As part of our news series where we share the backstories behind supporter's Divination Card designs, we spoke with Cryptc to learn about their card design for The Sigil.



Growing up, I had a fascination about different worlds, alternate histories and the stories of these places. From my dad reading me science fiction books as a child, later discovering Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying, and seeing how computer gaming evolved over the years to create increasingly complex experiences.

In my teenage years I played a lot of Diablo 1 and 2, which spoke to me on a deep level of both the interesting world it portrayed and the feeling of finding amazing items and developing your own character builds. I was extremely addicted to Diablo 2, to the point that it was affecting my life, but in the end I finally managed to quit the game completely and took an extended break from gaming for a few years where I focused on my personal life, education and career.

Later, once I was well established, I started returning to computer games as a hobby, mostly roleplaying and strategy games. Me and some of my friends started our own gaming server of a modded Neverwinter Nights 2 set in the Planescape campaign setting (one of my favorite D&D settings). It was a while into the life of this server that one of my friends told me about Path of Exile, which was in closed beta at the time. Path of Exile immediately awakened my nostalgia for Diablo 2, and after a few weeks hoping for a free beta key I ended up buying a supporter pack to try the game. I remember how impressed I was that I could actually inspect my character and look at my gear from the website itself, planning my skill tree during lunch breaks at work. I was hooked, and have been playing the game to varying degrees ever since.

When Divination cards were introduced I knew immediately that I wanted to design something meaningful for me to put into the game. I decided I wanted to make the card themed around the Planescape setting I love and that had been very important to me the last few years running the server based around it. I knew very early I wanted the card to be called "The Sigil", which is generic enough to work in any setting but also hints at the city of Sigil from Planescape. I made sure the flavour text also sprinkled in as many references to Planescape as possible. The "rule of threes", "gate", "ward", "faction", and even using the word "unravel" to indirectly reference Ravel from the Planescape Torment classic crpg. I did not directly influence the artwork decision for it, since I didn't want to pressure GGG to import aspects of another setting into their own world, so I was very pleasantly surprised when the art turned out to be very obviously inspired by the Lady of Pain from Planescape, making it far less subtle that the card was inspired by Planescape.

I submitted my card pretty early when divination cards were still a new thing, and their role in the game was still a bit unclear. This was around Tempest/Warbands league, and at the time both crafting and the game's meta were very different from how they are now. It was still a significant part of the game to play through the acts, and reaching maps was something that took some time, particularly in hardcore for someone like me who is at best a moderately skilled gamer. Energy shield builds in particular were very dependant on crafting decent gear while levelling, so I decided that it would be interesting to have some way to get an item to get a decent energy shield boost and have to finish crafting it yourself, so you might need to go through several attempts to make a decent one. I looked at all the different high level mods that could spawn for various items, and saw the top tier mod for amulets being 20-22% Energy Shield, and at ilevel 77 it was at the time something you'd not immediately have access to. My idea was that hopefully the card would be dropping from a late act in the campaign, letting you have some way to grind for an amulet that would push your energy shield high enough to start getting into maps. Unfortunately, the card instead dropped from Overgrown Shrine, making it much less useful than I had hoped. Overgrown Shrine has moved up and down in tiers over the years, but as the game has evolved, my card has become even less relevant. My hope is that one day it will be moved to drop before maps, and find some niche use for SSF players trying to get enough ES for harder content.

Interestingly, a while after my card came out there was one of the more major nerfs of energy shield in Path of Exile's history, and one of the mods that was entirely removed from the game was %ES to rings. I don't know for certain, but I did at the time think that my divination card might have been one reason why that mod was not removed from amulets too, as it would have required my card to be changed too. So in my mind at least the legacy of my card was that it nailed down an affix so that amulets would always be allowed to have it.