Narrative Declaration Update - January 2024 (Patreon)

Happy New Year! It's your wizarding wonder here again with another SPELL CAST!

We have a lot going on this month and a lot planned out for the year. Here is what's going on with Narrative Declaration.

Patreon Exclusive PF2E: Kingmaker Campaign

We're happy to announce that the PF2E: Kingmaker Campaign is greenlit! The currently plan is to make the campaign exclusively on Patreon at the $5 (Traveler) Tier.

To answer some questions we got regarding the campaign:

Why another campaign?

We've wanted to start a membership-only TTRPG campaign for a long while. Sadly, we never had the capacity or funds to tackle another custom campaign.

When we talked internally about other campaigns and things we wanted to do, we found that doing another custom made TTRPG campaign wasn't going to happen. The Rotgrind players didn't have time for another long-term campaign due to their endeavors concentrated on Alfabusa's channel. Which means without the money to fund making all the custom assets, and the players time, we'd have to table projects like the WarHams reboot.

But Kingmaker, is a different story.

Who is in the Campaign?

Thurston (OnCallGM) will be Game Mastering it. I (ZoranTheBear) will be a player with Froggyloch, Kabhaal, Saltyjub, Minerva, and a new face, Maddikus. You'll know most of these players from Rotgoons!

What are the Goals of this campaign?

• To provide more value to the Patreon
• Raise additional funds to compensate staff
• Present a professional game by executing the rules as accurately as we can. With some understanding that we're human.
• We really wanted to play Kingmaker

Would this add a lot of work? You guys do so much already.

Yes, this will add in another chunk of work on us. But we love what we do, so it doesn't feel like work too much!

The FoundryVTT Module for Kingmaker allows us to achieve our goal of a Patreon exclusive campaign due to all of the assets being completed for us. All maps, music, tokens, statblocks, systems, everything is already done. We simply need to play it with minimal Game Master prep.

When I and Thurston talked about ND plans and doing another campaign, he told me that he'd only be able to do one if it was a pre-made campaign. As it would take away a lot of the prep and asset creation he normally has to do for Rotgrind. So Kingmaker fit just fine for what we wanted to do. And to be honest with you all, everyone in the group already wanted to play Kingmaker. Thurston wanted to Game Master it, I wanted to play it, and the others really wanted a different type of adventure. We also like interacting with all of you, so making it a Patreon exclusive to help offset cost seemed like the right idea.

How will the campaign be distributed?

The Kingmaker Campaign will only be on Patreon. There will be no stream, as it's terribly awkward to create a personalized stream for Patreon. But our minds may change in the future!

The Video and Podcast version will exclusively be on Patreon. To help announce the campaign, we will release the first episode on Youtube. To further help advertise the campaign, shorts and video highlights of the campaign will be posted on the Youtube Channel and Social media to further advertise the Patreon campaign.

We also plan to increase the video and podcast production quality for this campaign. We're currently finding out how far we can go with this, but expect the same quality you expect from us at a bare minimum. But we do not wish to tire ourselves out, so we'll only upgrade things within our means and sanity.

When will the campaign begin?

The soft date is sometime in March or April 2024. I have a release strategy in mind, which may require us to prepare several episodes beforehand. So, at the latest, it will be in late April or, at the earliest, March.

If interested, we plan to release our test sessions here on Patreon under the $1 tier. Two test sessions are out all ready and you can watch them here.

We're looking for charities to support!

I get incredibly nervous about doing charities.

I never want to touch the money, nor accidentally mishandle it. So I've been trying to find any cancer related charities that are also trustworthy.

If you have any suggestions for a charity you want us to do an event for, please leave your suggestions in the comments below!

Our plan is to utilize our single/short adventure WarHams specials to be charity events.

 Several of us on the team lost someone last year to cancer or other means. And we want to do something. So any help would be appreciated finding a charity that goes after cancer. Preferably a charity that has a direct donation system we can integrate with a stream.

Regarding the Patreon Video Player

I've been getting DMs about Patreon's video player being less than satisfactory. In the past we had a lot of issues with people taking the unlisted Youtube Link and sharing it with people, so we switched to Patreon's internal video player. 

Always, piracy is a service issue. We're aware people even share our PDFs out. As much as it sucks, my stance is to always provide a good service than hammer down and make it miserable for all of you in hopes of making a quick buck.

Please let us know in the comments below and by voting on this StrawPoll if you're a current Patron, on if you'd prefer we go back to doing unlisted Youtube Videos or keep them on Patreon's native video platform.

(Editing in context to the video player as I think some might not understand. On Patreon, we can directly upload videos straight to the website and it'll use Patreon's own video player. Alternatively, we can upload the videos to Youtube as unlisted and link them in the posts. That sadly is easy for folks to take the video link and share it about. So we're seeing what folks prefer.)

Thank you all for such an amazing 2023! Here is to 2024 bringing more smiles and laughs than ever before!

- ZoranTheBear & The Narrative Declaration Team