Death's Door

Greetings adventurers!

I don’t pretend to understand the trivial separations of living and dead. We all seem to have our place in the world and who am I to judge a lich for seeking eternal life? I do find it a bit uncouth when some meddle with temptation by keeping a foot on either side. Normally something would stop that kind of behavior, but it seems someone ripped a door to the other side straight off its hinges leaving just a wooden shield behind. What an odd choice that I’m certain has had no end of consequence for the region in which it happened. Oh well, you know what they say; when one door closes, another one opens.

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Design notes from Matthew:

I really had a fit of inspiration earlier in the month where I planned out all of the items coming for this month. I felt like I hit a really good stride and had some great ideas. Death’s Door is a phrase I’ve seen used in a number of other TTRPGs to remark upon being close to the brink of death, but I thought it could be so much simpler. It’s just a literal door. With that idea in mind, it was time to figure out what that could even do and a shield was probably the most obvious answer.

For 5E there were some pretty straightforward mechanics to pull from. Giving you some resistance to necrotic and a bonus to intimidation is a relatively straightforward affair and helps shore up the rarity due to the lack of a +1 bonus. The animate dead spell in 5E is very straightforward, so I figured it would be easy to just drop that onto the item and specify the level it’s cast at. This was the simplest way to achieve what I wanted.

For PF2E it’s a bit different. Spellcasting and the ability to cast spells from an item is a bit more limited to wands and staves, so instead I had to get a bit more creative. I wanted to give similar options, but decided to limit it in key ways by making it once per day and limiting which creature could be summoned from it. This allowed me to sidestep the spell issue and mostly focus on developing an interesting mechanic instead. The negative damage resistance and bonus to saves was just to shore up the whole package of the item.

Designing shields is something that I find quite entertaining for some reason. I think the idea of making something that is purely built for defense have some extra properties that make it useful all of the time is just compelling. It’s great to try to figure out a way to make that work and still have the item be engaging instead of just some small bonuses.

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If the skeletons are summoned, don’t come a knockin,

- Fernando & Matthew