The Guild of Alchemists is vital and diverse.
There seems to be no end of products that can be produced through chemeia (the alchemic art): potions and medicines, distilled liquor, preserving oils, acids, fine and potent dyes, flaming oil, Cargan fire, draconite, fireworks, paints and glues.
Often, alchemists will be specializing in some products suitable for a settlement's major industries - alchemists in an area producing textiles may create fulling agents, mordants and dyes; alchemists in a metalworking area may make amalgations and fluxes, those in a mining town may create fluxes and draconite, and so forth.
Alchemists' workshops are almost invariably built from flame-resistant materials, brick, adobe or stone. They will tend to have several ovens and furnaces, and contain a fortune in glassware.
Alchemical workshops will usually have at least one tall smokestack, to carry off the noxious fumes which are produced by many alchemical processes.
Alchemists are usually relegated to setting up their workshops downwind from the settlement they live in, and usually outside the city walls. This is both because of ever-present fumes, and out of fear that something might go terribly wrong. Stories abound of workshops which have killed off entire town wards with poisonous fumes, or even through fiery explosions.
Alchemists are generally well off. Despite their trade in longevity potions, they do not usually get to be very old, due to their continuous exposure to strange and potent fumes and materials.
As long as they give others no reason to suspect that they dabble in sorcery, alchemists tend to be held in high esteem by their community.
Alchemists generally deride sorcery as being dangerous and imprecise, and extoll the safety of elixirs compared to sorcery. To avoid being taken for sorcerers, they often lead efforts to ferret out and eliminate them.
Alchemists have an uneasy relationship with the University of Scholars, either guild feels that the other is impinging on their territory. Alchemists deride scholars as daydreamers and dabblers, scholars mock the alchemists as hacks.
Alchemists usually wear white frocks and heavy leather aprons while working. Their formal attire is a blue robe with gold, red and white horizontal stripes as trim, and a cylindrical, brimmed hat (coalshuttle style).
Alchemists have no "guild weapon" - they are less rowdy than scholars. However, some alchemists have taken interest in developing better incendiaries and guns, and study the use of these weapons.
Pharmacists share their guild with alchemists. In general, pharmacists are more modest in their ambitions than alchemists. They concentrate on creating medicines and drugs.
Pharmacy has several advantages over alchemy as a profession. The most important is that the overhead is far lower - a pharmacist can in a pinch make do with a well-equipped kitchen. A close second is that pharmacy does not give off the impure fumes that seem to be a constant byproduct and hazard of alchemy. As a result, some alchemists do little more than pharmaceutical work
Pharmacists are wear the same guild clothing as alchemists, but theire hats must have low crowns - they cannot be more than an inch taller than the pate of the pharmacist.
Stereotypical alchemist disadvantages are: Absent-Minded, Hard of Hearing and Obsession.
Primary Skill: Pharmacy.
Secondary Skills: Diagnosis, Merchant.
Tertiary Skills: Alchemy, Naturalist