Esoterica from Thedas Volume 3: Apothecaria

[Tiger's Heart]

Esoterica from Thedas Volume 3: Apothecaria is now up on the website in it's first form.

This contains extra background and some rules for herbalism crafting that we are using. It also has recipes for both Herbalism and Poison Making for those who wish to add a further dimension to their travels in Thedas - or make more profit from their journeys.

Edit: Esoterica Volumes 1 to 3 can now be found here:
Esoterica From Thedas: Volume 1 - Vault, Volume 2 - Bestiary & Volume 3 - Apothecaria
Files hosted by Jekias DA RP Resources

Tiger's Heart

[mxninja]

Great Job !

Thanks for all the hard work you two.....

[Scion of Haven]

"These pieces must be installed within a special cage designed by the Paragon Faradeh."
This shout-out made me laugh. Props to you.
A minor criticism, not enough to detract from the excellent material presented within, but this book contains many confusions of "its" and "it's".

[Loswaith]

Looks good and has a fair amount of detail to it as well.

One thing I noticed while skimming through is the foot note for Page 49, wraps around to end the last sentance on the foot note for page 50, so half of the sentance is on page 49 and the other half on 50.

[Tiger's Heart]

I only noticed that after I'd put the document up. : Something must have moved a bit.

I know people don't want to keep downloading, so I'll post up a fixed version later today and update here when it's done. This will hopefully fix those few typos and formatting glitches.

If you see others, let me know.

@Scion - If you can give me heads up on the page numbers that would be a great help.

I apologise for the errors - It is hard to proof read your own work.

Edit: Sorry, although I've got most of the typos mentioned so far, I need to do a final check so the new version won't go up until tomorrow.

Tiger's Heart

[Saisei]

Great stuff. Thanks

[Tiger's Heart]

Apologies for the delay.

Esoterica Volume 3 has been edited and updated.

Due to an error the incorrect file was posted last time, and so there are major differences in rules between the previous version and the corrected version now up on the Esoterica Web page.

Tiger's Heart

[kronovan]

Very impressive - excellent work. I love the look of the layout and the plant art is very nice. Ironically I started to create a similar document once I'd read that herb lore didn't make it into Box Set 2. I put it on hold until I get the Box Set 2 game guides. I came up with different plants though -Brecilian Beard, Bronto Brush, Ferelden Finger and Storm Sedge to name a few. I did come up with Dragonbane, which sounds like it may be a bit like your Dragon Thorn. I've only glanced at your plant listings - so I can't say yet.

One thing extra I did, is I attempted to define geo-climatic regions for Ferelden and create a 3-tier ranking system for the occurence of beneifcial plants, minerals and gems within them. So far I've come up with about 10 regions - Lake Calehad District, Breclian Forest and Northwest Coastlands to name a few. I didn't get too elaborate with it and only came up with "Common Throughout Ferelden", "Common to [said] Area(s)" and "Rare" as the rarity/occurrence categories. I actually used the vender inventories from the 2 Dragon Age CRPG's to determine some of that. The purpose of it, is that a GM could use that information for test rolls for the occurrence of beneficial plants, minerals & gems in an adventure area and even build quests around the rare varieties. I was basing the Player identification of plants on Cunning (Natural lore) rolls and their discovery in a given area on Perception (Seeing), Perception (Searching) and Perception (Smelling) rolls.

Will the team that created this consider an update in the future. And if so, will it be possible for others who may wish to collaborate efforts to join?

[Lex]

Great job! Really impressive!

[tarnishedarmour]

Another awesome compilation. Love the work you do, I use all three.

[HalWhitewyrm]

Oh neat, I missed that this was out. I'll post it to the Oracle.

[Kaltharion]

This is outstanding! Excellent work as always!

One thing extra I did, is I attempted to define geo-climatic regions for Ferelden and create a 3-tier ranking system for the occurence of beneifcial plants, minerals and gems within them.

Any way you could post your work? The herbalism section took me way, WAY back to MERP 1st edition and my party scrounging the countryside for a single Athelas plant. Ahh, memories

But seriously, I would really like to see how you approached this. Thanks!

[Loswaith]

Both Tiger's Heart and Hellebore have links to their Esoterica In their Signatures, so should be able to get the links to download them from there.

[Tiger's Heart]

I believe that Kaltharion was referring to the quote which was made by Kronovan earlier in this thread.

I admit that I am also curious about this.

Thanks for all the positive comments.

Tiger's Heart

[Loswaith]

oops, my bad.

[kronovan]

Sorry I haven't been following this thread for a while. What I detailed in the 2nd paragraph of my earlier post really describes the Geoclimatic system I came up with. I'm reworking it right now, by going through the novels to see if there's more details on plants and other possible regions and I really should go through Esoterica 3 in more detail. So far I've only focused on Ferelden. Ferelden isn't a big kingdom, but the CRPG creators still gave it a fairly diverse variation of regions. While many plants -since their herbs (weeds actually)- would be found throughout the kingdom, some would be specfic to specific area; i.e. my own Brecilian Beard is only found in the Brecillian Forest. I personally have some real world background in forestry, plant sciences and cartography, so I'm interested in this sort of thing in fantasy worlds.

[Zapp]

Link in OP broken.

[Tiger's Heart]

Sorry the link in the original post no longer worked, but I have now edited it to the new file locations.

Both Hellebore and I also have the links in our Signature blocks.

Thanks for your interest, we have a couple of new books in progress.

[HalWhitewyrm]

Where are the files now? I've had a couple people ask me from the redirects up on the Dragon Age Oracle.

[Tiger's Heart]

https://rapidshare.com/files/161391461/ ... _Vault.pdf Esoterica From Thedas: Volume 1 - Vault,
https://rapidshare.com/files/1764763260 ... stiary.pdf Volume 2 - Bestiary
&
https://rapidshare.com/files/2170067528 ... ecaria.pdf Volume 3 - Apothecaria

Files hosted by http://www.users.on.net/~jekias/ Jekias DA RP Resources

links for copy purposes - thanks for sharing the books.

[HalWhitewyrm]

May I suggest using the Public folder option of a Dropbox account? Lots of users have problems with RapidShare. I can host them in the DAO Dropbox if you'd like.

[Jekias]

Rapidshare used to be ok until they recently start borking up free accounts

You can get them from wupload.com as well:
http://www.wupload.com/folder/632428

Dropbox links:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/63471974/Esoter ... 0Vault.pdf
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/63471974/Esoter ... stiary.pdf
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/63471974/Esoter ... ecaria.pdf

[HalWhitewyrm]

Thanks, I'll update the links.

[Giorgio]

Tigers’s Heart and Hellebore,

Kronovan has offered to take the work he has done with herbs & plants and add the material from EoT Vol 3. Has anyone taken him up on his offer?

I am about to start a campaign where the PCs would for the Ferelden Traders Crafthouse and that kind of information (or even a table of plans per terrain) type would be very useful.

If no one has done such a table already (I didn’t see it anywhere), could I create one and submit it to you for inclusion as a EoT Vol3 update?

[Tiger's Heart]

The next volume of Esoterica that I am working on will have appendices that will include Maps of Thedas with climatic zones, and the distribution of animals from the Bestiary (and other volumes including some new creatures) and plants from Apothecaria.

As it requires completion of new maps, amongst other things, it is taking a while to finish.

I will try to tabulate some of the data as I would for the Map Keys and post that in the interim.

Of course, there are loads of creative people here on the forums so there is no reason that you, or Kronovan or anyone else couldn't do their own version.