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Timewinder's Cuirass
🕑 Added 2022-02-03 17:00:06 +0000 UTCGreetings everyone!
It’s February already and where did the time go? The shortest month of the year is upon us, but you can still expect the standard amount of releases from us. It just kind of works out timing wise. We also have a pretty cool collab coming at the end of the month. Just something to look forward to. Now though, we get on to the Timewinder’s Cuirass.
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.
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Design notes from Matthew:
Messing with time is one of those really difficult things to do in D&D. I’ve seen a lot of options centered around movement, pushing things forward in time as if it’s a type of banishment, and so on. These are all great options, but what I really wanted to do was create something that offered a way to feel like you were altering time when you used it.
The methodology on this one was tough. I played with dozens of ideas including making you fully immune, making the damage never be applied, so on so forth. I liked a lot of those options, but they were just too powerful. I had originally laid this out as a very rare item, but it became obvious very quickly that legendary was probably the only way to accomplish this.
I like the final place where we landed with it. I can see the cinematic possibilities here of someone rushing in to do something extremely dangerous, then getting back to their party just in time for the rest of it to hit. We love putting in some level of epic storytelling for our items and I feel like those moments could nail it.
The way this could also be used to delay death is interesting to me. There’s a potential to have the party stack on healing and protection for damage that comes later. I see a lot of interesting opportunities centered around the delay mechanic.
Illustration notes from Fernando:
This baby was quite the challenge to illustrate (as is usually the case with steampunk/clockwork items that require a lot of technical drawing). It was also very time consuming, even the initial concept (which I try to do as fast and loose as possible) took over an hour to sketch out because it’s so detailed and complex. I also only did one concept for it, it’s one of those items where Matt and I were on the same page the whole time and when we discussed the theme I visualized the look right away.
Some of the obvious details are the different clocks, cogs, and gears spread around the armor, including the chest piece which I picture can be turned to select how far ahead in time to travel. The less obvious ones are all the metal bands and lines decorating the armor, which are meant to evoke different timelines and the flow of time as an intricate pattern. I also gave this heavy armor a padded suit underneath because I figured time traveling is hard on the body and the extra padding helps protect the user from the outside forces while leaping through time.
Color-wise I don’t think I had a lot of choice, I wanted the steampunk/clockwork trope of bronze and metal, red compliments yellow quite well so it was the obvious choice for the under armor, and I decided to leave the cloak white because I felt adding one more, large, colorful element would be distracting and make it look too cartoony and white makes a great neutral color which and bounces light around nicely.
January was another great month for us and we had the opportunity to release a creature for the first time ever as part of a collaboration with the wonderful Tom Cartos. If you missed it, check it out here. It was really great to work with a creator of his caliber and this month we have another lined up. We can’t wait to talk more about it!
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)
Until next time!
- Fernando & Matthew
