abyssalbrews

Flint & Steel

Added 2022-09-01 16:00:10 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

Flintlocks are a relatively new invention in our neck of the weird woods, but that hasn’t stopped artificers and tinkerers like us from plying our trade on them. There’s always something to tweak or something to improve. In this case, a rather demanding client with very broad shoulders was looking for an axe. He also mumbled something about a flamethrower being faster. Either way, we’re not quite sure what he wanted with either of those so we just decided to put them both together before he got angry.

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Design notes from Matthew:

I absolutely love this piece. I say that about a lot of our items, but this one really struck something special for me. All of the mechanics just worked together nicely to provide added little bonuses without feeling like they’ll take over a round. They let you do the things you would probably already want to do, just a little better. It definitely started out a little different though.

Initially I had thought about some mechanic where you could teleport to it after throwing it and then pull the trigger yourself, but I realized I was falling into an old trap of adding too much to something when simple is often better. Giving options is a great thing, but adding complexity for the sake of it never really works out in your favor. I decided to strip that mechanic and get it down to just the core, an axe that shoots fire.

The throwing idea of it was always there, but I realized that it would just be a super fun mechanic to be able to throw this thing and have it hit and fire at that time. It’s a pretty unexpected attack. An axe comes your way and suddenly you’re engulfed in flames. That’s a pretty bad day for whoever is on the receiving end. Causing the effect to then ignite the blade was a late addition, mostly because it just felt like there could be one little other boon to the item to really round it off. Fernando did an amazing job rendering it into an item that feels like it could exist in a fantasy world.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

Well, we finally made a gun, I guess it was a matter of time and that time is now. When Matthew told me the item idea I remembered I had seen pictures of something similar in the real world. I guess axe heads mounted to flintlocks were an actual thing once, kind of cool when the real world has weapons and items that look out of a fantasy story.

Obviously just translating a real world weapon is not exciting for us, so after some brainstorming Matthew came up with the idea for a flamethrower. Art-wise we went through several iterations of gunblades and the basis for this one stood out.

Since it was meant to be a gun initially I added some tweaks to make it more flamethrowery, like the fuel canister at the end of the handle, and the burnt/scorch marks around the barrel. I’m particularly proud of that last bit as it grounds the item, it really comes through visually what this thing does.

I will say this one I wrote with barbarians in mind. There’s something about a character with an axe that shoots fire that just screams that kind of rage driven gameplay to me. The idea of chucking an axe, having it explode in fire then charging in to retrieve it and strike their enemy is just pretty iconic to me. I love the visuals, that said it could definitely be at home on several types of characters depending on the setting.

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