abyssalbrews

One More Thing: Death Bell

Added 2024-08-29 13:50:14 +0000 UTC

Greetings Adventurers,

It's the end of August and as with every month, we make sure to tack on just one more thing for you. This week we're bringing you the particularly terrifying Death Bell. A creature for you to use to turn dark days into even darker ones for your players. We hope you've enjoyed another month of content as we've loved making it!

As with all of these One More Thing releases, it's exclusive to patrons. If you're not a patron and want this release, please consider supporting us here. For patrons, you'll have to grab the files from your master post (linked below) to see the stats. We hope you enjoy it.

Design notes from Matthew:
Creating a creature is often about making an encounter in your head. I think it's easy to come up with the initial idea or what you're looking for, but considering all of the little mechanics that will make that into an interesting fight is where that gets a little harder. There's a lot of potential levers to pull and when designing these creatures, I like to think about individual moments that could make the fight memorable.
On the 5E side, something to remember is that you have more tools at your disposal than the base materials like to give you. In this creature, I made use of retaliatory actions, offensive actions, conditional actions, reactions, and defensive actions leading to a well rounded creature that has a lot to offer to an encounter. Don't feel too stuck to the standard 2 slashes and a bit that a lot of 5E materials have. It's okay to get a bit creative.
On the PF2E side, this one was a bit of a nightmare to put together as I wanted to make sure it couldn't just grab and grapple without some limiting factors. I turned to some of the oozes in base materials but none of them really had the defensive abilities I wanted, so I ended up having to wing it a bit here and there. My recommendation when creating for PF2E is that you need to know when there's something relevant for you and use that if needed. You also need to know when there's nothing out there like what you want and you should just go your own way then verify. Knowing the difference is difficult, but necessary.

As we put another month of creations to bed, I have been looking back on our library and it's crazy to see how much it has grown since we first started 3 years ago. We'll keep adding to it, but it's nice to take a moment to stop and appreciate it all. Another cool thing is that we never lock the library so you still have access to all of it!

If you're not a patron and would like access to these exclusive releases, click this link and check out our tiers. Every patron gets full access to these "One More Thing" releases each month.

To get all of your rewards click the appropriate tier below to go right to your master post where you can download them all.