Heavy Lore 1.6.0 "The Lectern"
Adventurers and Arcane Circle, this one is small, and I want to be honest about that up front. There is no new kind of artifact in it, no new paper, no new wax. What 1.6.0 brings is a door: Heavy Lore now has a proper public API, so other modules, macros and automation tools can finally talk to it.
I will also be honest about why it comes now. The next thing we are launching needed this door open. It is still a secret, but it is the biggest release we have made in a long, long while, and it arrives this week. Heavy Lore had to learn to listen before that could happen. So here we are.
What the API lets a table do
Open a book on your own screen, or on every player's screen at once, on the page you choose
Hand a book over for reading or writing from a script, and take it back the same way. A book taken back now closes in the player's hands on its own
Write into a book from the world: a new page, a line at the end of the last one, a bloodstain, a burn, a picture
Bind whole books from code, move them between shelves, export and import them
Listen. Heavy Lore now fires hooks when someone opens a book, turns a page, finishes it, sets it down, or cracks a scroll's seal. A GM script hears a player finish the prophecy, and the passage opens
Ask for the same procedural pictures the Library draws, covers, spines and pages, to put on a map or anywhere else
If you are a macro person, the small things got easier too: you can name a book by its shelf name or cover title instead of hunting for the id, and anything you are not allowed to do tells you so in a plain sentence.
The guide
The whole thing is written up in a file called API.md that ships inside the module folder, next to the README. I wrote it for people, not for compilers: what each call does, who is allowed to call it, and a handful of recipes for the moments we all want (reveal the prophecy to the whole table, a tavern guestbook the players can write in, a diary that gains a clue while nobody is looking). If something in it is unclear, tell me and I will fix the words.
How to get it
Open Foundry's module manager and update Heavy Lore, like any other module. Your Patreon needs to be linked to your Foundry account, same as before.
About this week
I am not going to say much yet. Only that we have been building it for months, that it is bigger than anything we have shipped in a good while, and that today's update is one of the doors it walks through. A few more days.
Thank you for being here for the small ones too. They are how the big ones become possible.
Gabú, Wand & Widgets 🐦⬛