Healing Potions. To the untrained warrior fresh in the way of battle, a healing potion is a second lease on life. To the grizzled veteran, a Healing Potion is a dangerous substance only to be quaffed when there is no other option. The novice may scoff at this seemingly misplaced fear, but an adventurer who's been in more dungeons than the typical neophyte has lived years knows how dangerous these little flasks are.

For one, you can't trust the men who sell them. Many a green adventurer has pulled out a potion when backed into a corner -- only to find, right before their demise, they were fooled into buying a simple flask of sugar water from an unscrupulous businessman. Some merchants even mix addictive drugs with their potions, ensuring that the ones who survive the horrors of the tombs they rob return to him with riches ready to be traded for more of their oddly colored flasks.

The worst part of the potions, though, are the side-effects. Among the older dungeon delvers, there are rumors that the large numbers of slimes roaming the countryside are men who've been dissolved from the inside-out by bad batches of what was supposed to heal them. Some of the other veterans are noticing that they've been aging faster, going from the body a centurion at 25 to the sickly, pale body of an aging man ten years later. Younger delvers brush it off as an aging brought on by seeing too many horrors for a normal man. The older ones know that each extra day of life they've gained from a potion took off a year of their life in total.