abyssalbrews
patreon
Grovespirit's Fletcher
🕑 Added 2022-05-26 16:00:08 +0000 UTCGreetings adventurers!
Deep in the forests, spirits haunt the trees bringing with them magics that enrich the forests around them. These Grovespirits treat the trees as their own children, tending to them and making sure they live a healthy life. Occasionally a ranger or druid becomes friendly with one of these spirits who grants them a boon. In this case, a ranger’s quiver was blessed by the spirit producing something truly special.
Our patrons get early access to all of these items as well as additional formats that are easily usable in both physical and online play. Additionally they get high-res art exports, easy to use text exports, behind the scenes updates, and a lot more.
If that strikes your fancy, consider becoming a Patron
Design notes from Matthew:
Ammunition doesn’t get anywhere near enough love and that has always bothered me. There’s +1 arrows or silver arrows, things of that nature, but it feels like there could be so much more done with interesting ammo. I wanted to take a crack at giving at least one option with this quiver.
The first problem I see with ammunition is that it doesn’t create interesting choices. Your general best course of action is to just focus fire on one target. While this is the most effective, it doesn’t always play out in a very fun way. With these arrows, there’s an implied encouragement to spread out your attacks on creatures in a close area forcing them to burn actions or be stopped in their tracks.
I had originally thought about using “restrained” as a condition for these, but that proved to just be too powerful for something at the rare tier. There’s far too many abusable situations with that kind of condition. Grappled locks them in place without making it too advantageous.
Finally, I wanted to make sure that you couldn’t just perpetually fire Grovespirit Arrows. Using these should be a choice, so I gave them a problem where they are unusable after being fired. This imposes some limits that should help stop them from taking over the game.
Illustration notes from Fernando:
This was a really funny process for us, Matt gave me a loose idea of the concept he had in mind so I illustrated what I felt captured that idea, then he looked at the art and it inspired him to change the item almost completely and rework the concept and mechanics, when he sent me the new write-up it inspired me to change the art some more to make it thematically closer to the final lore and mechanics.
The back and forth between us really gave me a chuckle. Illustrating ethereal object is usually a bit tricky; I iterated through a few ideas before settling for the concept of a quiver that had a bunch of spiritual energy inside it, so much that it was literally bursting at the seams with it.
Once the item turned into a more druidic in theme I went back and tweaked the ethereal lights and particle effects to resemble more vines and leaves. I also drew a bit of inspiration from the ethereal arrow I painted for the bow of lucid dreams; I didn’t want to copy it exactly, but I wanted to resemble it a little bit.
Sometimes I treat our items as design challenges to solve a noticeable problem or fill a gap that I see in systems that are out there. This is one of those cases where we got to do a little bit of both. Fernando was amazingly patient with my last minute changes and I’m really proud of what we put together here.
We highly encourage you to join our Discord server where you’ll get access to exclusive channels that have sneak peeks, behind the scenes chatter, and more.
Rewards for Patrons!
Kraken's Kollaborators ($10 Tier)
That’s the spirit!
- Fernando & Matthew
