Heavy Lore 1.5.0 - "The Scriptorium" (Patreon)

Heavy Lore launched in June. What came back from you was more than we ever hoped for: bug reports, feature requests, wild ideas, and macros written at two in the morning, across Discord and Patreon. We read every single one of them. This update is our answer. The fixes you were promised, the features you asked for the loudest, and a whole round of small comforts. And we didn't touch the thing you told us you love the most: how it all looks and feels.

New - the things you asked for

Polyglot support. Books your character literally can't read.The most requested feature since launch, by far. Give any book, notebook or scroll a language in the Desk's Book Settings. With Polyglot active, only readers whose characters understand that language see the true text. Everyone else opens the same beautiful book and finds every page written in that language's own script. Espruar for Elvish. Dethek for Dwarvish. Real runic typefaces, laid out exactly like the true text, illuminated initials and all. Two players comparing notes see the same glyphs (the scrambling is deterministic, we thought of you, note-comparers). GMs and editors always read plainly. No Polyglot installed? Nothing changes. And here is the beautiful part: when your character finally learns Elvish and you open that book again... now you can read it.

A fourth scroll length: Epic. Above Letter, Long and Grand now stands A Prophecy. A 4096-pixel sheet for the texts that outlast their prophets. The closed roll grows properly fat (nine windings in the spiral!), and the three lengths you already use are untouched.

Players can bind their own books. New world setting, off by default. Switch on Players may bind books, grant the Foundry permission it points you to, and a "Bind a book" button appears in your players' Satchel. Field journals. Herbals. A character diary written session by session, by the hand that lives it. The player owns the book, the GM always sees everything.

The Desk got friendlier hands. There is now a formatting bar above the text. Select a passage, click, done: bold, italic, headings, ornament dividers, and two brand-new marks that did not exist before. Scratched out by the pen, a real ink stroke, wobbly, slightly different on every word, exactly as if the writer changed their mind. And underlined, for the passages that matter. Each page also gained a Text size dial (70% to 130%, and the ruled lines follow the letters!). Long page titles now break onto a graceful second line instead of getting clipped at the margins.

Macros without the archaeology. Some of you were digging book IDs out of the page source to build macros. We felt that. Every book card in the Library now has a copy-ID button and a copy-ready-macro button. One click and your automation has what it needs. There is a new Alt+B keybinding (rebindable) that opens the Library for GMs and the Satchel for players. And the README gained a proper Macros, items & automations section with the exact recipes you were hand-rolling in Discord, including "buying the item grants access and opens the book".

Clearer answers for players and premium installs. The README now spells out who sees what (Library for GMs, Satchel for players, eye means read, feather means write, and only the GM needs a license). It also collects the proven fixes for those "Not Owned" installer hiccups.

Pictures can now live under the ink. Every placed image has a new "Behind the text" switch in the Desk. Flip it and the picture slides beneath the writing. The text stops flowing around it and runs straight across. A faded map under a travel journal. A watermark. A full-page wash. Page backgrounds are finally a thing, and they still move, rotate, scale and take frames like any other picture.

The cover bends further to your will. Three quiet requests, granted. A subtitle line under the title (italic, auto-fitted, same foil). Sigil size and height sliders, so the emblem sits exactly where your composition wants it. And a halo toggle for custom sigils struck in fiery foils: keep the infernal glow, or strike it cold.

Books know who wrote them. A new Author field in the Bindery tools the author's name onto the cover. A quiet capital line under the title's flourish, struck in the same foil. Long names fit themselves gracefully. The Library's card credits the hand too. Track your world's recurring fictional authors!

Books travel between worlds. Every book card in the Library now has an Export button. It saves the whole book as a single file: cover, pages, marks, damage, language, everything. In any other world, click Import at the bottom of the Library and there it stands on your shelf, identical down to the last coffee ring. Campaign templates. Shared setting libraries. Write in your prep world, hand it over in the game world. One honest note: page images travel as file paths, so the destination world needs those image files too (the module warns you when it matters).

A Contents drawer in the Reader. Long books no longer mean flipping page by page. A quiet new button on the Reader's bar opens a Contents panel listing every page by its title (or its opening words). Click an entry and the book lands on that spread. The entries for the spread you're reading glow softly, so you always know where the ribbon lies. And yes: a book in a language you can't read lists its contents in that script too. No spoilers in the index.

Shelves with names. Your Library, organized. The single endless shelf is now a proper library. Create named shelf sections, each with an engraved brass nameplate tacked right onto the wood. Drag any book from shelf to shelf. Rename sections, reorder them, take them down (their books safely return to the main shelf). Players see the same organization in their Satchel and in the SessionFlow widget, but only the sections holding something they can actually read.

Your Foundry fonts, in your books. Every font selector in Heavy Lore now also offers the fonts your world already knows: system fonts, faces added by other modules, and anything you upload under Foundry's own Additional Fonts setting. Upload your campaign's typeface once, bind books with it forever.

Cyrillic, properly. EB Garamond and Caveat now ship with full Cyrillic coverage. Russian and Ukrainian text renders in a real serif and a real handwriting face right out of the box, not some bland system fallback. And when a chosen face genuinely doesn't cover part of your text (an alphabet it never knew), the Desk tells you so with a gentle warning instead of leaving you guessing.

Every page can have its own voice. A new pair of controls in the Desk lets any single page write in its own typeface and its own ink, while the rest of the book keeps its typography.

Fixes: the things that got in your way

Detached windows keep their books. Foundry V14 lets you pop a window out to your second monitor. Great feature! Except the Library could arrive there completely blank, and stay blank until something forced it to redraw. Turns out browsers can wipe every painted surface when a window changes homes (Firefox is the usual culprit). Heavy Lore now repaints all its windows the moment they detach or come back, in both directions. Your shelf survives the trip.

The Desk no longer cries wolf about scroll overflow. On Long and Grand scrolls, the Desk was measuring your text against the height of a regular book page. So it kept warning about "text past the end" that the Reader displayed just fine. Now it measures the actual sheet. Bonus from the same root cause: dragging stamps and images on long scrolls is pixel-precise again.

Custom wax seals lost their dark halo. If you sealed a scroll with your own matrix image, a dark ring showed up around the wax on the closed roll. The strike was quietly punching a hole straight through the parchment behind it. This one has been hiding since 1.0.0 and nobody caught it until this update's QA. The wax now sits clean on the band, intact or cracked. (Found in-house. Consider it a freebie.)

Your book's name finally behaves. Since launch, two different things carried a name: the title embossed on the cover, and the name shown on the Library shelf, tucked away in the Desk's Book Settings. Most of you never found the second one. Result: books called "New Book" forever. Now they act like one. Title your book in the Bindery and the shelf follows along. Want them to differ? A sinister tome whose cover says nothing? Give it a separate Library name in the Desk and they part ways from then on. Oh, and that field had a sneaky bug of its own: hitting Ctrl+S while still typing in it silently kept the old name. Gone. Every keystroke counts now.

How to get 1.5.0

Already an Adventurer or Arcane Circle member? Your version updates like any Foundry module. Open Foundry's Setup screen, find Heavy Lore under Add-on Modules, and hit Update. Version 1.5.0 is the one that smells of ink and fresh leather.

New around here? Welcome! Link your Patreon to your Foundry account (foundryvtt.com, Edit Profile, connect Patreon), then search "Heavy Lore" in Foundry's module installer. It installs like any other module, gated to your membership.

About the sci-fi and modern requests

We see you, datapad people. Modern documents, consoles, slates, cyberdecks... it's one of the most exciting ideas on the whole list, and the honest answer is: yes, it's coming. And it will take a while. A whole new visual family means new materials, new sounds, new reading physics, all built to the same bar as the books you already hold. That's slow work on purpose. We'd rather hand you something that feels real than something that feels rushed. It stays on the roadmap, close to our heart.

Thank you

This update exists because you kept talking to us. You reported bugs with screenshots, you wrote macros at two in the morning, you told us exactly what your tables needed. We read everything, and we'll keep reading. From the bottom of the bindery: thank you for the support. We really, really hope you love this one.