abyssalbrews

One More Thing: Cervusan

Added 2025-06-26 17:00:07 +0000 UTC

Greetings Adventurers,

This month we're delving into something that I find fascinating and a lot of fun to play with, spellswords. Sadly there's not a ton of options for these types of characters in 5E or PF2E, but there's slowly more and more being added. I wanted to take the concept and breathe some additional inspiration into it from the real world which I'll talk about in the design notes. Hopefully you can enjoy these unique and powerful warriors in your games.

As with all of these One More Thing releases, it's exclusive to patrons. If you're not a patron and want this release, please consider supporting us here. For patrons, you'll have to grab the files from your master post (linked below) or from the Katalogue to see the stats. We hope you enjoy it.

Design notes from Matthew:
I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for interesting cultural sites or places that have a particularly unique thing about them. One such place that I know of is Nara in Japan where the Shika (deer) have learned to bow to tourists and visitors in order to receive food for their efforts. That was such an interesting piece of imagery to me, that I pitched it to Fernando and he was immediately on board.
Our good friend Tom Cartos who we share these monthly extra releases with had just wrapped up a very cool map that resembled a Japanese temple and it seemed like the perfect time to let this idea come to life. When I started thinking about how to make them special though, it came to me that we could impart some mysticism into it by maybe having them cast magic with their horns. That said, I also wanted them to be somewhat like the traditional depictions of samurai. Then, I said why not both?
One of the biggest hurdles I've always faced when creating creatures for my campaigns is the desire to streamline them. Oddly enough, this creature in general was almost the victim of it. I nearly locked it down to just a fancy blade wielder with a few minor spells. Giving myself room to explore and add in the spellsword nature really let me create something more fun and innovative that never would have come about if I tried to limit myself more.

I can't believe we're already into summer as this year is just moving by. We've been at this whole creation thing for quite awhile now and I'm so pumped to keep going. That said, I'm always looking for your feedback on what else we could be making so don't be shy about sharing it here or on Discord.

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