5E DEV TALK 23.07 – WALKING THE PATH (Patreon)

Dear Bestiarum RPG fanatics,

Welcome to our first 5e Dev Talk, an initiative we’re kicking off to keep you all in the loop about the continued development of our 5e offering and enhance your experiences in the world of Doaden. We hope to make these a regular (monthly) occurrence to address your queries, provide insights into our development process, share our vision for Bestiaurm’s RPG setting, and hear your ideas and feedback along the way!

There's a lot of ground we want to cover in this first Dev Talk, so grab a drink, get comfy, and read on!

Firstly, we'd like to say WOW and thank you for all the excitement, comments, and support we’ve received during our recent Path or Penitence launch! We’re grateful to have such a passionate and dedicated following to share this journey with.

Monthly Modules

As many of you have already seen with the Burial Isle rework and as will be clearer when we roll out our first set of revamped 5e adventures this July, there are some major changes to what you can expect from our monthly modules.

The transition from releasing a single adventure per month to three adventures marks a significant shift in our vision for Bestiarum’s RPG offering. Our goal is to offer more story possibilities and world development opportunities while maintaining our beloved dark atmosphere.

To achieve this, we will be dedicating two out of the three 5e adventures to the month’s miniature theme(s), while the third adventure will be a wildcard, used to build an even more in-depth story with one of the current factions, or perhaps revisit a classic release, or explore something entirely new!

Module Format

You will find that the new adventure design optimizes GM utility and ease of use, prioritizing substance over style. The new, print-friendly formats are meant to enhance readability and provide more conveniently formatted utility, meaning you’ll spend less time referencing PDFs and more time focused on the gameplay in front of you.

In terms of content design, each adventure is intended as an easy-to-run one-shot module, that uses up the party’s resources for one full ‘adventuring day’ – essentially pushing them to their limits before they must take a long rest. Using the Path of Penitence campaign system, you can string together modules to build a long and compelling character-driven story arc for your party, choosing from the adventures that you enjoy the most!

You’ll start to notice many added benefits as well, but we’ll highlight just a few that show our primary design intent.

Dynamic Boss Fights: You’ll see regular dynamic and engaging boss fights that challenge parties’ combat prowess to their limits. Especially Tier III adventures will feature bosses with their own lairs and phases, with abilities that constantly shape and reshape the combat area, creating tense, interesting, and memorable combat encounters. The upcoming Prisoner X, and Void Rift: Hellspawn Modules will feature this heavily!

Location Identity: A second push we are making is to build stronger adventure location identities. We want your players to feel the world of Doaden, not just the enemies that inhabit it! You’ll see more traps, environmental obstacles, puzzles, and resident characters in upcoming adventures, to breathe a deeper life into the areas your parties will explore.

GM Utility: Lastly, several new utility options will be built into the adventures for GMs, from items & loot, spells, and much more!

Burial Isle

We’ve seen interest in the discussion boards about hearing our design team’s process regarding the Burial Isle rework and thought it would be a great example to showcase the new adventure approach!

The main mechanical changes to Burial Isle have been an increase in the number of traps, new interactivity with the pools of corrupted blood, a bit more hidden narrative if players can decipher the Scythrian language, and a rework of the enemies faced on the island.

Some of you have noted the absence of two of our unique enemies; the Infected Scythrians and the Infected Statue boss fight. Our decision to make these changes wasn't taken lightly. However, they were necessary to fit the new adventure module system.

The prior version of the Burial Isle / Rise of the Jailer adventure was designed to quickly rush players through the starting levels up to level 5 so they could transition to our monthly modules. However, our new adventure modules can scale across a wide range of levels, and are designed with brackets all the way from level 1 to 20, so we no longer need to rush players through the early levels, meaning your campaigns can progress at a more organic pace.

Taking into consideration the Path of Penitence GM QuickStart Guide advice on levelling, parties should gain a single level once they complete a full scenario at level 1 and 2. Therefore, many parties that use Burial Isle as a starting adventure will be trying to get through all these obstacles on very limited resources. Based on the potential damage taken from the traps and enemies along the way, there was no space left to challenge the party with any meaningful boss fight at the end of the scenario.

As a side note, the adventure level scaling is intended to be flexible, and can be switched even mid-adventure. Some parties may find Burial Isle too easy, especially if they are a larger party or overcome the traps adeptly. For these parties, a GM that truly wishes to challenge his level 1 party with a nerve-wracking boss fight might decide to opt for the higher-level final enemy, using the Blood of Chaos as the challenge present in the final chamber of the Scythrian tomb – a foe that will certainly feel like a satisfying mini-boss due to its unique blood-spraying abilities, powerful attacks, and narrative connection to the blood pools the party have been finding around the tomb.

At the same time, other parties may find the adventure too hard! This is an inherent design challenge that is created by the 5e system; however, it gives you great leeway in how you might tell these adventures. Just make sure you try to gauge your party’s capabilities beforehand to make these decisions!

As for the Infected Scythrians and Blood-infused Idol, stay tuned - we have plans to bring back a much more formidable version of it in a future higher-level adventure! A second consideration in our decision to remove these enemies from the adventure was that at the expected party level of 3 when they face the boss, the Statue had to be designed to be a very weak enemy, far from the imposing boss it should be to do the sculpt justice. With the new flexible 3-adventure campaign system, we hope to revisit many of these past locations and continue to build on them with follow-up adventures. One we have in mind is another Scythrian Tomb, filled with new traps, new loot, and the monsters that were removed from the first location!

There’s a pretty bold admission wrapped up in all this, and it’s something we’ve had to take time to decide for ourselves too; that what makes a great Miniatures Release, does not always make a great RPG release, and vice versa. By breaking down this connection between our two flagships, we’re confident that the end result for you all will ultimately be far more valuable, exciting and most importantly, enduring.

With this in mind, we hope you can see how the new focus on environment, along with the shift in the level advancement system, left little space for us to drop the removed enemies on the party – they’d surely be faced with an impossible adventure. However, we believe these changes create a more comprehensive experience designed to immerse you deeper into the world of Doaden and the Scythrian Tomb environment.

We hope that the ability to revisit and build upon these locations also serves as a way to delve further into the substance and persistence of the world of Doaden. As parties find more Scythrian tombs to explore, they will start to understand more of the culture, the enemies, and the world itself. The same goes for all other factions, expect to see encounters with the N’Gorroth, Man-Eaters or any of Doaden’s other Myriad horrors returning again – those minis you’ve lovingly printed and painted over the past 3 years shall have another chance to take down the party!

Looking Ahead

We’ve been really pleased with the overall response to the QSGs and Burial Isle, and we appreciate your engagement here. We’ve also heard some well-considered and eloquently stated concerns too, for those of you who’ve expressed some doubts about the new direction, we hope this look at our long-term vision has addressed some of your worries! We certainly believe you're all going to love seeing the plans unfold.

Going forward, we're keen to hear more about what locations you'd like to explore or revisit, which enemies you think deserve to have their own dynamic boss treatment, and the most pressing questions you have when running a Path of Penitence campaign. Your feedback will help us prioritize our development efforts and continue to improve our offerings.

Thank you for being an essential part of our community. We look forward to embarking on this journey with you and can't wait to see where our collective creativity will take us. Stay tuned for our next Dev Talk!

Warm Regards,

Alex Dovermann

Game Director / 5e Lead Designer