abyssalbrews

Mandala

Added 2025-06-19 15:00:10 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

Mathematical patterns and deep meanings of fractal ratios in the world are a magic in and of itself. I haven’t spent as much time studying them as I would have perhaps liked to, but I have spent an unreasonable amount of time as a child toying around with a kaleidoscope that I was given by a dear family friend. I would try to find the meanings and patterns within the colors as I looked through that magical lens. I wondered what it might mean to shift a quarter turn versus a half. Ultimately it was just a pretty toy to look at, but it did inspire a lifelong love of that kind of deep patternwork to me. This staff is the result of that love. Also a lot of very expensive crystal experimentation.

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Design notes from Matthew:
Here is one of those times that I’m going to talk about the fundamental difference of expectation between 5E and PF2E. Staves in PF2E have a purpose. They are made to cast prepared magic spells and to expand the roster of spells available to spellcasters. This results in quite a rigid setup for them where you have to be careful with what additional properties you give to them. They’re expected to be themed and all flow together. You can see the theme I went for here was with elemental magic as well as more “prismatic” style magics.
In 5E, the expectations on staves are a lot different. They can do a number of things and not all of them have to have spells baked into them. That said, designing the thing I wanted here was all about picking the right spells to include on the list. Again I leaned into the elemental damage style spells while tacking on some that fit the additional damage types that made sense to me in 5E.
Regardless, the big thing that I wanted to get into on each was the changing of damage types. People might think that this is an underpowered utility for a legendary, but the math enjoyers of the 5E and PF2E worlds will tell you that’s patently wrong. There’s a lot of spells that are in some way balanced around how many creatures have resistance to that type of damage. Being able to change damage types at all is a huge boon to casters and firmly places this in the high level/high rarity brackets.

We had spent some number of weeks focusing on shoring up some more low level offerings for you all, so I had been itching to design something big and stompy and powerful again. It was exciting to dip back into that for a bit. Next week we’ll be bringing you a creature and item pairing that I’m super pumped for.

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