abyssalbrews

Heartbound Therimoire

Added 2022-01-20 17:00:08 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

Our third in a line of gothic fantasy items and I have to say this one has a special place in my heart. Or perhaps it just is a special heart. The mystical has a place in this genre and that place is often just on the cool side of creepy. We wanted to embody that with a spellbook that was beneficial, but also just a little weird.

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Design notes from Matthew:

From a usability perspective, spellbooks are a really interesting one. It’s rare that you get a chance to develop directly for a specific class and try to shore up some places where they are a little lacking. As we all know, for wizards, that’s in HP. They are just little squishy beans and they can’t help it.

I wanted to find a way to give Wizards a bit of an extra HP pool while not giving them a forever get out of jail free card. There needs to be a cost to the damage taken. We had the idea for a book with an anatomical heart in it and I knew that it could be a way to tie all of that together into one item that actually felt good to use.

I tried to do my best to theme the spells it grants into something that’s usable, but maybe off beat for Wizards. It’s not often that they get the chance to participate as much in social interactions or situations, so I wanted to give them some tools that could actually help with that when it came up.

I’m really happy with the idea of mending a broken heart. That was a super cool idea that Fernando came up with and I immediately had to put it into the item.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

One of my favorite characters I’ve played was a Mage so I was excited to illustrate this item since there’s a chance my character will someday come across it!

A book is a deceptively tricky item to illustrate, a book can be any shape, as demonstrated by the many children’s books my kids own, but a magic item needs to be recognized both by what it does, but also what category of item it is. So that leaves in a position where the item needs to mostly be rectangular with a bunch of pages.

One of the first ideas I had was for the ruby heart to be embedded in the book itself, so the writing would all have to go around the heart since every page would have a big heart shaped hole in the middle. This would be impractical and silly so we scraped it fairly quickly (even though I made a second version attempting for it read better, which it did, but the concept itself wasn’t good)

Making the heart anatomically correct gave me the idea of adding a rib cage around it, which immediately gives the book both a unique look, personality, and slightly creepy factor we want in a gothic fantasy item. The ruby heart was a ton of fun to paint, I looked at a few references of course and I noticed one way to make something look shiny like glass is to give one of its faces an almost pure white highlight.

I think the combination of the leatherbound book, the metal “X” shape, bone ribcage, and ruby heart give this item a very attractive and varied look!

Next week, we’ll be bringing you something extremely special in the form of some extra content with the wonderful Tom Cartos. I can’t wait to share what we’ve been making with him. We’ll be releasing an item as per usual, but it will also come with a map, and a new homebrew monster that we’re building out. It’s going to be a great release and we’re extremely excited to get it into your hands.

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.