The remnants of a dying tradition.

Alchemy has a long and colorful tradition, dedicated alchemists and dabblers alike toiling in their laboratories observing and studying the mysteries of that can be brought out of seemingly ordinary substances. Like most traditional forms of magic it has since waned in power, but there’s still something to offer for those who refuse to move with the times.

While Classical Alchemy is a distant ancestor of narco-alchemy, it’s not an adept school; it is more closely related to Authentic Thaumaturgy, and like it, is a Mind skill that can be studied without obsession. A laboratory is required for using it, although it doesn’t have to be a very sophisticated one; most of the procedures involved date back from Middle Ages or earlier, after all.

The skill can be used like Authentic Thaumaturgy for any rituals of an alchemical nature; e.g. it would work for Create Homunculus and most variants of Lead to Gold, provided you can get the required charges. Rituals that aren’t alchemical in style can’t be used with this skill.

Additionally, an alchemist can attempt to create alchemical works. These are potions, unguents, talismans, etc. that have been prepared in his laboratory to imbue them with the essence of a particular thing. To create a work, the alchemist decides on what sort of effect he desires, then acquires appropriate materials and refines them over the course of one or more days. When sufficient time has passed (determined by the GM), he can roll his skill; if he is an Adept or has access to charges via other methods, he can choose to spend either a minor or a significant charge to energize the work.
On a matched success, or an ordinary success after a minor charge was put in, the work gains a minor-level unnatural power, usable once.
On an OACOWA, or a normal success after a significant charge was used, the work’s power is of significant level, still usable only once.
On a failure, or an ordinary success without using charges, the work has nothing special about it and the materials used are wasted. If the roll fails after a charge was spent the charge is also wasted, and a random unnatural phenomenon of the appropriate level takes place.

What do successfully empowered works do then? Well, that’s a bit unpredictable. They always have an effect related to the concept the alchemist chose when starting out, but the exact effects are highly chancy. A minor-level potion intended to heal, for example, always has some sort of a vitalizing effect – it could restore a few wound points or cure a head cold, but it might instead whiten your teeth or make your hair grow five inches over the course of the next day. And there’s no way of knowing what it will do without trying it out, so it may be a good idea to produce more than one use’s worth in one go and use some for experimenting. Repeated uses of the same procedure are not guaranteed to produce the same result.

This unpredictability is not conceptually inherent to alchemy – in the past, alchemists were able to get more or less what they intended most of the time, and to produce repeatable results with the same procedure. The symbolic significance of traditional alchemy has waned however, so the skill now amounts mostly to a way of producing semi-controllable unnatural phenomena in storable packages.

Notes: I had to think a bit about which category to put this in. It’s not an avatar school, but neither is it a single ritual. I wanted to describe another example of a tradition that doesn’t really work properly anymore but may still have some followers, in the style of waned adept schools like cryptomancy.
As usual, comments and criticism are welcome.