abyssalbrews

One More Thing: Cobalt Crawler

Added 2025-02-27 18:00:11 +0000 UTC

Greetings Adventurers,

It's so nice getting back into my routines after the holiday season has left us behind. Don't get me wrong, I love getting together with family and friends. There's just something comfortable though about getting back in my creative routines and hopefully getting some more time to just write the things I've been wanting to write. As always, we try to give you one more thing to enjoy for the month and this month, it's our Cobalt Crawler.

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) or from the Katalogue to see the stats. We hope you enjoy it.

Design notes from Matthew:
Weird wastelands is one of those genres that I wish got some more attention. Some folks have done near future adaptations and so on, but I mean just really leaning into the odd fantasy and magical applications that can derive from a world filled with odd magics that can bubble up from time to time in unexpected places. For example, with this creature, I asked myself "what would happen if magically charged lightning formed crystals in the desert?" and built from there.
I think it's an important thing as a creative to come up with odd questions at times. Letting your mind wander the silly little pathways and not stopping yourself because you haven't seen someone else do that thing before is really a great way to exercise your creative muscles. There's also something freeing in not knowing what's out there already. Could there be another crystalline scorpion creature someone has written? Probably. Did I want to look it up and stunt my creative exercise? Absolutely not.
The mechanics of this came together rather simply as I knew I wanted some pincers, a sweep with the tail, a sting that can do some nasty stuff, and I wanted it to be a burrowing, stealthy creature. These are all ideas that evolved from that one question I asked myself earlier. From that point on, once your idea is so well established, it's just about filling in the numbers and mechanics, which is something you get better at with time.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read these and continuing to support us here on Patreon if you do. It's really the only thing that keeps us able to keep working on things for your games. I hope you had a great month.

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.