abyssalbrews

Pocket Pitfall

Added 2024-03-07 16:00:08 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

At first I thought someone was just playing a clever ruse on me. An extremely well painted pit in the middle of my shop floor, very funny. Some of my friends are the joking type so I strode across with confidence only to have an incredibly unpleasant fall. How about that, the pit was actually real. Now how did they do it? I wondered. It’s then that one of my associates appeared at the top and asked if I was interested in buying it. I thought it was a silly question, how does one buy a pit? Well as it turns out it was a bit more complicated than I originally thought.

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Design notes from Matthew:

This actually came as a suggestion from one of our patrons so it’s great to be able to make it a reality for a release. I love designing things that are a bit quirky and an ACME style peel and stick pitfall is pretty much right up my alley for the kinds of things I want to make. It’s interesting to try to put into words how something like this would work. It’s really not as straightforward of an exercise as you would hope.

Though 5E has some rules around them and suggested traps, there wasn’t a lot to build off of here for me. I mostly had to just write it out and try to plan for as many possible workarounds I could. One of the funniest last minute realizations was that I had originally not included language about the pit needing to be empty to peel it up so you could essentially trap someone within or use it as a portable infinite storage pit. I realized that mistake pretty quickly thankfully and corrected it.

In the PF2E version, thankfully they have a lot of expanded rules around traps and information for them. They also have lots of sample traps, so it was extremely easy to just reference the hazard and let it go from there. I was able to focus all of my writing around the mechanics of how the item functions instead of worrying about the trap. That could be a message for newer designers, don’t do more work than you have to if the system has done some of it for you.

Now that we’re into March proper, I’m excited to start working towards this month’s One More Thing release and I think you all will like it as well. I’m still working on the digital Katalogue and the beta has been going well. Still a lot of content to enter, but at least the initial bugs are solved!

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