3PP Release UPCOMING: The Forgotten Vault: Unlocked

As many of you who have purchased it (thank you all!) know, the first large-ish release that PMG ever did was Spells from the Forgotten Vault. We did it back before I had a handle on what's necessary to do a product for print with DTRPG, and one of the most frequent requests I've gotten since its release is for a print version, which just isn't feasible with the way that specific product was laid out.

I've also been wanting to do a sequel for a while.

The original plan was to do a sequel as a PDF-only release and then a compiled version with all the spells from the original, plus all of the material from the new release that was available in both print and PDF. However, as time went by and the list of material going into the sequel materialized, it became apparent that this was kind of a silly idea; the new material by itself is going to be several times the size of the original release, so I recently made the decision to only do the compilation (which will be available in both print and PDF).

While The Forgotten Vault: Unlocked is still at least several months out, the content list has solidified, and here's what you can expect, at a minimum:

Spells:

• All of the spells from the original Spells from the Forgotten Vault
• Dozens of new spells including:
  • A set of spells based on the logic of nightmares
  • Sin and Virtue spells
  • Dragon spells
  • Chess Spells
• A set of 78 rare spells based on the tarot; each can be cast normally or reversed (for a total of 156 effects!) and all of them are available to any spellcaster who can research—or find—them. They will span from cantrips (the aces of the minor arcana) to 9th-level spells (the most powerful major arcana).
• Multiclass spells:
  • The bloodblade, esper, and scholar third-party classes will each be getting a set of 5 multiclass spells to bring them into parity with the other non-spellcasting classes.
  • There will also be 55 caster/caster multiclass spells, one for every two-class combination of artificer, bard, cleric, druid, elementalist, herald, sorcerer, warlock, wielder, and witch. Unlike the caster/non-caster spells, these will cover a wider range of spell levels as appropriate to the classes and spell concept.
• Invocations, a kind of "super-ritual" that can be cast by anyone and works better when cast by groups - if you ever wanted a system for your monster hunters putting down barriers like the hunters in Supernatural or a way to mechanize that cult ritual, this system will have you covered.
• 10th-level spells, available to single-classed spellcasters via a feat at level 19. Just charging the spell slot will take significant work, but casting one will be incredibly potent.

Character Options:

• Magical combat traditions:
  • Old favorites Cutting Omen, Sanctified Steel, Arcane Knight, Eldritch Blackguard, and Arcane Artillery will be returning.
  • Entirely new traditions will include Thrashing Glade, Twisted Key, Tyrant's Fist, and Grandmaster's Strategems.
• The Sphinxborn heritage.
  • If you're familiar with my previous release, Sinuous Sentinels, you have a sense of what to expect from the Sphinxborn. They're another created species like dragonborn or sinuous, brought into the world by powerful magical progenitors to aid in their tasks.
  • The heritage will also come with new cultures and backgrounds to bring it into parity with existing A5E heritages.
• The return of motif classes. These 8-level classes that originally appeared in System Architecture: Motif Classeshave all the fun of a prestige class with no waiting; designed to be taken early in a character's build, they cover interesting concepts from the jump and are another method of "soft" multiclassing. Currently included are:
  • Fortune Teller (Bard/Witch)
  • Grove Protector (Druid/Herald)
  • Overlord (Warlock/Wielder)
  • Shackled (Adept/Warlock)
  • Soothsayer (Cleric/Wizard)
  • Stratemancer (Marshal/Wizard)
  • Thunder Hammer (Cleric/Elementalist)
• And a few other odds and ends!

This will almost certainly be a larger book than MoAR Complete was, so prepare for an infusion of magic later this year!

Work continues! It remains an absolutely massive book and is taking a long time, but still plugging away.

Looking forward to it!

Hey absolutely enjoy your Moar and multiclassers manual series as well as motif classes which I recently acquired. I have a question does return of the motif classes by any chance mean that you are moving away from the synergy feats route or is this a more of hey lets make more motif classes so people have more options while also making having an option to get synergy feats if not going ffor motif classes. Also is there any projected time in sight for the release. Also will there be new archetypes(I know its a spell focused book Im a sucker for new archetypes)

Sagathai said:

Hey absolutely enjoy your Moar and multiclassers manual series as well as motif classes which I recently acquired. I have a question does return of the motif classes by any chance mean that you are moving away from the synergy feats route or is this a more of hey lets make more motif classes so people have more options while also making having an option to get synergy feats if not going ffor motif classes. Also is there any projected time in sight for the release. Also will there be new archetypes(I know its a spell focused book Im a sucker for new archetypes)

Click to expand...

A bunch of questions in one there, so let me tackle those one at a time:

As far as motif classes go, no, I'm not moving away from synergy feats as a general practice. We just had some fun ideas for motif classes to showcase some various cool elements in this book - in particular, some of the new magical combat traditions. Well, also they're also kinda fun to design, so we've been wanting to make some more for a while and this was a good excuse to! I'm hoping to pepper them into future releases a little more frequently, as there are some things that fit more naturally with motif classes than synergy feats, but I much prefer having both in the system. In particular, we have a magical combat tradition based around manipulating active spells that Rachel designed (which was made special for a specific motif class that can show it off to maximum effect), and I had some ideas for a druid/herald mix that gets partial shapeshifting to aid it in combat. And then there's the marshal/wizard mix with the special magical combat school and chess spells...

As far as a projected release time: nope, nothing to announce yet. Hopefully by the end of the year, but this project has seen some significant scope creep, and there have also been some scheduling bottlenecks (notably, my day job has been exceptionally busy of late), so that's also been a factor.

Finally, there won't be any new archetypes in this one, but you can definitely expect to see some more in MMV3 (which will probably be the next large release after this one)!