abyssalbrews

Flutter

Added 2025-06-12 15:00:10 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

Have you ever stopped to consider the amazing metamorphosis that the simple caterpillar goes through? I have and I must tell you that when you slow things down and think of the transformation one of these creatures goes through, it’s an absolutely mind expanding opportunity. Consider them as a metaphor for your true self. The ability can exist within all of us to change so completely as to not be recognizable anymore. I find comfort in knowing that should I become unhappy with who I am, I can always have the capacity for complete and total change if I’m willing to suffer the process… Oh yes, the cloak, uh it’s pretty isn’t it?

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Design notes from Matthew:
This entire item was inspired by a trip to a pride festival over the last weekend where I saw someone wearing the most amazing cape that looked like iridescent butterfly wings. I pinned it in my memory and knew that I wanted to work on something soon that was inspired by it. Well the opportunity came quite quickly as I soon pitched the idea to Fernando and he so enjoyed it that I got to writing and he got to illustrating. This was one of our faster turnarounds as we both had a great idea of what exactly it would do from the moment the concept was pitched.
For our 5E version, I wanted to give this a reaction to lower damage, but figuring out how much to lower the damage was actually one of the harder balancing points. You want something that feels meaningful to use, but isn’t going to break the system. Instead of limiting how often you could do it, I chose to balance around a lower damage mitigation and also limiting it to non-magical sources. Between those two, I think it lands in a decent place that should hold from when you would get it into endgame.
On the PF2E front, I was mostly worried about how to make it scale properly over time. The math in PF2E really does ramp over time so I knew that I had to tie it to something that also scaled with you. This is where the idea of player level scaling came into focus. I’m going to try to play more with ideas like this in the future. Item scaling is one of the harder things to tackle, but it’s also one of the most impactful to the player in allowing meaningful updates to their characters.

I’m always trying to keep myself open to inspiration whenever I go to anything or read new media. It’s probably the one reason I’ve never run out of ideas for magic items thus far. There’s an endless sea of inspiration if you choose to make everything a possible jumping off point. Hopefully you know someone in your campaign who would love something like this.

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