[Shadow] Armor - Blackmaw

Only the most brave or foolhardy would dare to wear the decapitated head of a sombragon, a fiend of living darkness, as armor. Cold shadows endlessly flood out of the dark maw, slipping along the ground surface like the arms of an eldritch horror.

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Blackmaw
Armor (hide), very rare (requires attunement)

You have a +2 bonus to AC while you wear this armor. While you wear this armor, its flowing shadows transforms nonmagical bright light in your space into dim light, and you gain darkvision out to 60 feet if you don’t already have it. 

This armor has 5 charges for the following properties, and regains 1d4+1 expended charges daily at dusk.

• Armor of Shadows. Whenever you take radiant damage, you can use your reaction to expend 1 charge to gain immunity to that instance of damage.
• Belching Gloom. As an action, you can expend 1 charge to cast darkness. If you target your armor with this spell, you can expend additional charges to modify it in one or both of the following ways: you expend 1 additional charge to allow yourself to see through the spell's magical darkness; you expend any number of additional charges to empower the spell — for each extra charge expended, the spell's level increases by 1 and the sphere's radius increases by 10 feet.
• Consuming Void. While you are in an area of darkness, you can use an action to expend 1 charge and turn that darkness feral. Each creature within 15 feet of you that is also in darkness must make a DC 17 Charisma saving throw, taking 3d8 necrotic damage on a failed save or half as much on a successful one. For each 1 you roll on the necrotic damage dice, you gain 5 temporary hit points that disappear after 1 minute.

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Rare Variant. The rare version of this armor grants a +1 bonus to AC instead of a +2. It has 3 charges instead of 5, and regains 1d3 expended charges daily instead. The DC of its Consuming Void option also decreases to 15.

Legendary Variant. The legendary version of this armor grants a +3 bonus to AC instead of a +2. It has 7 charges instead of 5, and regains 1d4+3 expended charges daily instead. The DC and damage of its Consuming Void option also increases to 18 and 4d8, respectively.

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DESIGN COMMENTARY

Fun fact: this was initially named Shadowmaw, but I realized there were way too many items with the word "SHADOW" in it.

It would be easy to create a cloak of shadows, so I challenged for a different type of defensive shadow item. The result was a piece of armor themed with the visual of an open mouth and swallowed darkness.

Because this is Hide armor, the worst type of Medium armor, the +2 is really just a +1 Chain Shirt, or a mundane Breastplate. Hide is complicated to balance because it's a -2 compared to a breastplate, so one would be tempted to give it a +2 to balance it out. On the other hand, Hide is the only non-metal Medium armor druids can wear (assuming you play strictly by rules), so it'd be a straight upgrade for them. In the end, I consider the +2 AC equal to a +1 for purposes of balancing.

The dim light helps with Stealth, but only when in bright light against creatures that don't have darkvision (which is somewhat uncommon). Darkvision, on its own, becomes less valuable at this tier of play as players gain access to more ways to mitigate darkness.

The options themselves are each worth about a 2nd-level spell per charge (Armor of Shadows is like a hyper Absorb Elements, but radiant damage is fairly rare and big radiant damage shouldn't happen often; Belching Gloom is self-explanatory; Consuming Void deals about as much damage and range as Shatter, except it deals no damage on a failure). Consuming Void does potentially grant temp HP, but a 3/8 chance to grant a measly 5 or 10 wouldn't affect much (it's more designed for the "consumption" flavor). Casting five 2nd-level spells is appropriate for Very Rare (staves allow for twice as much magic potential, and this armor already has other useful properties).

The legendary version gets a bump to Consuming Void because damage at that tier of play is so trivial it needs a side boost.

Pretty happy with how this one turned out. Visually, I took a second crack at creating an armor with fangs for this one. My last attempt for this was Winter's Hearth, which didn't look that great, so I'm glad I could sort of "redeem" myself. The best decision I made was shifting the maw to the side, which created a much more interesting silhouette than a centered mouth would. The "hide" in the armor is darkness now in the shape of furs, which looked great. To differentiate that in color, I made sure the leathers were desaturated red/yellow, and added red cloth to give it more directionality and dynamism.  Topping that off, the bright metal plates creates visually readable designs.