Grips of Force (Patreon)

Greetings everyone! 

We're so excited to bring you our first item of our Patreon launch. The Grips of Force are made to give you the upper hand whether trying to move a stubborn cart or punch a foe off of a cliff. 

Our patrons get early access to all of these items as well as additional formats that are easily usable in both physical and online play. Additionally they get high-res art exports, easy to use text exports, behind the scenes updates, and a lot more. 

If that strikes your fancy, consider becoming a Patron 

Design notes from Matthew:

I have a real love for unarmed strikes in 5E.  I currently have a monk in one of my home campaigns and I love the visuals that a high dexterity character like that can bring. I’ve been wanting to cook up something that would make for interesting unarmed strikes and these gloves finally brought that to life.

The initial idea for these was to obviously have them revamped punches to make them feel a bit more usable, but I wanted to include some adventure flavor as well. Giving advantage on strength checks was a simple way to accomplish that and let the gloves feel like there was flavored utility outside of combat.

Inside of combat, the initial idea for these involved a crit sending the enemy fling backwards and striking things. A problem I had with that is that crits are just rare enough to make it feel underwhelming and I’m a much bigger fan of active mechanics in 5E combat. I refocused the pressure mechanic to be charge based and let it build with hit. This gave a much more cinematic feel that we wanted. The ability to punch an enemy off a long fall or lock one down against a wall with successive punches gives a much more usable way of interacting with the properties of the item.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

When Matt first came up with the concept for this item the first thing that came to mind was Vander’s gloves from the show “Arcane” on Netflix, I have been so influenced by this show lately that I had to make a conscious effort to steer away from those iconic visuals.  I wanted the gloves to feel oversized in order to convey that they really pack a ton of force, and getting hit by them feels much stronger than being hit by a regular punch; so I turned to other sources of inspirations like Gully from Battle Chasers, mostly for proportion ideas, and finally I made several different concepts all with a more Steampunk look.

There will be a video walkthrough for these so please keep an eye on our Patreon, YouTube Channel, and Twitter for a chance to look at all the different concepts we did before choosing this one.  I believe they were close to 20 different ones in total.

Rewards for Patrons

Kraken's Kohorts ($3 tier) 

Kraken's Kompanions ($6 tier) 

Kraken's Kollaborators ($10 Tier) 

Thanks so much and we'll see you soon with our latest item! 

- Fernando & Matthew