[Radiance] Weapon - Emberhome

A flame of Ellumara's Great Furnace flickers within the firewell of the hammer. Though small, its light and embers possess the same inspirational and persevering quality of its venerated source.

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Emberhome
Weapon (light hammer), rare (requires attunement)

You deal an extra 1d4 fire damage to targets you hit with this weapon.

Brilliant Flame. This weapon sheds bright light in a 20-foot radius and dim light for an additional 20 feet. You and allies have advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks made to examine targets inside the bright light. You can use an action to suppress this light until you use another action to restore it.

Emberlight Blessing. While you wield this weapon, you can use a bonus action to release the embers within. The embers fill a 30-foot radius sphere centered on the weapon that lasts for 1 minute. This sphere does not move, spreads around corners, is filled with bright light, and grants the following benefits:

• At the start of each of their turns, creatures of your choice gain temporary hit points equal to their proficiency bonus. These temporary hit points last until the sphere ends.
• Creatures of your choice in the sphere can re-roll one damage die each time they make a successful attack. They must use the new roll.
• When you make a thrown attack with this weapon while you are in the sphere, the weapon immediately flies back into your hand after you hit or miss with it.

Once used, this property of the weapon can't be used again until the next dawn.

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Uncommon Variant. The uncommon version of this weapon lacks the Emberlight Blessing property.

Very Rare Variant. The very rare version of this weapon grants a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with it.

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DESIGN COMMENTARY

The weapon is rather basic in its overall design: bonus damage in line with its theming (that also encourages continued attunement and use), and a single-use ability.

The Emberlight Blessing ability is a simple buff for you and your team:

• Granting temp HP
  (about 3-4 HP per 3-4 characters at this level for an average battle about 3-4 turns long, for an average total of 42 temporary HP)
• Possible bonus damage
  Re-rolling produces an average bonus damage of 1.5 at this level (tested using d12 and 2d6) Assuming 3-4 average characters in an average battle about 3-4 turns long with 2 attacks per round from Extra Attack, that's an average of 37 bonus damage per use.)
• Returning items when thrown are generally situational, so they don't factor into this calculation.

These bonuses places it comfortably in the Rare range - the bonus damage and the Emberlight Blessing accounting for about half its power.

Visually, I maintained the design language of the Emberlight guild. It was fairly easy to put together (fire in a cage). I'm not sure I really sold the weight of the hammer that well. With hindsight I would probably thicken up the cage a bit more to give it heft, and reduced the flanges to make its bludgeoning damage more approrpiate. The back of the hammer was intended to be shaped like an anvil, but I rendered it as a flat piece of metal because of how the cage logistics didn't really make sense. I should have thought about it more before I moved onto rendering. Ah well.