abyssalbrews

Crash & Ox

Added 2022-05-05 16:00:07 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

The animal kingdom is full of wonderful inspiration and this week we wanted to celebrate an interesting mutualistic relationship between the rhinoceros and the oxpecker. They are a fascinating pair of creatures that work together to make up for each other’s weaknesses and we were so inspired by it that we had to turn it into something fun for you all.

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Design notes from Matthew:

I came to Fernando with an idea of making a shield, which I knew he’d be on board for. The guy is sword and board the whole way and I love him for that. I had a few options that I wanted to explore, but one of them was a rhinoceros. My initial idea was centered around tough creatures that charge and well a rhino is pretty high up on that list. Also they are adorable tank puppies so I wanted to make something with them eventually.

Fernando did the research to learn about the mutualistic relationship between rhinos and oxpecker birds and I was immediately intrigued. The idea that a set of very different creatures work together to cover one another was immediately appealing to me and I know that I could work that into an item.

Oxpeckers will alert rhinos to threats when they approach and that just leans right on ideas of the Alert feat. I didn’t want to port a feat directly onto an item so I went for a toned down version that still conveys an interesting benefit. This ended up adding a ton of flavor to the item and makes it feel really special with this bird on the shield chirping when an attack is imminent.

The charge ability was one that took a bit of time to balance for me. I was hesitant on not putting restrictions on it, but honestly it’s just more fun to be able to use this ability whenever you want. It doesn’t convey a ton of strength unless you can line up a number of enemies. Then you can have a pretty good bowling pin effect. The relatively low 2d6 damage isn’t anything crazy either, but I was mostly worried about the prevention of opportunity attacks. Ultimately it was the lack of opportunity attacks that made me bump it up to very rare in the end. It’s just a powerful thing to have!

Illustration notes from Fernando:

Like Matt said, I’ve never met a shield I didn’t love so when he threw the shield idea at me I didn’t even have to think about it. As always he managed to come up with some seriously cool mechanic for it. Whenever one of our items is based off an animal I tend to do a deep dive on it and share it with Matt. We always look for things that are not obvious in order to breathe originality into our items.

A Rhino shield needs to have obvious abilities like charging or having tons of armor, that’s expected. When we read about the oxpecker, though, a light immediately went on. We love the relationship these two animals share, and having a shield that alerts you of danger felt like just the right fit for us.

Art-wise, I did a few iterations of Rhino heads and they were OK but we weren’t getting excited about them, once I went abstract and angular the shield really came to life. I purposely didn’t make the bird angular like the rhino’s head even though it’s coming out of it because I wanted to still have some way of visually depicting that they are two separate entities, but they work together.

We have a lot of great ideas coming up for you this month. I spent some time over the last few days mapping them out and I’m so excited to get them into your hands. Our “One More Thing” this month is going to be quite a dangerous beastie as well to use in your high level campaigns. May is looking like a good one!

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