abyssalbrews

Verdant Sanctuary

Added 2022-04-28 16:01:05 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

It’s the last week of April and that means we’re putting out our last Alchemical item and as sad as it is to see that theme go, all good things must end. We’ve got a killer final item of April though in the form of the Verdant Sanctuary. Where alchemy meets survival. Some seek to turn items to gold, whereas others pursue creating water in the desert. Only this time, they were actually successful.

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Design notes from Matthew:

I always love the concept of creating safe places for your adventurers to camp out for the night. Whether it’s a tiny hut or a magnificent mansion, the concept has always intrigued me. That said, it always seemed a bit odd that none of them were really themed around harsh survival locations, so we decided to make one.

The original concept for this was actually just a consumable orb that was kind of a “break glass in case of emergency” type thing. You could throw it on the ground and it would pop up an oasis consuming the item on use. It seemed fun, but really lacked some of the lasting power that we want to give our items, so we opted to make it a bit more permanent with some powerful draconic magic involved.

I wanted to make it a beautiful place that would allow people to survive in the harshest climates imaginable and I think that we achieved something rather unique here.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I feel we have been pushing ourselves lately with the more unusual concepts, illustrating this item was a fun challenge because it’s more of a landscape than an item, really. I don’t do a lot of landscape painting but when things like this pop-up out of my comfort zone I try to tackle them with a positive attitude rather than be intimidated by it. Lately I have been on a big “reframing” kick in my personal life where I’m choosing to reframe challenges or negatives into positives.

The first version of this item was just the oasis inside a glass sphere, Matt asked that I make a base for it so it looks more like a snow globe, I believe we wanted some ties to emerald dragons so I made the base to look like green dragon scales/skin, almost like the dragon’s tail is wrapped around it.

The last touch came as a suggestion that we add fog to the interior in order to make it more ethereal/magical so I used a brush meant to paint fire and painted the fog with it, this way it doesn’t just look like smoke or clouds but like a gas more magical in nature.

We’ve still got one more alchemical release coming your way this week. Our “One More Thing” for the month is quite an extensive potion making supplement that we’re calling Elixir. It’s quite a bit bigger than our usual bonus content, but we didn’t want to cut it down for the sake of brevity. Keep an eye on that later in the week.

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