abyssalbrews

One More Thing: Anuran Shaman

Added 2025-05-29 17:00:05 +0000 UTC

Greetings Adventurers,

We often share these extra releases with the Tom Cartos community as a fun little bonus piece of content, but this time I was actually inspired by one of the maps that Tom released to his patrons. He made a lagoon palace that just screamed frog at me. I don't know why, but I became obsessed with the idea of these frog peoples who might worship in a place like that and I knew we had to make them.

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:
I love having a strong idea when I start into a creature and this one definitely had a strong core to it when I began. The idea of an amphibian shaman with control of the various elements just has so many options associated with it that I had to basically pick and choose what i wanted to include and what I needed to exclude. I knew I wanted it to be a caster so that was immediately in, but there were other things that I had to make harder decisions on.
A good example of those decisions was the inclusion of the leaping slam for the creature. I knew I wanted to give them some sort of gap closer and I had thought of giving them a reactive way to get out of danger as well. I ended up having to exclude the reactive way to get out of danger as they already had an interesting reaction to use most turns in changing their aura, so instead I gave them a combination of a way to move out of danger and possibly deliver damage with the leaping slam.
One of the more important things to remember when you're writing creatures is that you should always stick to the theming of what you want to write. Don't allow yourself to deviate too far and don't allow yourself to step outside of the core of the creature too much. You're trying to make interesting encounters, not a jack of all trades. The less focused a creature is, the worse it often plays. That's why it's always great to have that strong idea like what I mentioned at the start.

It's been another wonderful month of creations and I'm so glad we were able to bring you all so many fun items and options this month. We put in a lot of work on lower level items this month and that's been a blast... Though I will admit, I'm itching it make a legendary soon so stay tuned!

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.