Potion of cyanide

!
Name	cyanide
Appearance	random
Base price	300 zm
Weight	20
Monster use	Will not be used by monsters.

A potion of cyanide is a type of potion that appears in NetHack: The Next Generation and SlashTHEM.

Generation

In NetHack: The Next Generation, a large box containing a live Schroedinger's Cat that is dropped from a quantum mechanic will also generate a potion of cyanide.

Description

A hero quaffing a potion of cyanide will develop an illness, lose up to 10 points of strength and loses health dependent on the potion's beatitude: a cursed potion does 4d16 damage, an uncursed potion does 2d16 damage, and a blessed potion does 2d8 damage.

A hero or monster that is hit by a thrown or wielded potion of cyanide, or else subjected to its vapors, has their current HP reduced to ¹⁄₅—if the victim has less than 10 HP when this occurs, they are killed instead.

Strategy

Illness from cyandie is classified as "vomitable" like food poisoning and can be cured if a hero finds a means of making themselves vomit, and applying a non-cursed unicorn horn can cure the illness as normal. In SlashTHEM, sitting on a toilet can also cure the illness.

Origin

"Cyanide" can refer to any number of real-life chemical compounds containing the cyanide ion (CN(-)). Most of these compounds are incredibly toxic to the point that they are invariably lethal in high enough doses, and death can occur in a matter of minutes, if not seconds—this makes the potion of cyanide an egregious example of NHINRL. Incidentally, the @Play column for January 2011 that discusses eight rules of roguelike design uses the phrase "no cyanide" as a shorthand for the second rule: "No unidentified item should be immediately fatal upon use given reasonable circumstances, otherwise the player should never try to use-identify."

Cyanide compounds are often said to have a bitter odor or taste, which is the basis for the message given when quaffing the potion while hallucinating—in popular culture, this is often used as a clue that food or a beverage has been poisoned with cyanide, such as in the Roald Dahl short story "The Landlady"; in real life, the scent can only be picked up with a special chemoreceptor that many people lack. Similarly, while some real-life cyanide solutions release hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas which is toxic, vomiting is an early symptom of cyanide poisoning rather than a means of curing.

The potion of cyanide appearing in the box containing Schroedinger's cat is based on the famous thought experiment of the same name (also spelled "Schrödinger's cat"), which involves imagining locking a cat in a box with a mechanism that has a 50% chance of killing the cat, depending upon the final state of a quantum system - for example, whether an unstable nucleus has decayed within a certain time. The mechanism is represented by a potion of radium and a potion of cyanide, with the radium representing the quantum system being monitored and the cyanide in the role of the nucleus: if the hero opens the box and discovers that the cat is alive, the box will contain the cat and both potions, while if the cat is dead, the box will only contain its corpse and the potion of radium. When this feature was added to NetHack, the potions were not carried over.

Messages

You quaffed a potion of cyanide.

This tastes a little bitter; maybe it's some sort of medicine?

As above, while hallucinating.

You feel very, very, very sick!

You were hit by a potion of cyanide.

<monster> looks deathly sick.

A monster was hit by a potion of cyanide and lost health.