Mana Enhancer

Ingredients:

Triple Distilled Water
3 Tablespoons of Mana Toad Oil
4 Sprigs of Dried Mistletoe
4 Tablespoons of the Sap of an Oak Tree*
1 Mandrake Root
3 Full Leeches

*Must be at least 50 years old

Instructions:

Fill a medium-sized pot with your Triple Distilled Water and bring to a boil.
Meanwhile, zest and finely chop your Mandrake Root, and mix the Mana Toad Oil and Oak Tree Sap in a bowl until it takes on a syrup-like consistency. When the syrup is so thick that it becomes difficult to stir, you know you are done.
Add your sprigs of Dried Mistletoe to a bowl and drain the blood from the Leeches onto the Mistletoe, ensuring that they are completely coated in blood. Once the water is boiling, add the bloodied mistletoe, along with any excess blood, to the water. Cover the pot with a lid and leave to boil for an hour.
Once boiled, remove the lid and gradually stir in the finely chopped Mandrake Root. Cover once more and leave to simmer for the next 5 hours. From this point, every hour ensure that you infuse the brew with magic to ensure that the potion combines correctly, and takes on it’s arcane properties. The margin of error on this is rather wide, however, so you can get away with being a little early or late.
Once the potion has finished simmering, take the lid off of the pot and ladle it into a bottle of your choice (there should be enough to fill 10 standard sized bottles). Before corking your bottles, sprinkle a pinch of the Mandrake Root zest into each potion and then shake thoroughly to mix.

Background:

Mana Enhancers are a potion predominantly used by Sorcerers to refresh their store of mana after they have exhausted themselves. Despite what the name of the potion might suggest, the Mana Enhancer is only capable of restoring a person's Mana to their current maximum capacity and will not exceed it. This potion sees extensive, daily use within Sorcerer Academies and amongst Hedge-Sorcerers in order to supplement their own mana while they train and study.
However, despite the clear benefits of taking this potion, there are some pretty severe downsides. Mana Enhancers are highly addictive, and abuse of the potion can lead to damaging the user's ability to use magic, leaving them with severe pain should they attempt to cast even the simplest spell or use even the most basic of forms unless they are under the effects of a Mana Enhancer. Because of this, the Sorcerers Collective has restricted its availability to just those who are associated with the Collective as they have deemed it to be too dangerous to be made available to the public.
There are some available on the black markets, as the Hedge-Sorcerers, having learned the recipe during their time at the academy, will sell the small quantities that they are capable of making to the local thieves' guilds. Anyone caught smuggling and/or trading in black market Mana Enhancers are dealt with severely by the Sorcerers Collective as they take maintaining control of the supply of this potion very seriously.
Not many people outside of the Sorcerers know how to make Mana Enhancers and those that do stay tight-lipped so as to avoid a visit by the Secret Keepers. This is partially due to the recipe being closely guarded by the Academies and Collectives alike, but also through the use of the proprietary technology that they use to create one of the ingredients, the Arcane Distillery.
I was fortunate enough to come across a Sorcerer at the inn I was staying at who, after being plied with a purse-emptying amount of ale, was kind enough to share the recipe with me. No matter how much ale I offered, however, they refused to tell me anything about the distillery. The very mention of the device seemed to sober them up as they looked around anxiously, muttered something about “not being that much of a fool” and promptly left the inn.
The origins of the Mana Enhancer date back to the early days of Sorcerers Collective. Some historians have even attributed the creation of the potion to the Sorcerer's rise to power as one of the Three Great Powers of Atoom. The earliest texts in the Collective’s libraries state that the potion was discovered by a wandering Sorcerer called Khafra Kader. A well-respected member of the infantile Collective, Khafra was described as being a man who didn’t want for power or ambition. Always trying to push himself and his magic further than anyone ever had before, Khafra spent every waking moment practicing magical forms and developing new ones. Even while sleeping, he dreamed of new ways that he could use his magic and increase his power.
Like all Sorcerers, however, he was limited by his own Mana Capacity. After a couple of hours of hard magical training, a feat worthy of note even today as the average Sorcerer's Mana Capacity will allow for up to an hour of constant mana expenditure, Khafra would always need to rest or risk passing out.
After three hours of rest, he would then feel ready to train again, but every time he would lament the hours he had lost that could have been used to further his training. Deciding that enough was enough and that this roadblock to his progress needed to be removed, Khafra set about studying various ways of increasing the rate at which he could train.
Ever ambitious, Khafra started with more extreme ideas, such as manipulating time itself to either transport himself ahead in time to the moment that his Mana Capacity would be restored, or to speed up the time surrounding him so that he could recover faster. However, he soon dismissed this avenue of research as pure fantasy as he knew just how much Mana it would take to manipulate time, and that was assuming that such a thing was even possible.
He next decided to see if there were other means of increasing his Mana Capacity, outside of the exercises that the Sorcerers teach. He proceeded to experiment with a variety of materials, ingredients and potions, hoping that one of them might provide the answer that he so desperately sought. He would eat the hearts of Wyverns, which only resulted in him vomiting violently and spending the rest of the week bedridden.
He travelled to distant countries to acquire magical artifacts that he believed might provide him with additional power or increase the effectiveness of his training. None of them would provide any conclusive results however, other than to anger their original owners with their theft, a controversial topic to this day.
In a last ditch effort to find any success, Khafra turned to alchemy, an avenue of study that he had very little experience in as he had dismissed it early on as unnecessary to a Sorcerer. In his inexperience, his experiments in potioncraft amounted to little more than throwing ingredients into a pot and waiting to see what happens. His early attempts resulted in a lot of mishaps and he almost blew himself and his home up on several occasions and resorted to hiring a permanent healer to live in residence with him after he accidentally poisoned himself for the fiftieth time.
It would take Khafra many decades of trial and error until he finally achieved the potion that provided the effects that he required. Unfortunately it had come too late as, at the ripe old age of 87, he was now too old to achieve the heights of sorcery that had once dreamed of. However, in his years of study and experimentation in his attempts to create the Mana Enhancer, he had discovered and created many other potions and poisons that would earn him a reputation as a legend in the field of Alchemy. Even today he is remembered as being the father of modern alchemy and it’s importance within the Sorcerer Collective. A statue of him can be found in most of the Alchemy wings in the Sorcerer Academies of Atoom.