5E DevTalk - Liber Obscura, Rise of the Jailor 2.0 and more! (Patreon)

Dear Bestiarum RPG fanatics,

We hope you and your party members have been enjoying the refreshed world of Doaden on your Path to Penitence! As we continue to navigate the dark and ominous journey to develop this vision, there are a few updates that we’re all eager to share with you.

So buckle up, don your favorite robes, sharpen your favorite sacrificial daggers, and read on!

1) Path of Penitence Supplements

As you might have pieced together by now, our monthly 5e game development path is focused on two core offerings. First up, we are releasing three easy-to-run dark fantasy adventure modules that aim to capture the feeling of our dark world setting of Doaden, while being structurally flexible enough to be run as one-shot adventures or used as part of your campaigns in other settings. These adventures are all rolled into our Liber Obscura, a growing repository for all these dark and horrible adventures.

Secondly, each month we will be releasing new campaign supplements specifically for Bestiarum’s world setting, which will help to build a unique world setting and anchor the Liber Obscura adventures within the world of Doaden. Over time, these supplements will accumulate, evolve, and shape themselves into a full-blown setting and campaign guide for the Path of Penitence system.

In practice, each month, these campaign supplements will enhance the system with new options, tools, and narrative possibilities. For instance, last month we unveiled a novel Path for Warlocks that follows a curious path of Enlightenment. Through understanding the nuances of reality via suffering, they've been gifted an expanded array of powers.

As our development gains steam, we hope to include you all in the process, helping to determine how we approach this gargantuan beast, and what useful tools and materials you’re all itching to see.

2) Rise of the Jailer

For this month’s Path of Penitence support, we're excited to release an updated version of the Rise of the Jailer starter adventure. We've overhauled the experience to be much easier to navigate. The adventure content has been refined, and the clues and journal entries have been rewritten as expository props which require a fraction of the time for your party to read, eliminating the need to sift through mountains of journal entries to understand what’s going on with Tommit and his cultists.

The Jailer's power, too, has been amped up to nearly its full potential. A high-level party might still be able to down this monstrous foe, but the vast majority of parties will be tucking their tails and running away from this fight with a heavy lesson learned – the foes in Doaden are incredibly powerful and adventuring cannot be taken lightly!

We expect most parties will experience a full party wipe during this encounter, but the adventure is set up for them to barely survive with the horrific realization of what terrors await them in the future. After this experience, the Jailer will certainly be well positioned as a formidable nemesis to encounter again later. It's an experience meant to set the tone for what's to come: a harrowing journey through hell and back.

3) Liber Obscura Release Format

You might have noticed already, but August’s Liber Obscura Zip also contains July’s 5E Content – Prison Break & Hellspawn. This is the first step in a major change to our 5E Delivery Format – moving forward, subscribers to the RPG or All-In Tier will have access to the entire 5E Archive to date* not just this month’s modules.

One really handy thing about this change in the delivery format is we’ll be building a convenient, and easily navigable repository for you to draw from. As the months pass, the Liber Obscura will grow at a rate of knots and you’ll have a much easier time searching for and selecting the perfect challenge for your players.

So each month, you can go ahead and replace, or merge, the old Liber Obscura .zip with the latest copy – everything will be stored in the same tidy structure, and any subsequent updates or fixes we make to Modules will be integrated with no bother!

*July 2023 onwards – we’re still considering options for the old format 5E modules.

Thanks for joining us for August’s DevTalk, happy gaming and we’re looking forward to chatting more next month!

Warm Regards,

Alex Dovermann

5e Lead Designer