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Amorphous Alloy
🕑 Added 2023-02-23 16:00:04 +0000 UTCGreetings adventurers!
I was horrified when a portal opened in our shop and a beast stepped through with a fiery hole in its chest bearing a hammer for an arm and an anvil on its knee. I had heard of these hellsmiths before in my reading, but the prospect of one being in the shop was less than an exciting prospect, especially considering how flammable I am. I shook in terror as the beast approached and placed its blazing hot sword on the counter. It blurted out “how much?”... Okay, well apparently even hellsmith’s need a career change some time. He told me he wanted to get into painting. I didn’t see a reason to argue.
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Design notes from Matthew:
Shapeshifting weapons are an absolute pain to illustrate and that’s why I don’t really subject Fernando to them too often, but when we needed something to pair with the hellsmith, the idea of a weapon that you could change to whatever you needed in the battle was just too good to pass up. There were some design problems along the way, but there always are when you work on something that requires a bit of finesse to get it right.
The heat mechanic was actually one of the things that I wanted from the start. I knew giving players the chance to change the form of their weapon any time would be a bit of a bear to actually make it playable in any real sense. It has to have some mechanic to balance out the versatility or you’ll end up with a bit too much power in the player's hand. With the stacking heat mechanic, it gives an incentive to get into the fray and stay in it.
The burst of heat was something to give the swap of weapons a bit more punch. I wanted that to feel like it was a cool moment each time it happened so the build and payoff had to come out right. I enjoy stacking mechanics and I enjoy them even more when you get a big payoff at the end.
Illustration notes from Fernando:
As Matthew said, it’s really difficult to illustrate shapeshifting on a static image. The obvious go-to is to show something mid-shapeshift but the problem with that is at which point in the transformation do you illustrate? Is it reading that it’s a shapeshift and not two things melded into each other? Hopefully with the context clues in the name as well as the writing people will find this illustration readable.
I definitely wanted this weapon to match the Hellsmith illustration in feel and color palette, so I added a couple of little visual cues to tie them together, such as the sword’s pommel’s similarity to the base of the metal rods poking out of the creature’s chest.
Pairing items with creatures is one of my favorite ways to design. If we had infinite time to work on this project, I would love to churn out pairings like this with all of our items, but that’s just simply not realistic at this time. Instead we’ll settle for doing them as we can and giving you guys a nice little bonus when it happens!
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Rewards for Patrons!
Kraken's Kollaborators ($10 Tier)
Stay toasty,
- Fernando & Matthew
Comments
AbyssalBrews
Sure thing! We use the rarity system per the DMG Page 135 where it recommends item rarities by level. Very Rare (like this one) are intended for levels 11 and above. That said, I could be comfortable handing this particular one to anyone leveled 9 or more.
Lyman Green
This is great. Do you have a suggestion on what level this weapon is appropriate for?
Levi Kane
Thanks so much!
AbyssalBrews
Hey Levi, with the mess that was the OGL debacle around that time, I'll be honest I just straight up forgot. I'm going to get that out tomorrow. My apologies on that!
Levi Kane
Is there going to be a January Wrap Up? I prefer to just download the full package at once at the end of every month.
