abyssalbrews

Miragic Cube

Added 2022-09-15 16:00:09 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

Every once in awhile, we can’t help but visit a faire and the house of mirrors has always intrigued us so. Something about the idea of there being dozens of yourself all around, maybe all existing in different realities equally as real as ours. A novel concept and maybe a bit far fetched, but we’ve had more than our fair share of odd adventures collecting and crafting items before. So, we set to work on the idea of turning a mirror image into a reality. What we came up with is this little odd cube for you.

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Design notes from Matthew:

For this item, I was heavily inspired by the concept of mesmers in Guild Wars 2. It’s a game that I quite enjoy still to this day and the idea of a caster that can pull forth copies of themselves in order to disorient and confuse opponents is just such a cool concept to me. I love the nature of this class so much, that I really wanted to bring that concept into a magic item.

The tricky part of creating something like this is balancing it around what feels usable and fun while not letting it get ridiculously OP. It was an early choice for me that these things would not be able to attack or do damage in any way. This had to be a purely defensive item or the action economy would go crazy in a moment from it. So once I knew that they couldn’t attack, then it became about making something that felt cool to use as a defensive item.

Turning invisible is a great way to disengage for the round and get yourself out of danger. You summon in your flections in spaces of your choosing and then you move to the place you want. The nice part about this is that you get complete control over the placement and then your own placement if you use it before moving. This lets you really set up a confusing problem for enemies, especially if you keep jumping places in subsequent rounds.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I love the idea of mirror images of a characters as a mechanic, I think Matthew always meant for this to be a mirror, but one idea I had from the get-go was to turn it into an infinity mirror illusion. One of my brothers has an infinity mirror art sculpture on his wall and I could stare at it for hours!

Much like the mechanics behind this item, an infinity mirror illusion is so well done, so realistic looking that even when you know it’s just an illusion your brain has a hard time not falling for it.

Illustrating this required a bit of technical drawing but it’s relatively easy to do that in Procreate thanks to the excellent perspective drawing tools it comes with. Making the humanoid silhouette repeat and overlap in a way where each layer was distinctly behind one and in front of the other without blending into each other was tricky, but the hardest part was the chain!

In the original concept I had the chain kind of wrapped around itself but it looked messy and confusing, I then tried having it disappear into the top edge of the image but that became a problem with the layout (which honestly I knew it would be and I shouldn’t have done it) but in the end I’m very happy with the foreshortening solution we ended up with, it gives the image a lot more depth.

This one is a bit of an odd concept, but I just love the idea of creating copies of yourself for defensive purposes. I could also see someone using the invisibility to get some advantageous hits off before the end of their turn and that’s by design. Get someone with misty step and blink and well, they’d be very hard to hit.

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