Senduma: Alchemy

There are two kinds of magic in the setting I'm working on: Alchemy and Sorcery. These are their stories.

What Alchemy Can Do

• Transform something (or someone) physically into something else. That's it. Under that rubric, of course. falls everything from fireballs to monsterization (the Recreated) to healing to "magic" swords (physical material isn't necessarily mundane material). Although the modern science of alchemy is newborn, the result of synthesizing several underground traditions from the East, the nobility of Europe are daily finding new applications for it..

What Alchemy Can't Do

• Be cheap. Nobility are the ones discovering the frontiers of the science because only they can regularly afford the components of alchemical reagents. Your average large town might be able to afford a few shots of fertility potion (for the crops, although...), and those are known quantities - creating new effects involves wasting of very expensive materials that take time and contacts to procure. Alchemy is a rich man's pursuit: Even if it could create gold, the reagents would likely cost more than the end product earned..
• Be instant, changeable or safe. A new alchemical reaction can take years to develop, and there's no necessary connection between effects. On a more personal scale, alchemical reagents need to be carried in bottles, with precious seconds spent uncorking and using them. Further, while carrying a healing potion around only risks breaking it, a philter that turns the nearest twenty cubic metres of air into fire on contact is another story
• Summon beings or matter from other realms. You work with what you have. A physical object changed by alchemy occupies the same material "footprint" as before. Science can do a runner: Matter occupies a given space but can have a changeable mass.
• Charm, delude or otherwise create specific mental effects. Alchemical drugs can create spectacular hallucinations indeed, but if the dosage is wrong they can also, say, turn all the user's bones to lead, so the smarter aesthetes and interrogators just stick to alcohol.
• Gold, as mentioned above, is immune to alchemy. It cannot be turned to something else, nor can anything be turned to gold. Further, gold affects changed matter as if it had never been changed: A gold coin dropped on a wooden bridge turned to stone would hit it and rest without affecting it, but you could use that gold coin to carve your name in the "stone" bridge as if it were wood. Gold-plated knives are the standard backup weapons of the Brotherhood's anti-Recreated task force, and can go through chitinous armour like human skin.