Temper
Greetings adventurers!
The art of moving metal into the forms that people are so reliant on for offense and protection is a complicated piece of performance. Balancing the heat so that you don’t burn the metal while not letting it get cold enough that you beat cracks into it is something that takes smiths years to perfectly balance. Then there’s the most important part of all of it, right at the end. The make or break, literally, for any piece of steel is the tempering. Getting the heat treatment precisely right, bringing the metal just to the cusp and then quenching it for the right amount of time trying to avoid bends and warps that could stress the blade. It’s a marvelous thing to watch, but what if we took that a step further.
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Design notes from Matthew:
Fire and ice are a common component in magic items and certainly bringing them together is nothing new to the fantasy TTRPG space, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t feel we had something to contribute to that discussion as well. There’s a whole world of mechanics to explore when it comes to heat and cool cycles. One of the most obvious is the tempering of steel and the artistry required to get that right, such that a weapon will perform up to par for those that end up wielding it. Fernando brought up the thought of a dual sided blade with fire and ice and I knew where we had to go from there.
I had this idea in my head of a weapon for awhile that reacted to your attack roll in some meaningful way. To take something that was otherwise not used as part of the actual mechanics of the weapon, outside of the hit, and use that to determine something else. This was the path I started walking down when I was writing this item before coming to the realization that dual sided blades like that, aren’t actually a thing in 5E or PF2E. I had to find the next closest thing and just build what I could there.
I had originally considered a builder spender system for this in both of our systems, but the reality is that PF2E is balanced a little tighter making something like frequent payoffs a little more outside of what I would consider appropriate for the math of the system. In that way I had to pull back on that mechanic and give it something else for a split purpose, thus the property rune idea. The 5E version was executed in the original builder spender idea I had. As always, it’s best to treat them as separate design exercises for one piece of art.
We’re cruising through the month of April and I hope you’ve enjoyed what we’ve brought along so far. We’re extremely excited to bring you the creature later on this month as it’s bound to be an epic one that you don’t want to miss!
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Kraken's Kollaborators ($10 Tier)
Temper your feelings,
- Fernando & Matthew