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Deadman's Chest
🕑 Added 2022-10-06 16:01:01 +0000 UTCGreetings adventurers!
It’s getting to be that time of year where there’s a chill in the air sending tingles down your spine. Ghouls creep the graveyards and the streets are bathed in gloom. Ah yes, the spookiest time of year is upon us. Not being ones to shy away from an invite, we took a wagon to meet a man that called himself a doctor, a professor of sorts, he said. When we gazed upon his creations though, we found ourselves a bit aghast at what he had created. He was “kind” enough to demand we take one of his creations with him and now we have this thing stinking up the back office. Oh well, now it’s your problem.
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Design notes from Matthew:
Okay the initial idea for this came from the pun of the name of course. It’s a chest of a different kind and well, yes I understand that it’s a bit disturbing, but we wanted to start off spooky season with a bang. The obvious influence here was the ability of zombies to get back up and keep coming back, making themselves a menace over time. I wanted to bring that feeling to players in a way that felt interesting, but came at a cost.
I went through a number of iterations for the curse on this one. I had some with it lowering Wisdom or Charisma, but intelligence seemed to be the most right on for something like a zombie themed chest piece. I also had some iterations where you became a zombie slowly over time, which was a very cool idea, but the execution of it just felt lacking. Also, I hate taking control of someone’s character away from them. It rarely feels good.
The limitation coming in the form of the proficiency bonus, was something that I added a bit late in the writing process. I knew I wanted to limit it in some way, but I wasn’t sure what would work best and make it feel fair. I think a proficiency bonus is typically an equally scaling way to let an item power up with you as a character while you continue to use it over time.
Illustration notes from Fernando:
This was a tricky one to illustrate, because of the theme we could have gone full ham with body horror but I wanted to avoid that, that’s not our brand. Then again, it’s a bunch of skin sewn together, it’s literally the MO of one of the most creepy, terrifying villains in film history. I looked to World of Warcraft for inspiration, that game does a great job of having entire zones that are very spooky and creepy but are never off-putting or true horror and the way they achieve this is by adding a bit of comedy to everything. WoW abominations are huge monsters made from body parts which is horrifying, but they have really silly facial expressions, animations, and are funny looking.
Inspired by that, I decided to add body parts to the sewn pieces of skin, a random ear, a halfling foot, etc. I also wanted to make it race-independent so I added different skin tones but also some dragonborne scales, a tiefling tail, some pointy ears. Lastly, I put a face with a silly expression as a shoulder pad to further crank up the silliness and turn down the body-horror.
Overall I’m very happy with the result, although this took waaaaay longer than expected!
I’m so excited to be getting into our spooky items for the month of October. This is one of our favorite times of year and we have so much we want to bring you to help you celebrate all things creepy and crawly. We’ll have a bit of a palette cleanser next week with something a bit more cutesy. We hope you’ll love them both!
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Kraken's Kollaborators ($10 Tier)
Keep breathing!
- Fernando & Matthew
