abyssalbrews

Telskean

Added 2025-02-27 16:00:14 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

When a sandswept nomad makes their way into your parlor, it’s often a good idea to take a moment and see what they have to say. Those that would journey into the deepest depths of the most arid climates of the world are made of tougher stuff than those stuck up nobles play fighting down in the arena. When one brought me a blade made of crystal and charged with crackling energy, I was befuddled, not understanding where something like this could have come from. He informed me of the existence of mutated scorpions called Cobalt Crawlers and I was hooked. I asked how much he wanted and paid him on the spot. I’ll make you a good deal on it.

Our patrons get early access to all of these items as well as additional formats that are easily usable in both physical and online play for D&D and Pathfinder 2E. Additionally they get high-res art exports, easy to use text exports, behind the scenes updates, and a lot more.

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Design notes from Matthew:
One idea, two design processes. That’s my mantra when I’m working on items for 5E and PF2E. The reason for that is quite simple, they’re two very different systems with different mechanics to interact with. It’s a fool's errand at times trying to convert items from one way or the other instead of just treating them as two separate writing exercises. In this case, I wanted to just make a better item for each system instead of trying to keep them too close in function.
In the 5E version, there’s a lot of interesting options when you give an item the ability to do a different kind of damage than they normally would. There’s inherent power that people don’t always think about in the form of weaknesses. It’s true that weaknesses aren’t as present in 5E as I would like, but still the option makes for interesting ideas. The arcing lightning was an interesting addition that I really wanted to have present as it was part of the creature, but writing it was a challenge. I ended up having to just break it down to each part of the mechanic. There wasn’t much more of an elegant way to approach it.
On the PF2E side, the shock rune basically handles the kind of AoE that I wanted to have as part of this weapon. Since that was taken care of in the property rune, I knew I wanted to give it a little more but nothing that would propel it beyond the level range that it was currently occupying. Thus I mimicked the scorpion’s poison mechanic and brought it here just in a more direct form with one effect instead of onsets.

It’s our latest item of February and later on today we’ll be releasing the Cobalt Crawler to pair with this item if you’d like to offer a challenge to some slightly higher tier players. Hopefully your short month has treated you well. I’m just looking forward to seeing more things in bloom with spring around the corner!

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