[Announcement] Patreon Update (Patreon)

Hello Friends, patrons, and people in the future looking back at our free posts! It’s Max here, the writer for Loot Tavern (a.k.a. Humperdink the Warlock).

Loot Tavern is growing from a couple of friends who wanted to make cool items, into an actual business that employs people. Starting in October, there are going to be a couple of changes in how we deliver the content to you folks! Before I got into all those details, I want to tell you one thing:

Feedback

We’ve been listening to your feedback, both from current patrons and people who’ve left (and filled out the exit survey). As we have more and more items, we get more feedback telling us the same thing:

• It’s hard to find the art and stats for specific items
• The foundry module is getting really big
• Reinstalling the foundry module each month to get the updates is annoying.

Hard to Find

This is the more complex one to fix. Patreon isn’t really a great file-storing system and turning it into one requires work arounds like master post lists etc. Our long term solution is that we’d love to create an online database, with a nice UI, to which you can apply filters to find items that you’re looking for. For example, you could find all the LT items that are rare and non-attunement, and get the link to the art on patreon.

That’s something that’ll take some time for us to sort, but is on our radar!

Short Term. In the shorter term, our wonderful Discord moderator Smood, has made this wonderful google sheet with the key info and patreon links, You will be able to find the link to this sheet in the pinned master post. They’ve graciously allowed us to share it with you guys - thanks, Smood!

Foundry Module

Here 

This one we have a fix for, and fixing it also helps us implement our new delivery structure! Essentially, instead of giving you one big module to update each month, we’ll be delivering the modules in bite-sized themes, each containing 9-15 pieces of art, and between 9 and 40 items (including variants).

I’ll talk about this in more detail in the section below, but here are the takeaways:

• You can install only the modules you want in your game (less data for you and your friends to load)
• Once you install it, you won’t have to do so again (unless we do a big edit of the items, say, in preparation for a Kickstarter).
• If you stop being a patron, you keep all the modules you’ve installed thus far, as well as any future edits to those modules.
• If you see a theme you like from before you started subscribing, you can buy just that theme from our web store (coming soon™).

Reward Timings

So far, all of Loot Tavern’s rewards have been ‘ongoing rewards’. That means that if you join, you get our entire back catalogue. Most of our rewards are going to stay like that, but some will move to a ‘monthly reward’ structure. A monthly reward is where, if you become a patron in July, you get the monthly rewards for July, but not for the preceding months. You will always have access to the July rewards your support helped create for as long as the patreon exists—that is never taken away.

Ongoing Rewards

The following things will stay ongoing rewards:

• Item art & mechanics ($5)
• Square item cards ($5)
• Printable tarot cards ($5)
• Compendium ($10)
• Bestiary (coming soon™ - more on this below) ($15)
• Monster Tamer class + familiars (coming soon™ - more on this below) ($15)
• Collaboration adventure PDFs ($-varies)

These collections will continue to grow and be available to their respective tiers, no matter when you join.

Monthly Rewards

As you can probably imagine, a business model that allows someone to join the patreon, download everything, then immediately leave, is hard to maintain. This is especially true now that we have talented folks to make the Foundry conversions and we want to be able to compensate them fairly! The following things will become monthly rewards:

• Foundry item packs ($10)
• Heliana’s adventure PDFs ($15)
• Monster tokens ($15)
• Foundry VTT adventures ($15)

How Will Monthly Rewards Work? On the last day of each month, we will send a message to everyone who has subscribed at the relevant tier that month. The message will contain links to the files for that month’s monthly rewards. These links will remain active for as long as the patreon exists, even if you unsubscribe. The files will then be deleted off of patreon; you will only be able to access them using the links in the message.

Think of it like a magazine subscription. At the end of the month, we send you the ‘magazine’ (the links to the foundry item pack, foundry adventure, etc.). If you unsubscribe, you still have all the magazines you received while you were subscribed.

For Example. If you subscribe for $15 on July 10th, download the Magnetite Dragon foundry content, then unsubscribe on July 15th, you’ll receive a message from us on July 31st. If you accidentally delete the Foundry adventure later that year, you can check your messages, find the link, and re-download it.

Note: it doesn’t matter when you unsubscribe. If you join the patreon for any length of time during the month, you’ll still get the message with all the links for the highest tier you were part of during that month.

What If I Want Old Content? What if you really wanted the Broodmother content from June, but now it’s July? Well, as a $15 subscriber for July, you’ll get a discount code that gives you 50% off of digital content on our webstore. This means you can buy the Foundry VTT adventure ($9.99), adventure PDF ($4.99), and the two Foundry item packs (2 x $2.99) for June from the webstore at half price (~$21 down to ~$10.50; prices TBC)!

Immediate Future

So When Is This All Happening? We’re currently breaking up the Foundry mega item module into individual theme modules, to be released over the next couple of weeks. These, and the other monthly rewards, will be available until the end of September, at which point you’ll receive a message on patreon with the links for posterity. You don’t need to do anything!

Bestiary & Monster Tamer

All these things are coming from Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting! Currently, they’re still being playtested and things are still changing.

Bestiary. We’re going to put together an ‘alpha’ version of the bestiary this month, containing creatures from the first 3 adventures. Fair warning: these creatures will probably have some adjustments made to them. Those adjustments will be transposed to the bestiary PDF when the Heliana’s book goes to print!

Monster Tamer. We’re onto the second draft of this bad boy, and it’s shaping up nicely. Once the core class settles down we’ll begin churning out the familiars. If you want to help with this early stage of playtesting, head on over to the Humperdink’s Wares Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zchd9xVKQB .

Alright guys, any questions, concerns, or suggestions, let us know in the comments!

Love you!

Max and Aggi