abyssalbrews

Bellum Rosis

Added 2022-05-12 16:01:02 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

The cinematic flair of a greatsword is hard to rival for me. Just the sheer mass of something sharp hurtling through the air is so evocative and the great warriors that wield them usually have such interesting stories. I bet you didn’t expect me to wax poetic about heavy weaponry today, but well sometimes that’s what gets me excited about making items!

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Design notes from Matthew:

The War of the Roses is a phrase that just set my mind on a path of what kind of magic item it could make. I started from there and built out the rest of the item. The idea of white and red roses dotting something war related really stirred up a mental image to me. I started thinking about what that could be and well, nothing says battle quite like a massive freaking sword!

The mechanics, I knew from the start that I wanted them to be blood related in some way. The idea of tinting a rose from white to red to signify charges was something that came to me early. I always like alternate methods of charge generation and reducing a creature to 0HP just made sense with the theming here.

The actual act of spending the charges was a bit more complex. I wanted to give this weapon something like a bleed, but there’s no real condition for that in 5E so I had to make my own. I understood that the temporary HP would be quite powerful so I had to keep the amount limited, thus the 1d4 per laceration.

There’s a somewhat hidden balancing point to this item with the charge generation. Being the one to reduce a creature’s HP to 0 is no small task. Generating charges isn’t easy and so the actual act of spending should feel special. Hopefully I’ve achieved that.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I’m a simple man with simple pleasures, I love drawing swords, and I love drawing shields; so these last two items back-to-back were a delight to make. This sword proved trickier than I expected and ended up taking twice as long to make than I anticipated. I made a lot of concepts for this one, to the point where I had to stop myself to make more and we just picked one.

For the final product we started going in one direction, but halfway through I felt it wasn’t working and started from scratch on this other concept. While that threw a wrench in our production timeline, one that frankly we can’t afford this particular month, or next, it proved to be the right decision as the final product turned out much better than the first version was ever going to be.

I particularly like the colors in this illustration, the green overgrowth contrasts beautifully with the golden crossguard and handle, the cool blue steel brings the temperature down as we move our eyes up the blade and Matt’s choice of red for the backlight is the perfect way to make the green and gold stand out together.

I really love taking items and theming them around a single phrase. I think that words can have a lot of power in them, so being able to bring a weapon to life simply from a small phrase feels like a great challenge to me. I’ll probably do more of this in the future. For now, we’ve got our One More Thing for this month coming soon and we can’t wait to share it with you!

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