Anti-Honey

Entry for Spooktober 2025

Anti-Honey is a venom derived from alchemically enhanced bee venom. The intent of the poison is to create the appearance of a severe poisoning or injury without causing serious or permanent damage.  
Even a novice alchemist can synthesize the poison easily, but it's time consuming and takes a lot of dead bees. Since honey and bee's wax are such widely valued commodities, a poison made out of dead bees is going to have a heavy opportunity cost because killing a bunch of bees means you'll have less honey and bees wax to harvest later.   Using wasps would be preferable because that would be eliminating a pest rather than eliminating a helper insect, but the anti-honey made from wasps is less visually gross and the whole point of the poison is to make visually gross swelling.

Properties

Material Characteristics

It has a consistency like honey and a vaguely gold color, but it smells too horrible to ever be mistaken for honey.

Physical & Chemical Properties

Carcelli, Parchment Background by Zeta Gardner
Anti-honey causes ugly looking but not serious welts when applied to bare skin. In theory, this could become a deadly poison if someone tried to eat it, since it cause the inside of a someone's throat to swell up. The smell and taste is so pungent, it would be impossible to trick someone into consuming it.   I suppose someone could be force fed the poison and killed that way, but that's unnecessarily complicated and cruel. There are less expensive ways to torture someone to death.   -Carcelli the Arcane Priestess

History & Usage

History

Anti-honey is a newly invented poison.   Kormatin has been engaging in espionage missions against Swynfaredia while in various disguises. Swynfaredians are very fastidious about checking for magical disguises but they have a sort of blindspot for non-magical disguises.   It quickly came to the attention of the Swynfaredian Dragonbloods that Kormatin has heterochromia, meaning his eyes are of different colors. A condition less than 1% of Swynfaredians have.   Now their guards are keeping an eye out for strangers with mismatching eyes. Kormatin started incorporating eye patches into his disguise. Now they are checking individuals with eye patches.  
by Eron 12 with Hero Forge
by Eron12 with Hero Forge
  Kormatin requested a poison that would make his eye looked messed up, so if anyone checked under his eye patch they would immediately be grossed out and also be convinced that the eye patch is legit. He turned the Fumayan Children for aid, and their resident poison expert came up with the idea of bee sting welts. Applied around the eye, the eye will be swollen shut, or at least swollen enough to make heterochromia difficult to spot.   The assumption is if a guard is pushy enough to ask to look under someone's eye patch, they will stop scrutinizing as soon as they see signs of eye damage.   The welts can be cleared with a little bit of Purification magic, or a couple days rest.

Environmental Impact

Only a small amount of anti-honey has been made. Hypothetically, if this would made in large quantities, it would harm bee populations and raise the price of honey and beeswax.

Distribution

Trade & Market

It's not available for sale, but effectively it costs 10 silver pieces a dose.

Storage

Unknown shelf life, but estimated to retain potency for at least a year.

Law & Regulation

Since it's newly invented there are no laws concerning it's use. Like all too many substances, anti-honey blurs the line between "poison" and "cosmetic"
Type
Biomaterial
Rarity
practically unique
Odor
sweet and pungent like honey mixed with fecal waste
Taste
Just enough honey flavor to accent the poisonous bitterness
Color
gray with a vague gold tint.
Related Locations
Related Technologies

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