Hurty Gurdy
Greetings adventurers!
The only question I have to ask whoever created this devious device is “who hurt you?”. Regardless, it has come into my possession and therefor I am the caretaker of it until it can find another home with some masochistic musician or perhaps a collector of true oddities. I haven’t learned the hurdy gurdy and I certainly won’t be trying on this one. Now, if you have the constitution for it, pick it up and grind out a song for us. Just know that you’ll be mopping up the blood should it come to that. Oh and you’re buying it if there’s any new stains.
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Design notes from Matthew:
Two different systems sometimes means you end up creating two very different items and that’s kind of the pinnacle of what I’m talking about when I say that I treat each system as an individual writing exercise. Lore and visual descriptions can certainly be shared across both iterations, but the actual mechanics sometimes end up quite different. This was one such case where a one size fits all method would not work out whatsoever.
On the 5e version of the item, I wanted to give it a bit of a push your luck mechanic, but nothing that would push things too far. This meant weaving in a bit of a gambling element with a D6 and even/odd results having a bit of a different effect. This can make the item either extremely beneficial or somewhat detrimental. I would say this is a good idea for someone that is trying to wring every bit of bonus out of a roll that they really want to make for some reason or another. The damage mitigation, well that was a straightforward writing exercise as I just calculated average hit damage for a 10th level martial combatant and gave it that much damage transfer.
For the PF2E version, there’s much less in the way of random distribution from an item than there might be in PF2E. The reason for that is that modifiers typically mean you’re good at the things you’re good at and therefor failing a flat roll on a gamble makes less sense on an item. Instead, I chose to give this item one more broad performance bonus coupled with a more direct one skill bonus to fill in the gap. Couple it with a high level spell cast that already exists and it all fell into place.
A very happy new year to all of you folks that have chosen to continue to support us. It’s been wonderful having you all and I hope you’ve had a great end to your 2025 and a wonderful start to your 2026. We’re going to keep on creating and we hope you continue to love what we have on offer.
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Kraken's Kollaborators ($10 Tier)
Grab some bandages,
- Fernando & Matthew