abyssalbrews

Loyal Tea

Added 2022-09-08 16:00:08 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

It’s rare that you meet someone so pleasant that you question if they’re real. A kindly old man strolled into our shop asking if we’d like some tea. We thought he was just confused at the moment, but sure enough he pulled out a lovely little tea set and set to work brewing the most amazing cup of tea we’ve had in a long time. We thanked him for his kindness, but upon leaving he insisted we keep the set. An odd encounter to say the least, but we’re not one to turn down a delicious offering.

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Design notes from Matthew:

I think that mechanical benefits in game are great, but having an opportunity to provide additional roleplay with an item is rare. When we can do that effectively, and really encourage people to use time to just sit and talk between players, I think that you can gain a lot of great moments at the table. One of the problems is that roleplay doesn’t provide mechanical benefits, so some will just outright ignore that.

Fernando came up with the name for this one. It was an off the cuff pun about the word loyalty and drinking some tea. That was basically enough to get me started down a path of wanting to make something that benefitted the party while also providing some interesting roleplay opportunities. I thought that I could figure out a way to get players to slow down once a day and just talk to one another. If I could do that, then I would feel like I had succeeded.

The mechanics of the help action are something that I think is highly beneficial. Many players are loath to give up their action to do so, but it’s a really great mechanical feature. Moving that option to a bonus action is a really easy way to make that feel less punishing. It was pretty straightforward as there is a subclass that does something similar. That said, this provides a small pool for anyone to use it at a much lower frequency. All it costs is a little discussion time.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I love when I’m talking to Matthew and being a complete goofball (most of the time), making dumb puns, and one of them hit his creative artery. Illustrating an abstract concept like “Loyalty” however is always a big challenge.

If you Google the word and hit images you’ll get lots of logos for things like loyalty programs, also lots of hearts which, without the context could be misconstrued as “love” instead. Some of the images however depict handshakes which is closer to what we’re aiming for here (bonding, friendship, etc.), I could have just done a handshake on each cup but that’s been done before, a toast is kind of a handshake with drinks in hand and in turn it resembles a modern fist pump.

That’s when the idea of making two cups toasting double as a fist bump hit me, Matthew loved it as much as I did. It’s just the type of silly our brand is while also perfectly illustrating the concept of the item itself.

Matthew always had the idea of illustrating some kind of satchel that holds this tea so I decided to do the whole set, that also meant I had to do tons of searches for interesting looking tea pots as I didn’t want to just do a regular traditional one, and eventually I did a blend of several ones I saw into one fantasy looking one.

I’m also going to start going back to a more colorful approach to our items, I think I’ve been leaning more and more into realism which normally tends to be more desaturated but our items are meant to be colorful, fun, and high fantasy. I just finished Lois Van Baarle’s newest book, and that combined with this month’s ImagineFX interview with Dave Grecco, and getting back into World of Warcraft is making me revert back to the more colorful, playful aesthetic we had when we first started AB last year.

I hope you enjoy some off the norm items like this one. They’re always a blast to develop as I enjoy spending time thinking about interesting ways to interact with mechanics without it being straight combat power. This can certainly be a combat item, but the actual action promotes character involvement in the world and that feels great to me.

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