The Drunken Lizard Pub

'Sprays the target creature with a vaporous mix of Polonium ...'

No.

Probably remember this from the news of how the FSB killed off an annoying political person in London.

Polonium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium is extraordinarily rare, fortunately for us, and mages are not nuclear physicists.

And compared to more readily available toxic materials, takes a good long time to kill. Why go into unnecessary details (toxic cloud is enough of a description in a magical environment) but if detail is needed why something both so highly technological and improbable? CO2 is faster acting and just as deadly and readily available.

".. drawn form the soil and stone about the caster"

Have any idea how many million metric tones of stone and soil you'd have to comb through to get enough Polonium to make a decent cloud?

It's not a material worth caring about unless you are making primitive nuclear bombs or copy machines.

It's obvious a lot of love and effort went into the making of the software and art for the game. The system isn't horrible. But to put stuff like this in the story context ... ugg. Anachronisms, especially bad ones, spoil suspension of disbelief.

Even if for some plot reason it's absolutely imperative that Polonium be the main component of your toxic cloud, keep it as a background idea and not something explicit in the text.

If you want a technological basis for your world and magic system, then things have to be reality based and that requires some real research.

Find me the place that BW said that Eschalon took place on earth.
For all you know, Eschalon takes place on a planet made entirely out of Polonium.

And again with the realism: Not everything in the series is done so that it is perfectly realistic to our standards here on earth.

Re: polonium - it will make sense in Book III.

But of all the things you could have questioned - magic spells, trolls, animated dead, instant healing elixirs, enchanted weapons, mind control...why did you pick out polonium to argue about realism?

This reminds of the time I was watching Kolchak - The Night Stalker (original series) with my father. This was a show where every week Carl Kolchak, a newspaper reporter, would fight vampires, Jack the Ripper, and monsters of all kinds, but what broke his suspension of belief was seeing Kolchak pull his car into an empty parking space. My father named the street and city block and said that there was never an empty space there at that time of the day since he worked nearby. That was his only objection to the series back in the 1970s.