Come on guys! More arrows! We need to bring those archers down! Lars, bring the pitch and the torch! Let's burn them!
Johan VanHalen Junior is the captain of the Betty. Ugly Pete is, atbest guess, a Faerie Revenant. He has to be "put down" every few years. It is part of his story.
Throw together a quick character and take it to the story!
7 points for Characteristics
one Virtue & one Flaw
Ability scores of Dutch 5, Profession Seaman 5, Something 4, Something else 3, Other thing 3, and Whatever 2
A defining personallity trait
Everything else is irrelevant
Guiverna has the Apothecary Ability, as described in Houses of Hermes: Societates (p. 125). Well, I say "described", but it says to refer to Art and Academe for information on creating medicinal remedies, poisons, etc.
I think I used to have a copy on PDF, but our poltergeist swiped my Rainbow Dash thumb drive that had all my files on it, and I'm trying decide whether to buy a new one. Or just track down the rules for Apothecary somewhere.
Thoughts/suggestions/ideas?
(As an aside, anyone else annoyed by the "Version 1.0" thing that pops up whenever I reply or quote or whatever?)
Just a heads up. Weekends are my busiest days for work. Kitchen life. I have read everything, and when I have time (Sunday maybe) I will write post and write a bunch of responses.
For my part, with the Hollidays, I will be spending a lot of time with family in the next 2 weeks, so I won't have time to write much. I will still check the posts at least once a day, but don't expect lenghty responses. 
Given the saga style, I wouldn't go to A&A for rules. You can go there for some stuff, but the power level of this saga is Marvel level (play with power) so the A&A rules just add subsystems and clutter to the saga without adding much real content, really.
I would use the rules to create posons via theriacs if you want, bit not much more. The whole labor point thing (the talso forces you to also look into city and guild) is just a waste of your valuable time IMO.
In general, apothecary is a facilitator skill. You need access to the stores of someone with apotechary 3 or more. As long as you do, you are fine to do whatever you fancy with your Medicine skill. If you don't, you seem to have malus to your Medicine skill.
As long as an apotechary 3 is in the covenant I would leave it at that. Nothing there that a low level (max level 10) hermetic spell cannot achieve.
The most interesting thing about theriacs in this saga would be the one that recovers one fatigue level. I wouldn't bother with the rest. If you meant to create poisons and then like give us a call and we will try to figure how to provide the rules without piracy.
We have, in fact, already gone there in the past. Donna has been using city and guild as an ungifted weaponsmith-enchantress, and has been using labor points. Marius has abilities with apothecary, arts liberales, and philosophae which he has used to produce theriatrics, and turtle was designed as a grog to try and ascend through his artwork as a woodcrafter. now admittedly turtle wasn't in the saga much when the game ground to a halt, but the fact is we have been using those books. for that matter Rilcheaux had a lab dedicated to his studies in philosophae…
The reason I'm asking about this is that I have an idea that I don't know how to do with the game mechanics I have access to.
Guiverna has Apothecary: 3, with a Specialty in Poisons. I was thinking about having her maybe spend a season building a stockpile of antidotes (and possible a few doses of poison, just in case).
Unfortunately that doesn't work- apothecary simply finds and prepares the components of medicinal formulas, he doesn't actually make the medicines (or poisons), which requires a skill in medicine.
So she would use her Apothecary (Poisons): 3 to gather and prepare the ingredients, and then her Medicine (Antidotes): 3 to prepare her poisons and/or antidotes, then?
yes.
p. 65 of art and academy outlines the procedure- you can either spend a season and gain (apothacary+intelligence)x3 'points' of supplies and lose 36 points of supplies per year (these rules are written assuming a business, but also include spoilage as well as usage), or you can seek out the supplies you need for a particular formula, taking 1 month and rolling perception+apothacary+stress die against a target of 9, modified for the season and terrain (table on p. 66), and you gain 1 point of supplies plus one point per level above the target number, or levels above the target may be used to halve the time spent searching. p. 56 contains a list of tasks that can be doe in the same season as such a search. The next part is formulating the theriatric- this is done with a lab total equal to medicine+intelligence=philosophical bonuses, which work the same as form bonuses for magic, and the lab works the same as developing a spell in terms of gaining points in total of the amount by which you exceed the effect and so forth. once you succeed you have a lab text, and can in the future concoct one dose per 5 points of lab total. Each theriatric takes 1 point of apothecary supplies for every 5 levels of effect, per dose. A level 30 theriatric can cause an incapacitating wound if the victim fails a stamina roll with an ease factor of 12. A level 20 theriatric can reduce the level of wound caused by any poison by 1 level.
however if you combine craft magic with medicine these formulas can be brewed much more quickly...
I almost want to wag my finger at you with a glare and defend myself. But you got me dead to rights. I did write "Play with Power" some twelve years ago. And I almost want to argue that the saga is not as high powered as it may seem. But I did do a full on Dragon Wars story. This is indeed an alternate history. Major magic events have shaken the world.
I do agree that the subsystems in A&A (and C&G) add a bunch of clutter and confusion without much substance. In many ways, I feel that those rules are overpowered.
But on the other hand, if you have fun with those rules, I do want to encourage you to keep having fun. Silveroak and Xavi have a much better understanding of these subsystems that I do. Go with their advice. Silveroak is also the only one (as far as I can remember with clarity) that has used these rules with a player character. I remember one or two characters caught some guff from Fixer. Remembering more, some of those subsystems are kind of broken. They are not very compatible with the time/resource management rules from Covenants.
As long as other players are fine with what you do and it is by the book, I do not mind. In fact, I probably never notice. I have a lot of other spinning plates in this saga.
Back to Xavi 
In defense of my "Marvel Comics" power level, I do feel that this has been a major contributor to this saga's longevity. It is the second longest PbP on this site. It is technically the oldest, but there was a previous hiatus, and the saga was closed then reopened, so it dropped a spot.
And it originally began as a live ArM4 saga in the 90's. Remember when I was an obnoxious Berklister? You were too as I recall 
The early foundations of the saga drew a lot from what I could dig up on the primitive interwebs of that day.
And old school D&D. The map of the covenant is a blatant rip off of B2 Keep on the Borderlands. Somewhere nearby there is a site called The Caverns of Entropy.
I once tried to slip a wizard named Xagygxrag into something I wrote, but they called me out on it and put a thumb down on it
The "Play with Power" concept works. It is easy to run and easy to play. But it is still rich and complex. Beyond being a game of "Spreadsheets & Accounting"
It is not a style for everyone. I am fortunate to have gathered the quality players that I have. They are creative and stalwart. They play with power, and understand that with great power comes great responsibility.
I have also had to learn from some serious mistakes. I am sure I have alienated several people. Some more than once. I have placated the wrong people a few times, and it took a while to learn how to weed out abusive players.
There were a few players waaay back in the first few years of this saga, they had some harsh conflicts with the troupe and each other. From those conflicts, I learned essential lessons about running this as a PbP. No Infernal or Divine for Player Characters is so very important, I cannot over stress it.
I also learned that the advanced CharGen rules in the RAW were broken, and my 10xp/season HR broke them further. Players tended to stack up a horde of xp in the first 3/4 of advancement, then do all of the lab stuff at the end. You may notice that the bulk of the words in my HRs are devoted to the Cycles system I invented to solve this problem. I would scale it back a bit if I were to reinvent it, but it seems to work out so far.
I am very interested in discussing revisions with the troupe, if anyone else is.
Persistence is the true key, I see that now having read what I just wrote. A willingness to admit mistakes, know I am going to make more mistakes, and a drive to just keep going and do better. The concept, to "Play with Power", is what fuels this drive.
In Denmark we celebrate Christmas on the 24th, otherwise I should be able to keep up with reading and replying
I celebrate Yule by staying up the entire night of the winter solstice to greet the new sun when it rises. Which will be in roughly 2 1/4 hour from now...
I was not criticizing the play with power approach, just stating that it was the case As such, labor points did not seem to match with the general saga approach, specially given that Andorra is a very wealthy covenant, so getting apotechary ingredients should be the least of the covenant's problems.
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In Consideration of Confidence and Fortune.
Before the hiatus, we were using special HRs for Confidence and invented HRs for "Fortune. The rule served us well, but it was a bit complex. I am not sure how well we remember this quirk, and to new players it is an unknown quirk.
It evolved from a side table talk thread...
Confidence Fortune HR Propsal
And was adopted and recorded in this thread...
Players and Fortune
I tinkered with a simplified and more efficient idea for this rule, but I need troupe input and discussion...
Proposed Revision
To summarize the concept, characters begin each story with their full Confidence pool (1 + twice their score). Confidence is recovered with rest between stories/chapters. Characters can participate in multiple stories at different times (to a limited extent, the situation comes up in PbP when a story stalls).
Replacing the story award system, Players were granted Fortune points. The Player was the one given the award, not the character. The sg counts as a player, and was given an award by the other players.
Each individual player could use Fortune points to benefit any character they controlled during play. Players (even observing readers) could give their own points to benefit another character. It is a meta-game way to give players control over stories, and to reward players in such a way so they focus on story over their characters.
We had fun with it, maybe played it loose, exploited it a bit. But it was fun. I want to use it again, reward players and close out these intro stories and start with the new stuff in 2020.
So I want to get some discussion. Should we use it? How should we use it? Does it need revision? Formalization? Leave it alone?
I have no problem with leaving it as is.
It seemed to work pretty well the way it was.