abyssalbrews

Ratty's Gutting Blade

Added 2022-08-11 16:00:07 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

We were in a not-so-great part of town trying to track down a reclusive artificer known as Ratty. He’s renowned for being hard to get a hold of, yet masterful at his craft if you can pin him down. We ended up finding him half-drunk in the backroom of a tavern yelling something about the importance of “pixel density” and while we had no clue what he was talking about, he did hand over this absolutely horrifying blade. We hope you love it because we’re a bit scared of it.

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Design notes from Matthew:

I like my legendaries to be things that can have options. I strive to make sure that when we write a legendary item, it’s not a one trick pony. It has to have something that can be useful in many different scenarios. I went through a lot of different iterations on what each of the liquids here would do, though how they were used basically stayed the same from the start.

I originally thought that each color would coincide with a type of damage deal, those being fire, poison, and cold. While that worked just fine, it made the item feel a bit lackluster to just do some damage. It didn’t have that cinematic feel that we usually go for so I scrapped that idea and began working toward unique mechanics for each color.

Bloodrot was the first one that I wrote in this new direction and it stayed the whole way through. I really loved the idea of a cursed liquid coursing through your veins making bad things worse. Ironroot actually was originally something that made difficult terrain, but it just felt clunky and difficult to use. Instead I changed it to a slightly enhanced barkskin with some melee reflect damage. It’s a defensive option. Finally the last one I settled on was Cryophil. It took me a lot of steps to get to this weirdly enough. For such a simple property, I had stuff with ice patches and cones and icy splash damage. It was way too much. Instead I decided to make this more utility focused. Reach isn’t really accessible to folks who use shortswords often so it felt like a really fun alteration.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last year of AB is that I like drawing swords…anytime Matthew comes up with a sword I’m happy to illustrate it, have a ton of fun doing it, and generally come up with tons of concepts quickly and easily. This one was no exception, the initial concept sketches for this one were all wildly different from each other. In the end we did a bit of mash of two of the concepts we both liked.

Initially I completely missed the gut hook part of the design brief, adding it gave this blade a ton more personality. Being a Goblin item also adds lots of personality to items, I get to play around with different scrap parts, materials and textures. All in all, a really fun item to illustrate from beginning to end, I hope you have as much fun using it in your game as we had making it!

As with all legendaries, I have to issue a word of caution. If you give this to your party early, they’re probably going to annihilate for a while. Now that can be a boon or a problem depending on your take. You could even give them a toned down version with just one liquid in it and have them find the others over time. Just a thought. Either way, hopefully Ratty’s little blade can make it to your table.

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