Stitch in Time (Patreon)

Greetings adventurers!

Through a series of circumstances that I’m rather unwilling to explain, I ended up at a needlepoint class. Look, it was something to do and I was rather restless on a midweek evening. I got to talking with a kindly elf who spoke happily about her adventuring days that had long since passed. She spoke of odd topics including time and the nature of it. I wasn’t sure what to make of her until I realized everyone else had left already and yet she and I were sitting there chatting. Hours had passed without me realizing. She thanked me for the kind conversation and handed me this hoop before leaving. I wonder who she really was.

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Design notes from Matthew:

This idea actually came from Fernando. It’s not unusual for him to kick a mechanical idea at me and for me to run with it in my own weird way, but I have to say this is one of my favorite instances of him doing so. Playing with initiative is something that often goes overlooked. I think there’s a fear when it comes to messing with some of the preordained rules of combat, but in my opinion a good magic item toys with the unexpected.

Any time you are messing with something as powerful as the action economy is in 5E then you need to make sure that you value it at a proper level. In this case, there was no question that this item should be legendary. You could basically line up all of your friends back to back at a critical time to hopefully end an encounter before it becomes an issue and due to that power, it needed some downsides.

I ended up working in the possibility of it becoming a regular hoop as I wanted the “frogging” ability to be something that you use only in dire circumstances while the rest can be used more regularly. A small design note, frogging is one of my favorite needlepoint terms because it comes from the idea of ripping out the stitches. You know, you “rip it rip it”

Illustration notes from Fernando:

I recently joined some friends in their Pathfinder one-shot and I was having awful initiative rolls, I’m not sure if this is Pathfinder or a home rule since I’m new to the game, but as a Champion I’m unable to use certain reactions until I’ve had at least one turn which made it feel kind of bad when one of my party members got hit in the first round and I couldn’t do anything about it because I hadn’t gotten to go yet.

That’s what spawned the idea for an item that would let me move around the initiative order.

For the illustration, I remember Matthew being concerned about how to illustrate this one, but we figured it out rather quickly.  I figured turning the thread into glyphs/runes would give it a mystical vibe to the whole thing, and the Universe being inside the loop gives it a really cool sense of looking into a window into another dimension/time.

In my opinion, there should be no sacred mechanic you can’t touch when it comes to designing magic items. You just need to find the proper balance points in order to do so and here it needed rarity and risk to go along with it. If you’re designing your own items, consider the things you don’t see others touch and make things for that! That’s where the fun is.

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Waste knot want not,

- Fernando & Matthew