abyssalbrews

Velika's Walking Stick

Added 2022-01-13 17:01:03 +0000 UTC

Greetings everyone!

As we continue our journey into the dark recesses of gothic fantasy, we come across a useful tool for traversal. That said, this walking stick holds so much more than one could guess upon first glance. Velika, the old slayer that used to own this cane, was not someone that needed much help wherever she went and the cane was her weapon of choice. We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.

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Design notes from Matthew:

Designing a legendary magic item is a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. You can put in a lot of the really powerful stuff that you often have to cut out from other items to make them work for where they are. When you get to this tier of rarity, the worry is almost that you’ll not put in enough sometimes to justify it. In this case I think we hit a good balance though.

Initially I did something kind of silly and allowed the cane to be able to stun on pretty much any hit and that definitely would have put this firmly in “best item in the game” kind of category. The whip itself also had some silly powerful abilities with damage. My feeling is to always give it too much and pull back and in this case I absolutely did that.

The idea of a two state weapon with a bonus action to swap between is something that really appeals to me. I just love the idea of something that can be useful in multiple ways. Giving a whip enough power to really feel unique and worthwhile was a bit of a struggle as well, but I think the stacking lacerations can do the job quite well.

I always wanted to put in a little flavor too so giving this cane the ability to let you pierce magical darkness just felt like a lovely little additional bonus.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I had a pretty good idea in my head of what I wanted this item to look like when Matt first came up with it. As I’ve mentioned before with two-state items, I have to find a way to illustrate both states in one image, this is very challenging but challenging ourselves is what AB is about.

Because of the two-states I had to come up with a design for this item when it’s in cane form and another one for the whip form.

The composition of this illustration was a bit tricky though, we tested overlapping some of the elements and it just looked messy, instead we went with a foreshortened view, and the solution to portraying the two states was to separate the different pieces gradually, as if the cane was in the middle of being changed into a whip.

At the tip, the pieces are far from each other so it looks like a whip, but as our eyes move towards the handle the pieces are closer and closer together, to the point where the first 3 or 4 pieces near the base are almost completely together, giving you an idea of what this item looks like a as a solid cane as well as a whip.

The last challenging bit was the colors, I went too dark with all the elements initially and with Matt’s feedback I tweaked the colors and values a bit which resulted in a much more readable item.

As we continue pushing into this new year of releases, I’m emboldened by the fact that this whole thing continues to grow and I’m heartened to see the project expanding. Fernando and I always say that if one person uses our product, it’s a success. We still live by that, so seeing so many people enjoying what we have to offer is amazing. We’ll be with another gothic fantasy item next time.

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