I’m curious as to what people use to phys-rep their herbs with?
Scott
My Quick and Easy approach remains stapling teabags to the cards. For bonus points, one can use five different types of tea, so each herb smells different, or handmake your teabags out of small bits of muslin and an appropriate herb/leaf to go inside.
However, it’s a passable physrep, it’s easy to add to herbs you acquire in play by means of looting or buying, it’s cheap enough to hand over a card+physrep to someone else without worrying about retrieving it, and it’s still very convenient to carry the resulting items in small belt pouches and the like, instead of trying to have potion bottles stored in holders with lammies dangling off them.
I would very much like there to be an agreed (aspirational, obviously) physrep description for the various herbs. That would be cool, IMO.
I’ve filled up around 30 1 inch bottles with ground herbs, some trimmings from flowers, leaf clippings; works out quite well!
[quote=“imnotagoth”]I’m curious as to what people use to phys-rep their herbs with?
Scott[/quote]
For some I saved and dried veg peelings and trimmings. For others I picked & dried weeds out of the garden. They all go in glass spice jars with tied cloth lids which nest nicely in my ‘herb box’. The cards are tucked down beside the bottles in the box.
Skian mhor has some little solid resin potion bottles for a quid each. a holepunched herb card and a small rubberband and I’ve already prepared the herb.
Plus they made the personal resources physreps so it fits the look and feel of the game.
I was wondering if anyone’s standardised on a Rune to go on labels for each herb type… So you could have a little cloth bag just big enough for the lammy, with the right rune marked on the bag, and some “arbitrary chopped dried vegetation” and the lammy in the bag… Be nice if the vegetation wasn’t so arbitrary, to allow ID by scent/form…
1 Like
i sell 2" glass bottles with wax covered stoppers of various herbs and spices from “the Grocery” in the league camp they are 2 qiud a bottle you can use the herbs and spices in food or potions and you can reuse the bottle i also sell empties for a pound
I have a few bottles with an appropriate solution for each herb. Clearly my bottle contains multiple doses. I find individual physreps to me too much faff especially if you unexpectedly acquire herbs you don’t have the “right” physreps for.
There are in fact some colour/texture hints for the herbs if you read the wiki article for each one.
Vervain: Green
Bladeroot: Greyish
Marrowort: “Sticky, translucent oil”
Cerulean Mazzarine: Blue.
Roseweald: Red.
Remember that these aren’t fresh herbs, they are prepared into a balm, tincture, decoction etc. A standard description would mean less opportunity for varied, cool physreps. Remember we’re playing in a setting full of highly individualistic nations and no medicines regulator 
.
For most of the herbs, I have bottles of coloured water, sometimes with looseleaf tea in. I use a greenish cucumber moisturiser for Mazzarine, which means I can rub it into skin, for example. I checked in advance with my group about if any of them have allergies and prepared my physreps to that. Which means if I know the person I can cover them in fake blood and poultices 
.
I grabbed a cheap bag of pot pouri and picked up some small glass jars from a flee market. Some quick hessian lids and…
I’m surprised that everyone has focused on plant material and bottles. For me, the key thing is obscuring the herb card, and for that reason, I make herb packets from textured cream paper. They are big enough to fit the herb cards and some small phys-reps, like leaves, and you can write the name and any notes on the outside of the packet.
The reason I like them is because I can open the packet, check how many cards are in there, pass the packet to you, so that you can check the cards, and no-one around us has seen the OOC card. At some point, I’ll put a diagram for how to fold them - it’s simple, but clever, allowing the packet to be “locked” for easy transport.
1 Like
Different aims for different people. Because I play a battle physick, I mostly acquire herbs and then use them on the battlefield. I need to be able to flash a good physrep around while I treat someone, then rip the card quickly without it getting in the way of my roleplay. Which means the OC cards get punched, snipped to start a tear, and hung next to the bag where I store my herb containers. I find that 2 seconds of ripping and 8 seconds of irrigating a wound, rubbing salve on, feeding someone Bladeroot etc is more interesting than 10 seconds of “TEAR, YOU £%^$£^! CARD!” 
. I also have a requirement for physreps that won’t easilyshatter and fill my belt pouch with broken glass. The herb cards are fantastic for not accidentally self-destructing like Strom lammies, though. They also blend into your kit fairly well as they’re a muted, IC-ish design.
On the other hand, you play a non-combative trader IIRC. Which means that having something IC that you can give away is a lot better as it ensures the recipient has a physrep.