I've been DMing an AD&D 2e game this weekend. One of the characters was a poisoner/alchemist: I've created a quick modification of the mage class for him. Part of the class was the concept of components. The poisoner had a long list of recipes for potions and poisons, each requiring multiple components from a common component list. The list contained component types such things as (hot and cold), (pain and joy), and such. The recipes also had a quality rating required for each component.

Now there was a spell he could use to extract a component from interesting things: corpses of monsters, special plants and such. The component type and quality was decided by a dice roll, lower quality being a lot more frequent than higher quality. However, afterAnna Atkins

Widely known as the first female photographer, Anna Atkins was born in Kent in 1799. She was a botanist, and like Fox Talbot, quickly saw the opportunities that photography gave to accurately document plants and nature.

Family friendships with both Fox Talbot and John Herschel meant she could learn directly from the process inventors. Atkins chose to use the new ‘cyanotype’ process invented by Herschel, impressed by the process’ ease of use, quality and stability.

Her aim was, like Fox Talbot, to record the natural forms she studied, however her composition was generally more intentional and artistic than her forerunners. While previous pioneers had invented techniques, Atkins investigated the way the cyanotype could be used to show her plants, and as such, each image is far more considered as