Everything in Armok is made out of a material. Certain materials have nutrition values and so on. Ideally, I would be able to assign poison effects to each material, and these effects would be different for each species. That would probably be too memory intensive, although there are some ways to abstract it. In any case, a poison will simply be a material that has some kind of adverse effect on a creature.
The effect will be tied to a delivery method (contact, ingestion, inhaling, etc.). The same material might have a different effect when ingested or brought into contact with a given creature. When a creature picks up an object, the game will check its temperature to see if the creature is burned. In the same way, the game can check the creature's species against the poison effects of the item's material and act accordingly.
Poisons will be able to attack any of the systems that are running in the creature. At the current time, (mammalian) creatures have a nervous system, a respiratory system, a metabolic system (via liver), an excretory system (via kidneys), and a circulatory system. They also have the tissues themselves (such as muscle and bones) that a poison could attack. These sorts of poisons would cause wounds (similar to combat wounds) to the relevant tissues, while systemic poisons will interfere with the function of the affected system.
Creatures will also have a digestive system for poisons to affect, as soon as I add food 
These poisons would probably cause nausea and vomiting (both of which will also be effects in the combat system).
Poisons might also have "steps", moving from one system to another, although this will be more common for diseases (which are otherwise quite similar).
Since poisons will be materials, the player will be able to delivery them any time he or she finds them (by coating a weapon, or slipping them in a drink, etc.). "Item sullying" is coming very soon, and with bloody weapons come weapons coated with any material, including poisons. Dissolving a poison in a drink will come when I add large bodies of water (which will probably keep track of dissolved oxygen for the fish, and similarly other dissolved gases and solids).
If the poison effects sound complicated (instead of "100 turns until death" or "lose 1 hitpoint per round"), well, I guess they are... but in terms of game-play, a poison will cause you to become "sick", and you'll find yourself unable to perform tasks as well (because a system or tissue is affected). A strong poison will kill you quickly or slowly. You don't have to muck around in the details if you don't want to.
I haven't considered antidotes; these fall under chemical reactions, which can get messy very quickly. A simple solution would just be to assign every poison or poison effect a corresponding antidote material (assuming it has an antidote), which also would have a delivery method. Anything more complicated than that depends on how other chemical reactions (lighting fires, mixing reagents, etc.) are implemented.
Since this is a fantasy game, outlandish poison effects and delivery methods are not off-limits. When I implement poisons (the first poison will probably come when I add snakes and slithering movement), I'll probably go nuts. Suggestions are welcome
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Topic: How is poison going to be handled? (Read 14067 times)