[Radiance] Item - Armguards of Inner Flame

The metal braces of these guards wrap around the arm like an organic weave, bolstering the body with the inextinguishable flame of the Emberheart. The flamebearers of the Ellumara's Great Furnace wear protective gear like these to safely handle fire and worship the flame. 

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Armguards of Inner Flame
Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement)

While you wear them, these armguards grant you a +1 bonus to your AC. When you use these armguards to make unarmed strikes, you can choose to deal fire damage instead of your normal damage. 

Illumination. While you wear these armguards, they shed bright light in a 10-foot radius and dim light for an additional 10 feet. You can use an action to suppress this light until you use another action to restore it. While the armguards' light is suppressed, its Burning Spirit and Rise from Ash properties are also suppressed. 

Burning Spirit. When you would gain a level of exhaustion, roll a d6. On a roll of 4 or higher, you don't gain it. 

Rise From Ash. The light of these armguards protect you while you wear them. When you would you be reduced to 0 hit points, you can use your reaction to instead set your current hit points to 5 times your proficiency bonus. When you take this reaction, fire also sweeps out from you, dealing 2d8 fire damage to each creature of your choice within 10 feet of you. The bracers can't grant this benefit again until the next dawn. 

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Rare Variant. The rare version of this item does not grant a bonus to your AC. 

Legendary Variant. The legendary version of this item grants a +2 bonus to your AC instead of a +1, and its Rise From Ash property deals 4d8 fire damage instead of 2d8.

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DESIGN COMMENTARY

The Emberheart lumenguild is a guild centered around buffing yourself and your allies, to persist with the spirit of the flame despite the odds (whereas the Dawnstar guild are proactive debuffers/abjurers of enemies). There's a ton of options for fire-based items, so I really searched for something different and visually exciting - an almost fluid look not often associated with fire and inner strength.

This item has a lot of minor properties, either situational or redundant, but important to the theme. I wanted to simplify my items but these seemed too important to cut.

• Replacing regular damage with fire will rarely be important (only monks really make use of unarmed strikes; vulnerabilities are rare in 5e so the benefit for switching types rarely come into play; unarmed damage should be magical by this level of play anyway)
• Natural illumination is not fully necessary since any character can light a torch, cast a light cantrip, or have darkvision.
• The avoidance of exhaustion is extremely situational (one of the rarest enemy-inflicted conditions). There's some interesting uses for the latter feature, however — many exhaustion effects can be self-inflicted (e.g. the optional exhaustion rules for not resting/sleeping), so that's one way to thematically "push ahead" without rest.

The basic AC increase is in the style of the Rare Bracers of Defense.

The other main feature is a phoenix-adjacent fiery resurrection, also tying into the idea of persisting fire. The power level varies, but on average allows you to either continue maintaining spells or effects (by avoiding falling unconscious), or take one massive hit. It's hard to compare this to an existing item, so I sorta eyeballed it. Very Rare seems an acceptable place to put this.

This one took double the time I normally spend on art! Visually, I wanted something that had an almost fluid look not often associated with fire and inner strength, while looking striking when viewed in silhouette. The Emberheart lumenguild visual design is a lot of metal striping, sort of like a cage protecting the "heart." This is carried into the cage-like metal strips which also follow the muscle lines to produce the visual of metallic muscles. I lineworked the front bits of metal, but wisely left the back bits of metal as a single overpainted piece. The back is also tuned to a low opacity so that it reads as faded against any solid background (which is great, but not good for nonsolid backgrounds lol) A bit of heated metal color helps sell the temperature. Probably wouldn't do this again without good reason!