abyssalbrews

Growth & Rot

Added 2022-02-17 17:00:07 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

Now that we’ve got Valentine’s behind us, we’re back into our normal releases with something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, a pair of daggers. There’s really just something iconic about two daggers when it comes to rogues, but of course we had to put a bit of our own spin on it with some theming and options for other classes to make use of them.

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Design notes from Matthew:

Dagger pairs are one of my all time favorite types of mechanics, probably because I love combo systems so much. You’ve seen me do it with other items like the Grips of Force or Velika’s Walking Stick where I just really enjoy things that build off of one another or have their own little added combo on top of them. It’s just one of my favorite ways to design as I think it makes things a lot more engaging for the player.

There’s a lot of concern though that comes with combo mechanics as there are a ton of ways to boost the number of attacks you can get in a round. One thing you have to be careful of is not letting them ramp too hard and stay ramped. You almost have to set an upper limit as without it you quickly can get into runaway damage combos. That’s why I tacked an upper flower limit on this one.

We wanted to do some sort of paired theme for these and while the traditional fire and ice and so on are cool options, we wanted to explore what other themes could be out there. I believe Fernando had the initial idea for Nature and decay which quickly grew into Growth & Rot. It was kind of the perfect theme. Also since this could fit in so well with our druidic friends, I made some writing provisions to insure that they could wield them with proficiency.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

This was a fun and unexpectedly challenging item to illustrate. I treated it like two separate items which let me focus on each one individually, unfortunately that turned out to be a big mistake because one of the daggers was significantly larger than the other and took the spotlight all to itself. It took a bit of fiddling with it after the fact to get them both to stand side by side and stand out, but in the end Matt figured out a good compromise.

It was a lot of fun to play with different shapes for growth, as well as play around with all the different natural elements like branches, leaves, etc. I definitely didn’t want it to look like it was made out of dead wood so I added lots of green and leaves, the falling leaves imply that it’s always growing new ones which push out the old ones.

I made rot out of bone since it does necrotic damage, and I encased that bone in rotting wood in order to mirror and contrast growth. While growth is made of living, healthy wood and leaves rot has a wooden handle that is actively rotting and it corruption is growing into the bone dagger inside it. I played around with including an animal skull but in the end the simpler design proved to be more elegant and eye catching.

If all goes to plan, next week we’ll be releasing another encounter pack as extra content for you all. You’ll get your usual item and all of the format there, but you’ll be getting a ton of additional things with it. We’re planning on having a new creature, a token and portrait for it, a battlemap by Ori the Cartographer, and soundtracks by the awesome Ivan Duch. I really look forward to getting all of it in your hands!

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