Poison

A bite lands every 3 seconds. Three of these burn out on their own; the fourth does not, and that is the whole point of it — a Deathly poison ends when you cure it or when it kills you.

A worse poison landing on top of a weaker one replaces it and starts again. A weaker one landing on a worse one does nothing at all — being bitten by a spider while a Deathly poison is running does not reset you down to Lesser, which would have made the small biters into a cure.

Beyond the damage, poison makes you harder to put back together. While it is in you:

• Everything that heals you is worth 30% less. Bandages, food, potions, spells, a Vampiric Band's leech, a cooked fish dish, a Compassion binding's regeneration — all of it, from every source. Poison does not only take health away, it stops you putting it back.
• You turn green. Your character is tinted on the dungeon floor plan and out in the world, to you and to everyone else who can see you, so a party can tell at a glance who needs a cure.
• It says so, in red, every time it bites — over your character's head and in the Journal, in that poison's own words from the table above.
• It shows in your debuffs for as long as it is running.

Being resurrected or healed to full on arriving safely in a town is not reduced — the penalty applies to healing you earn, not to the game putting you back on your feet. Dying clears the poison, which is the one cure nobody recommends.

Four things cure poison, and they are deliberately not equal — the stronger the poison, the fewer of them work.

Cure Potion

The portable answer, and the only one that works mid-fight without a spellbook. The potion is spent whether it works or not — but a failed one is never wasted: every potion that fails against a poison makes the next one 15 points likelier, until it becomes a certainty. A run of bad luck corrects itself, so the question is how many you brought rather than whether the dice liked you.

So a Deathly poison is certain to break by the fifth potion, and a Greater one by the third. The ladder resets if the poison is cured or replaced by a worse one — failures are banked against that affliction, not against you.

The Cure spell

“An Nox” — circle 2, 6 mana, and cheap to keep reagents for. It draws out the two weak poisons every time and can never touch the two strong ones: against those, the words simply are not enough. Cast it on a Greater or Deathly poison and you have spent the mana for nothing.

Bandaging it out

A bandage that lands can draw the poison out with it, and it is the only cure that costs you nothing you were not already spending — you were bandaging anyway. How likely depends on the strength of the poison and on both halves of your healing: Healing is the craft, Anatomy is knowing what you are looking at, and the two are averaged — the table below is that average, so 80 Healing and 40 Anatomy reads as the 60 row.

Every poison but the Deathly one has a floor — odds a bandage draws it out however green the hands holding it — so the snake that bites you on your first afternoon can be answered with the one cure you already own. From 30 upward, every ten points you train is another rung: the floor rises with you rather than sitting still, and nothing you learn is ever wasted.

A Deathly Poison is the one with no floor at all — untrained, cloth does nothing against it. It climbs like the rest once you are learning, but it tops out at two in five even for a master: drawing that one out of a wound is skill, a potion, or the walk to a healer, never luck.

Two things the table cannot show. The heal itself is still the poisoned one on the application that cures you — the wound is being dressed while the poison is still in it, so you get the reduced number, and the poison is gone from the next bandage onward. And a bandage that fails does nothing at all, poison included: whether one lands is your Healing alone, one point of skill to one percent, so a half-trained healer is also landing only half the bandages these odds are rolled on.

A town healer

The surest cure in the game. Speak to the healer in any town and they draw out whatever you are carrying — any strength of it, Deathly included, no roll and no charge. “Let's rid you of this illness.” The price is the walk back, which is exactly what a Deathly poison ought to be able to cost somebody who ran out of potions three rooms deep. It is also the one cure you cannot reach mid-fight, which is where poison is actually dangerous.

Letting it answer itself

Both portable cures can be set to fire on their own:

• Auto Magery has an I Am Poisoned condition that casts Cure the moment something gets into you, in a fight or walking home afterwards. It knows what the spell can and cannot do, so it will not sit there burning mana and reagents against a Greater or Deathly poison it could never draw out.
• A Cure Potion in an armed potion slot drinks itself, trying again every 2 seconds for as long as you are poisoned. Each attempt shortens the odds on the next, so an armed slot with a few potions behind it will break even a Deathly poison on its own. Nothing is drunk when there is nothing to cure.

Poison is a property of the thing biting you, not a difficulty dial — a Dragon hits harder than anything on this list and poisons nobody. Each of these has a chance on every blow that lands; the chances are deliberately low, because a poison keeps working long after the swing that delivered it.

Lesser Poison

Poison

Greater Poison

Deathly Poison

The undead on that list are there for grave rot rather than venom, which is why they sit at weak tiers with small chances. It is not a blanket rule for the undead: a Skeleton or a Bone Knight is bare bone with nothing to rot, and a Wraith or a Ghost is not solid enough to leave anything in you at all. Only the ones still carrying flesh can do it, which is how a Skeleton comes to hit harder than a Zombie and still poison nobody.

Some creatures speak the Poison spell at you — the real one, the same two words you would say yourself. A cast you resist outright leaves nothing behind, which makes Magic Resistance the counter to every creature on this page's second half.

Signature casters

For these four, In Nox is not a spell they happen to know — it is what they are. They throw it every cast, instead of the spell their depth would otherwise have earned. It hits for exactly what their tier always hit for; what changed is what it leaves behind.

The Poison Elemental is the only creature in the game that can put a Deathly poison in you with a spell, and it no longer bites you as well — the spell is the only way it can reach you, so resisting it works.

Everyone else who casts

Every other caster keeps In Nox in the rotation, rarely — roughly one cast in twenty — and never as its identity. A spellbook that deep has the words in it somewhere. What it leaves follows the caster's own depth, and it stops at Greater: Deathly stays the preserve of the two creatures built around it, because a poison that arrives by accident is not one anybody fears.

The cast bar never lies to you. Whichever spell it names during the wind-up is the spell that lands, so a Lich announcing Poison really is about to poison you, and one announcing Energy Bolt never will.

What never poisons you

The dragon family breathes rather than casts, and a breath is not a spell — none of these can poison you however deep they are: Swamp Dragon, Wyvern, Dragon, Drake, White Wyrm, Ancient Wyrm, Serpentine Dragon.

Poison does not tick while you are offline, and offline fights never inflict it. A Lesser, Regular or Greater poison you log out with has run its course by the time you come back — it was always going to burn out on its own, and charging you for it while nothing was happening would be the worst of both. A Deathly poison is still there when you return, because a Deathly poison never ends on its own; it simply starts biting again from the moment you log in.

See also Offline Progress and Dungeons.