abyssalbrews

Earthember + Chaos & Capybaras (Collab with Night Owl Odysseys)

Added 2022-06-02 16:00:08 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

We have a real treat for you all today. We’ve been lucky enough to work with a ton of fantastic creators since we began AbyssalBrews and this is absolutely no exception. Night Owl Odysseys creates some fantastic adventures that work as both one shots, or parts of a longer campaign and I absolutely LOVE their creations. This week, we were lucky enough to team up with them to create an artifact worth centering an adventure around. Even more exciting, you get access to both! Here's a bit more about the lovely Night Owl Odysseys crew:

We are Night Owl Odysseys - a collective of inclusive creators publishing 5e one-shot adventures. Each release comes with custom, hand-drawn battlemaps, fully illustrated magic items, monsters with custom tokens, and a musical track with a looping variant- all you need to run your game right out of the box!

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thenightowls

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nightowlodyssey

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nightowlodysseys/

Roll20 Marketplace: https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/publisher/1839/night-owl-odysseys

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. Additionally they get high-res art exports, easy to use text exports, behind the scenes updates, and a lot more.

If that strikes your fancy, consider becoming a Patron

Design notes from Matthew:

This is the first time I’ve ever made an artifact level item. I know that’s wild to say, but up until this point, I’ve never really had a reason to create one. So when we were talking to NOO about a collab and the idea of creating something of this power level came up, I was absolutely excited. Then we started talking about the theme and I got even more excited.

You see, I’m a huge fan of capybaras. They’re my favorite animal. I love that they chill in hot springs. I love that they’re basically giant goofy rodents. I love everything about them. This concept of an item that imbued the waters around them with magical powers that the capybara and frog knights would hang out in, ugh that was just absolutely perfect for me. I was sold instantly.

The actual abilities were fairly straightforward. I knew I wanted to give it options for team play, melee, range, and AoE. An artifact item, in my opinion, should be something that is truly special and offers a multitude of options to the party that is lucky enough to travel with it. This concept of geothermal lakes and the fact that they’re powered by magma deep underground gave the perfect theming for this weapon.

Really after the theme was set, it was just a matter of putting together the right abilities. Honestly I think the use of heat metal here was one of my favorite additions.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I didn’t really approach the illustration for this item from the point of view of it being an artifact, I think that would have put too much pressure on myself, I just followed the brief we agreed upon for the mechanics and treated it like any other item.

It came out pretty epic looking though, we went through a few iterations for the molten heart motif was always present. I had to play around a little bit with the sparks and especially the smoke effect because I didn’t want to overdo it and obscure the item too much but other than that I feel the look matches the artifact nature of it.

It was also really cool to collaborate with two other artists for this one, and to see their own takes on this item!

I am so excited for this adventure. It brings together a lot of things I love like capybaras and giant, powerful magic items. I hope you’ll take the time to check out what Night Owl Odyssey has on offer as well because their creations are some of my favorites out there. It also helps that everyone on their team is pretty awesome.

We highly encourage you to join our Discord server where you’ll get access to exclusive channels that have sneak peeks, behind the scenes chatter, and more.