Soulfetter (Patreon)

Greetings adventurers!

We’ve been known to run in some less than savory circles from time to time. What? Don’t look so judgemental. Sometimes the “bad” folks have the coolest stuff! Either way, we had been told by a certain necromancer that they knew of a method to bind souls together, intrinsically linking their fate to those of others. Well, that’s a particularly powerful ability so we asked them to show us. After taking a bit of time to master it, we asked about the possibility of applying it to projectiles and well, here we are.

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:

This is one of those straight forward combat abilities that I have wanted to figure out a way to write for some time. I love the idea of teamwork and things that allow you to set up possibilities for your allies. Here the concept is that you’re trading your ability to do some amount of damage on your turn for the ability of your teammates to do far more on their turns. It even turns something like a fighter into something with AoE, which I found interesting.

The balance around designing something like this is that ultimately, you’ll end up having a lot to say when you’re trying to lay it out. It’s deceptively difficult to balance an item that turns a single target attack into a multitarget attack and you start running into a lot of weird scenarios that you need to account for. The two primary issues are stacking damage via AoEs and then just how broken it could be if someone gets a perfect shot off.

I sought to mitigate the last points by a combination of halving the damage that would be applied and also not allowing AoEs to stack on top of one another. Really that is the only way to be able to bring something like this in line. That said, it’s still really powerful if your teammates link up to really toss damage at one target.

Illustration notes from Fernando:

The initial illustration idea for this were actual bolts but it wasn’t very interesting or very dynamic so Matthew switched it to a quiver while keeping some of the properties we had initially talked about for the bolts.

The ethereal fletches and chains were part of the original design and idea so naturally I kept those; that left just the need to make a quiver that was cool looking.  Since these are bolts and not arrows I wanted it to be stubby.

I made the belts also shorter so it looked like something you could tied to your leg and not just your back; lastly I added a ring at the bottom with some hanging strings in order to balance the whole image a bit since it was looking too top heavy.

We love creating things that bring more than just damage to the field. We want items that create interesting scenarios and reward good positioning. We want to make sure we’re offering variety along with utility in everything that we make and I think this did a good job of getting there.

We highly encourage you to join our Discord server where you’ll get access to exclusive channels that have sneak peeks, behind the scenes chatter, and more.

Rewards for Patrons!

Kraken's Kohorts ($3 tier)

Kraken's Kompanions ($6 tier)

Kraken's Kollaborators ($10 Tier)

Let your soul glow,

- Fernando & Matthew