abyssalbrews

Flask of the Golden Branch

Added 2022-04-07 16:01:03 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

We’re now into the month of April and have successfully navigated the quagmire of April Fools. We did release a goofy little coconut over on social media, but that didn’t stop us from making our regular item for all of you. We mentioned it in Discord, but we’ve decided that April is for Alchemists! Look forward to a lot of alchemy themed items throughout this month as well as our One More Thing being alchemical in focus. Hopefully you enjoy it!

Our patrons get early access to all of these items as well as additional formats that are easily usable in both physical and online play. Additionally they get high-res art exports, easy to use text exports, behind the scenes updates, and a lot more.

If that strikes your fancy, consider becoming a Patron

Design notes from Matthew:

A magical potion kit on the go is something I’ve had in my head for a bit, but creating something straightforward that was just literally a potion mixing kit didn’t appeal to me. I wanted it to have some sort of flavor that felt unique to the item itself and would also give rise to an interesting form for Fernando to render.

When I’m designing these items, I usually have some sort of imagery in my head of what the illustration will look like. Many times, the illustrations look nothing like what I had pictured, but that’s because Fernando is adept at illustrating things that are just way beyond my expectations in every way. This is a perfect example.

My initial thought was just a bottle with a bag of marbles around it, but Fernando found a much more interesting way to demonstrate the idea of the different sacks containing different options.

For the mechanics, I wanted potions that gave two distinct and powerful benefits when consumed. I also wanted something somewhat reusable. The idea being that you could in some way find more of these marbles in the world as well makes it a bit more interesting to me.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

Matt and I are often challenged in different ways when it comes to these magic items. Sometimes the idea from an item comes from it’s imagery but Matt has to work extra hard to come up with good, balanced mechanic for it because one thing is to have a loose idea or concept and a much harder thing is to actually make it. For example, I have this great idea that we should be able to teleport everywhere! Now someone go ahead and work out the details to make it happen ;)

Likewise, sometimes Matt sends me a really cool concept and mechanics for an item, but because it’s either very abstract or part of the idea is that the item is plain looking which are both a challenge illustration wise to make interesting to look at, especially since I don’t have a backgrounds or characters to show the item being used.

This was one of those where the concept and mechanics were very cool, but a bottle with a bag of marbles doesn’t make a hugely compelling, epic fantasy illustration.

One of the concepts I sent Matt initially had a single stem coming off the bottle with the bag of marbles tied to it, we had also discussed the inclusion of a golden tree as part of the concept so the single stem turned into a sort of street growing around a bottle, which I made iridescent for an extra “fantasy feel”.

We’re really looking forward to this alchemical focused month. We think that we can brew up a lot of interesting options that aren’t just potions, but things that alchemists could otherwise create in their lab. I’ve always felt that it’s a somewhat unexplored area in base D&D so I’m hoping to extend that with some of our offerings.

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