abyssalbrews

Living Nephrite & Nephrite Prowler (Collaboration with Tom Cartos)

Added 2022-01-27 17:01:04 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

It’s a very special week as we’re releasing a collaboration with the extremely talented cartographer Tom Cartos. We were so excited to bring this to fruition and we really wanted to create something special for it. So we decided to go a little above and beyond to do not only an item, but our first release of a monster with a portrait, lore, token, and stat block. All of this is paired with a battlemap pack from Tom that you can use to run a whole adventure in these mines.

Think of this as a little preview of what we’ll be up to when we hit our next Patreon goal of providing additional exclusive content every month. Before we get into our usual design notes, I’d like to recommend that you check out Tom’s work as he is one of my favorite cartographers.

Tom Cartos creates highly detailed, multi-level battlemaps for TTRPGs. Use the high resolution pre-made maps for an extra level of atmosphere and immersion in your games, or try out the "creation mode" packs of unfurnished maps and assets to reimagine each setting for your specific needs.

Sign up now for access to more than 1500 battlemaps, 7500 assets, Character & Creature Tokens, 5e Adventures, Foundry VTT modules and more!

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/tomcartos

Twitter - https://twitter.com/CartosTom

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tom.cartos/

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsk9lyzrsjUhkJcudibQOfw

I definitely recommend giving Tom a look as he puts together maps that I use in my own campaigns all the time. Now, let's talk about our new item and creature.

Design notes from Matthew:

Tom had the initial concept of a mine that was imbued with a type of mineral called Nephrite. He has already created one piece as the mine entrance and was planning on creating the rest of the mines in a multileveled structure that players would have to descend through to take out the problems within. I saw this as a perfect opportunity for a stealthy hit and run type creature that would use this setting to their advantage.

One of my main points in creature design is that I want creatures that feel cohesive from start to finish. They should have a concept and everything within it from their moveset to their actions should serve that concept. I had decided on a creature that doesn’t want to stand and fight, but would rather chase people away. I knew I wanted it to have burrowing speed to travel through the layers of the map with ease, and I knew I wanted to give it some type of escape maneuver.

The creature, we playfully named Phillip during development, was reasonably quick to come together once I started working on it. Its high AC, stealth, resistances give it the proper defenses to attack an unaware party, but I realized he needed a getaway. The Safe Retreat ability is probably one of my favorite abilities I’ve created. I love that it gives the monster an opportunity to kick up some problems for the party, then burrow away to safety somewhere else. It really embodies the hit and run style that I wanted for it.

For the item, well this little guy was just a joy to develop. I didn’t want to put too much character into it outside of being a little timid as I wanted to leave that open to the DM. That said, the concept of a living piece of this material that you can sling around to do some healing or damage is just hilarious to me.

The Living Nephrite was a little harder for me to put together as I had to play with the numbers a good bit to put it into a good place where he wasn’t obviously better than some spells, but not a waste of an action to sling it. I think it landed in a pretty comfortable position where it’s a nice bonus without causing too much disruption. The ability of the Living Nephrite to eat an action as well to cause enemies to remove it was a last minute addition from me. It just seemed right that there should be some way to make it less “fire and forget”. I’m all for interactive choice, so that was the most obvious direction to take.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I love when we do collaborations like this one because working with other artists and creators is always a lot of fun, but also a learning experience every time. I get a bit of insight into their process and workflow as well as pick up a few tips and tricks here and here.

The approach to Phillip was two-fold, I wanted the token to match Tom’s map and art style as much as possible so I tried as best I could to match the way he paints his shadows and highlights. Tom also sent us a preview of the map so I was able to sample the colors from it since Phillip is meant to blend in with his environment.

For the portrait I still used the same colors as a base, but I wanted this illustration to have our more recognizable art direction so I switched things a bit to make it more saturated and colorful.

The Living Nephrite was a ton of fun, one of the concepts for Phillip was similar to the Living Nephrite so I built off it. I love when we get to play around with characters, as much personality as I try to imbue into our magic items they are still inanimate objects so it’s fun to be able to give our illustration a bit more personality through facial expressions.

I struggled with making the Living Nephrite two colors or all green and in the end I went with the more monochrome look, I think it works well and it working in a single color lets me focus more on getting values right and not just hues.

As we come to the end of January, we couldn’t be more proud of the work we’re doing and the platform we’re building here. Collaborating with a creator the caliber of Tom was something that Fernando and I saw as a pipe dream, but now that we’re here, it’s just a bit surreal. We have a lot more collabs planned in the future, which means more and more extra content for you all. We hope you enjoy it.

We highly encourage you to join our Discord server where you’ll get access to exclusive channels that have sneak peeks, behind the scenes chatter, and more.