Asherons Call: Aqua, aqua everywhere....

First you'll need to gather the ingredients. The most basic is the mote. My favorite place for those is metos, but you can also find them fairly decently at Aerlinthe from the coral golems who respawn pretty quickly also. If you don't have Aerlinthe recall, simply take a D note to the undead guy out by candeth keep at 87.6S, 65.6W, and he'll send you there once you hand him the note. You won't need too many motes, it'll depend on how many gems you'd like to make. One mote will make up to 5 aqua vitae.

Next you'll need a crucible. This is easily purchased from Zarri ibn Khaybi in Xarabydun at 41.9S, 16.2E.

And third you'll need to purchase some concentrated Aqua Incanta. It must be concentrated, and undiluted to work. This can be found at any of the vendors listed here: Aqua Incanta Vendors

Now comes the decision part. For every single level 6 gem the only herb you'll need is the Frankencense. But it differs for each gem which powdered Gem or Potion you need. At the end I'll give you the link for the entire writeup and you can easily see both the formula and the ingredients, as well as those for the lesser gems if interested. Perhaps those might come in handy for a vassal or two down the road.

The basic formula is this:
[li]Step one, you take your mote, add it to the Concentrated Aqua Incanta. You'll get 5 Aqua Vitae.
[li]Next you take your potion of choice, for example if you wanted a basic Gem of Greater Protection, this would be Stibnite, and you'll add this to your crucible to recieve your Crucible with potion mixture.
[li]Third you'll take your herb of choice. In our case it would be the Frankencense mentioned above, and you'll add this to the mixture. You'll receive a Potion and Herb Crucible
[li]Fourth take the Aqua Vitae, add it to the mixture you now have, and you'll get yet another mixture, called Treated Potion and Herb Crucible
[li]Last step, yay! You take the powdered Gem, for our example that's Powdered Onyx, and you add that to the crucible mixture, and there you have it a buffing gem. You can make one for each of the level 6 prots, from Greater Protection to even a Gem of Greater Regeneration, Gem of Greater Rejuvination, and even a Gem of Greater Mana Renewal. Something I've never seen from the holiday lights quest personally.

If you'd like to save time, you can actually get larger amounts of Aqua Vitae all at once. It just take combining the motes. We know for 5 we'd only need a single mote. But lets say we'd like 10, you can combine two motes into a sliver, add that to the Aqua Vitae and you'll get 10 instead of 5. For 20 a Nugget. A Bar will get you 40, and a whole Ingot will get you a whopping 125.

So next time you're stuck without buffs, as you can see with just a little preplanning, and a decent alchemy skill you can create for yourself some nice little gems to take along as a nice tide me over, or as gifts to wow your new vassals with.

As promised, the link to the write up is found at http://ac.warcry.com/index.php?content=compendium/tradeskills/alchemy_gems

I hope you've enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it, and as always, if there's anything you'd like to know but haven't had the time to look up, feel free to email me at stormowl@warcry.com and I'd be more than happy to feature it here.