abyssalbrews

Death Knell

Added 2024-08-29 13:49:49 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

I’m always particularly cautious when it comes to messing with the dead. There’s just some things that are better left alone and I think people that have passed are one of them. That said, I can never deny their usefulness in some areas. A friend of mine returned from a war torn region bringing with them something odd. A staff that seemed tied to the very spirits around it. At first, I had outright refused to take it, but once they told me the tale of how it came to be, well I needed to have that in my shop and I also needed to do some research on these Death Bells.

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Design notes from Matthew:
As I mentioned earlier this month, staves are very different animals in 5E and PF2E and trying to design them similar to one another is a recipe for destruction. You basically have to approach them as two separate design exercises as staves have very particular use rules when it comes to PF2E. 5E is a lot more loose when it comes to what staves can do, so every time we make one I just buckle in for two separate design exercises.
On the 5E side I wanted to make something that allowed you to summon the dead to your aid at the ring of a bell. The problem with that is that most of the 5E spells that summon or raise undead do so by targeting bones or corpses and thus make it a lot harder to be used on the regular. My solution here was to just ignore the spells and essentially write a spell on my own allowing you to summon 4 Shadows to the fight. When dealing with more than 1 summon, it’s important to keep the CR of each low as action economy and flat math allows this to get out of hand quickly.
For the PF2E version. I wanted to make sure I didn’t step on the Staff of the Dead and made sure this had a different flavor. First of all it provides some knowledge about the undead with undead lore, but further than that, I wanted the spell list to feel a bit more informative/protective in addition to just summoning the dead. It brought this staff into more of a utility + minion roll instead of straight damage and I’m for that.

This is our last item of August, can you believe it? It’s wild how quick this month has flown by for me and with that comes the start of the fall semester. I work at a university so it’s a particularly busy time for me. That doesn’t mean content will be slowing down of course, just another thing to juggle as we move forward!

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