abyssalbrews

Affection Confections

Added 2022-02-10 17:00:06 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

Ah it’s that time of year. The magical time where love is in the air, mid February. I’ve always found it a bit odd that Valentine’s is plopped in the middle of a frigid month with lots of ice and snow but hey who am I to judge? We thought we’d give you a sweet treat this week with the Affection Confections!

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:

Honestly this was one of the simpler ones to come together that I think we’ve had in recent memory. We knew we wanted to do a magic item to celebrate Valentine’s Day and the first time a box of chocolates was mentioned, we knew it was on from that point. That was about all of the ideation that was needed.

The idea of it having some random effects is definitely a bit of a Forrest Gump reference. I can’t avoid that and I don’t think I should shy away from exactly what everyone's thinking already. I do enjoy randomized tables with items at times. I think it’s easy to overdo it and put in too many roles, but with one a day potentially, I don’t really see an issue.

For the effects, the first idea I had was one that was just coconut. That’s why you see option 4 in it. “Coconut. This one tastes like coconut.” I’m not a huge fan of the flavor of coconut so every time I would bit into a chocolate that was coconut filled, that was kind of my reaction.

The rest of it was a mixed bag of useful and potentially awkward effects. I wanted to make some of them feel useful and some feel like a bust, but useful in the right situation. Hopefully you enjoy where it landed!

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I love coconut and coconut filled chocolates, I seem to be alone in that sentiment as neither my wife nor my kids like it and that’s fine by me, daddy gets all the Halloween Almond Joys!

This item came about fairly easily, the idea, the concept, and the illustration were pretty straight forward but still fun to do. I tried adding some details to the box itself so it didn’t look too plain and I didn’t want the chocolate itself to hint at any of the possible outcomes from the random rolls.

The timing on this item was also pretty fortunate as we were coming off the Tom Cartos collaboration was very time consuming, and genius me followed it up with a super complex clockwork armor that took me 13 hours to illustrate! I was also having quite a busy week at my non-magical work so having a straightforward one to do was a much needed bonus!

We’ve begun work on a new collaboration this month with Ori the Cartographer and the composer Ivan Duch. We’ll be giving you another nice creature, item, and map pack but this time it will have a soundtrack with it as well thanks to Ivan. We’re very excited to put that all together and get it to you the last week of the month.

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