Poison Hilt Dagger – 5e Homebrew

This item has been updated, you can find the original version here.

You can find this on DNDBeyond here.

A clever artificer has added a mechanism to a dagger that allows for a vial of poison to be stored in the hilt and delivered through the blade when the mechanism is activated, helping ensure that the poison works is always used on the intended target.

– Dagger holds a vial of poison in the hilt.

– On a turn where you hit with the weapon, you can use your bonus action to drain the vial into the creature you hit. 

– Note, this does not work if the dagger was thrown

– Entire vial is drained at once, giving the creature disadvantage on their saving throw against the poison

Discussion: This is one of my weaker homebrew items. Does not give any special advantage to hit, and still consumes part of the action economy to use, might make poison slightly more valuable, and can be used in clever ways by some classes with ways to vastly increase their damage (like assassin rogues). Would also keep an eye out for Drow Poison, because this will help increase their chances of knocking someone instantly unconscious. Though do consider if giving them this potentially non-lethal option might actually add some variation to your combats, before trying to hide all Drow poison from your world. I think a party with both an alchemist and a rogue with a weapon like this could end up creating a variety of interesting concoctions that could be used at different times and towards different ends. Alternatively, the artificer who created it might be interested in helping in that endeavor, for a price.

Thoughts on refilling: After feedback I have started to think about how long it takes to refill it. I am not fully set on the mechanics, but am leaning towards:

• Can always safely refill it if you spend one uninterrupted minute doing it.
• Can attempt to refill by using an action to make a DC 12 sleight of hand check, while doing so you are consider incapacitated until the start of your next turn.
  • If you fail the check you are still incapacitated until the next round, and the mechanism is broken and will require a DC 12 tinker tools check to repair over an hour.
    • If the repair check fails then the mechanism is more severely broken and will require a DC 20 tinker tools check and 20 gp in new material to repair over 6 hours.

Other videos mentioned in this video:

Five Spells Better than Fireball:

Broken 1st Level Spells – Bless and Bane:

Other resources mentioned in this video:

• Poison Hilt Dagger
• Basic Poison
• Drow Poison
• Purple Worm Poison

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English Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:24:08
Bennett Tomlin
Hello everyone, and welcome back to my Dungeons and Dragons Channel where we try to use the rules of 5E to our advantage. Today we're discussing a homebrew item I created and I created it because I was frustrated with some of the limitations of poison in 5e. The Dungeon Masters Guide has a few different poisons in it, but, well, 15 poisons may leave some people feeling a little disappointed.

00:00:24:10 - 00:00:45:15
Bennett Tomlin
There are many homebrew books that add new mechanics, poisons and other things, but frankly, I've never added many of those into my game, so I cannot recommend any specific books for you there. However, what I can talk about is this item I've created. But first we need to go over a little bit of how poisons work in Fifth Edition.

00:00:50:13 - 00:00:55:26
Bennett Tomlin
Basic poison is the first poison you likely experienced, but it kind of sucks.

00:00:55:29 - 00:01:27:02
Bennett Tomlin
Actually. It sucks. It sucks. It's a bad item in 5e. It has a recommended cost of 100 gold pieces, enough to maintain a modest lifestyle for three months. After investing three months of living expenses into this poison vial, you get this single vial that you apply to your weapon or your ammunition, takes an entire action to do this, which means you're either wasting a round in combat or losing some of the one minute of potency as you apply it

00:01:27:02 - 00:01:56:09
Bennett Tomlin
waiting for combat to start. Once you actually do start combat, it does a little bit of extra damage. If your enemies fail a DC ten con save, well, then they take an extra one d4 poison damage when you hit them. That's not great. It's a little bit better on your weapon because at least it applies to potentially every hit for the nine or ten rounds if your DM lets it. Every other injury poison and injury poisons in the DMG

00:01:56:16 - 00:02:17:13
Bennett Tomlin
say they work until you do the wounds until they're wiped off. So arguably it only works on your first hit. And this is a thing that cost you 100 gold pieces. If you're putting it on your ammunition, you're spending like 34 gold pieces per arrow for maybe an extra 1d4 damage, an average of two and a half

00:02:17:13 - 00:02:39:21
Bennett Tomlin
If no players in your campaign have ever used poison, this might be why. And like I mentioned, there are alternatives to the basic poison. But often they carry such an extra expense or have other problems that even the better poisons aren't worth actually using in game. So let's talk a little bit about those and how we can make this just a little bit better.

00:02:39:24 - 00:02:56:11
Bennett Tomlin
In the DMG there are four types of poison: contact, ingested, inhaled, and injury. Injury poisons are the ones that are most commonly applied to your weapon. You stab someone with it. It does the poison damage. That's the one we're primarily going to be discussing today are injury types.

00:02:56:11 - 00:03:02:03
Bennett Tomlin
These injury types include drow poison, purple worm poison, serpent venom, and wyvern poison.

00:03:02:03 - 00:03:26:23
Bennett Tomlin
They're all more powerful than the basic, but are each only intended to be used once. You only get the single wound with them. Whereas with the basic poison, depending on how you interpret it, you might get it for the full minute. It's also important that these don't have that same one minute limitation as the basic poison, but they do say they only last until you need to wipe your weapon off.

00:03:26:25 - 00:03:50:07
Bennett Tomlin
Keeping your weapon maintained is an important part of an adventurer’s daily routine, and so you're still not likely getting more than a single day's worth of use after applying this very expensive poison. It feels awful to spend 2000 gold pieces to get purple worm poison and then not actually get to use it because combat didn't come out when you expected it to.

00:03:55:09 - 00:04:18:22
Bennett Tomlin
So how can we make these more useful in make players want to use poisons? My idea was to create this item called the Poison Hilt Dagger. A clever artificer has been working on creating some new and unusual types of weapon. They created a dagger that has the hilt hollowed out to store a vial of poison. And there's a channel that runs along the blade.

00:04:18:24 - 00:04:39:25
Bennett Tomlin
When you activate the mechanism, the poison travels through this channel and is delivered. Mechanically, how this works in combat is when you hit with a melee attack on your turn, you can choose to use your bonus action to trigger the mechanism and drain the entire vial of poison into your enemy. Because you're draining the whole vial directly into the creature,

00:04:39:27 - 00:04:43:09
Bennett Tomlin
the creature has disadvantage on the saving throw for the poison.

00:04:43:09 - 00:04:51:02
Bennett Tomlin
You rogue has loaded their dagger up with an expensive batch of purple worm poison and has been tasked with taking out the lieutenant for the BBG.

00:04:51:04 - 00:05:17:02
Bennett Tomlin
They sneak through the lair, finally finding them, surprise them, strike true, and drain the poison into them, watching as their body locks up, and then they collapse, thanks in part to this weapon. Now this is a relatively weak and situational homebrew item, but I think it helps make poisons more useful. It really reduces the problem of it being washed off or losing its potency.

00:05:17:05 - 00:05:49:27
Bennett Tomlin
And giving the disadvantage helps incentivize the players to actually use these poisons and be willing to spend to get them. Also, since this is not assumed to be a magical weapon, it can be destroyed if the DM is worried it's affecting balance too much. Now, getting the full vial into the dagger can be a little tricky. So if you went to reload it with more poison, you either need to find a whole minute outside of combat where you can carefully open it up and put it in or if you want to quickly reloaded in combat.

00:05:49:29 - 00:06:07:16
Bennett Tomlin
I have some rules for that as well. You choose to incapacitate yourself until the beginning of your next turn as you focus all of your attention on trying to refill the poison, you make a DC 12 sleight of hand check, and if you're successful, then you're able to load up a new vial of poison directly into the hilt of

00:06:07:16 - 00:06:08:05
Bennett Tomlin
the dagger.

00:06:08:05 - 00:06:26:08
Bennett Tomlin
If you fail the check, you are still incapacitated until your next round. But in the process of failing this fast reload, you've also broken the mechanism and will need to repair it. You can repair it later out of combat by spending an hour working with it on your tinkers tools.

00:06:26:10 - 00:06:47:02
Bennett Tomlin
If you pass a DC 12 check on that, you will have successfully repaired it. If you were unable to successfully repair it there, well, you're going to need to invest even more time into trying to fix this. You'll need another couple of hours, a DC 20 Tinkers Tools check now and 20 gold pieces in new materials to help you repair it.

00:06:47:04 - 00:07:07:18
Bennett Tomlin
This is a straightforward and simple item that I honestly think can be placed in your game as early as level one, but there are a few things you should know before you implement it. The disadvantage on the saving throw means things like Drow poison become more powerful, potentially knocking your enemies unconscious. This can seem problematic for balance,

00:07:07:18 - 00:07:35:09
Bennett Tomlin
But before you hide all the Drow poison in your world, I want you to consider the benefits of giving your players these kind of nonviolent (*non-lethal) solutions to problems and how that can lead to really interesting story beats. Players come up with clever and fun plans when given the opportunity. I also want to highlight how this potentially makes the Assassinate feature for assassin rogues more powerful because they're able to critical hit on a surprised creature and double the damage from this poison.

00:07:35:12 - 00:07:59:17
Bennett Tomlin
They may find that this weapon is really powerful for them on that first round. Remember though, as the DM poisons are consumable they’re either going to need to go out and buy them, or you can control how many they're giving as loot from mission or how many they're able to recover from monsters and stuff the party defeats. So you can still help kind of keep that in control if you want to make this item even more powerful.

00:07:59:17 - 00:08:26:00
Bennett Tomlin
There's a few modifications you could consider. You could make it a magic item with a bonus to hit and damage, and that added reliability. You could also work with the artificer or to maybe find ways to integrate other types of poison. Maybe a separate mechanism would make it so contact poison could easily be added, or maybe even with a little bit of magic, make it so ingested or inhaled poisons could work through this type of thing.

00:08:26:02 - 00:08:45:09
Bennett Tomlin
All in all, this item is meant to make it so that your characters can prepare their poison well ahead of hand and know that when they strike, they've got this opportunity to use it without having to worry about some of the usual limitations. And since they know there's a better chance of it actually working, the let's really make plans around poison.

00:08:45:11 - 00:08:59:05
Bennett Tomlin
So what do you all think? Could this item be useful for your party? Have you created items to work around some of the awkward parts of 5e? Let me know in the comments and make sure to check out some of my other videos linked to in the description. Thanks for tuning in.