State of Caeora (Patreon)

Hello all!

It's been a while since my last post.. and I couldn't resist the serious title but thankfully I've been doing just fine and working hard behind the scenes on a few new things everyone will hopefully find very exciting!

In personal news, that I'm very happy to share here on Patreon, I have now officially joined the Foundry Virtual Tabletop team as a Lead Designer! I will be working on Foundry related design which includes improving both the website and software plus helping to lead an unannounced Foundry Project. This is of course a huge deal in some ways but not so much in others. Time-wise I’ve actually been working on the unannounced Foundry Project for the last 6 months unofficially for 1 day a week and one more day will not affect the production of content that much on Patreon which is nice. Joining Foundry opens up some interesting opportunities though, and I'll get into those later on.. ;)

My Partner KTech has been knocking it out of the park recently and of course she has been helping out so much with the new content that I feel confident she can pick up any slack here on Patreon while I'm working on Foundry things!

With that out of the way let's get into the main reason for this post today. So a little background for those that have only been following me within the last year or so. I started making content on Patreon in 2017 and since then my artistic style and what I've been making have changed quite a bit. I'm very proud of what I'm currently able to make but I have to admit to myself that my older content is.. not great. Today I would like to talk about a few changes to what I’ll be making going forwards as I think this has become something I want to try and tackle.

Below is a quick bullet point list of what kind of content I'm going to be concentrating on:

• Token Packs (Creature Packs & Bestiary Packs)
• Unique Tokens (Tokens Cards & Individual Tokens)
• Asset Packs
• Sketch Assets
• Textures, Walls & Windows

Token Packs & Asset Packs will have a Free Version and a Complete Version

Maps are not listed here as I have moved away from them over the last year. That doesnt mean I won't be making them again, just that they will be one off random posts rather than a regular thing :)

That is very similar to what I make right now right?

Well yes and no.

Creature Packs

Creature Packs will be entirely replacing my CR packs of monsters. Creature Packs are monsters from the DnD Monster Manual made in my style and I will be starting again at CR0.

*Insert shocked Pikachu face here*

While this might sound odd, after all, I got up to CR9 before and I should finish that first right? Well after some thought I have decided that I don't think that's a good idea. Firstly the lower CR tokens I made several years ago now are.. really really bad, and are effectively unusable for play on a modern virtual tabletop.

Thus when you look at my content as a whole there are a whole host of creatures from those packs that people just don't use, which is flat out, not what I want.

Secondly and while I could be wrong on this one, most people are not using high CR creatures in games. Typical parties will be fighting lower or mid-tier creatures for games and that means the latest tokens I would be making would not actually be used by the vast majority of people in the space right now.

So I think it's time to step back and approach things again.

One of the major reasons for doing so was actually the token cards i've started making recently. Spending time and care to make each token has been amazing and so the new Token Packs will be getting that level of detail.

Yes, that means every token I make going forwards will be higher res and more detailed and will all include the circle portrait versions as standard.

To give you an idea of what this looks like below is a little comparison of an older token and one of the new ones!

Bestiary Packs

As I am now a member of the Foundry Team, Foundry has recently partnered officially with Paizo, the folks behind the Pathfinder system and setting. In fact, Pathfinder 2e is very well supported on Foundry and will become even better in the coming months (I will have some input here!)

So with the restart of my work making monsters for Creature Packs, Bestiary Packs are the same thing but for Pathfinder 2e!

Now of course there will be some overlap with the basic creatures and if something like a frog or cat exists in both systems they will be included again in each pack. However, if there is something that artistically looks different there will be a more unique token for that creature. A good example would be a Goblin. Pathfinder Goblins have a very distinct look and Bestiary Packs will include that version while Creature packs will include the more generic fantasy version instead!

Asset Packs

Along the same vein, Asset Packs moving forwards will be getting a revamp alongside the token packs. Previously I had been making my assets a little smaller than my tokens as I wanted to make more assets for a pack.

Well, fuck that.

People want quality, not quantity. So now assets will be the same size and resolution as the new tokens using a 200px square grid at 300 ppi. This will make the assets much, much nicer to use in programs like Dungeondraft and Dungeonfog!

A little example below that I’ve been working on vs an old asset!

Wrapping Up

Overall, this makes things nice and simple as everything is now fully standard across the board and much nicer to use digitally to make maps and to play with! I can't wait to share some of the new tokens, assets and textures I've made over the last few weeks, and damn some of them are pretty as hell XD

And that's pretty much it for now. Everything will be released to tiers in the same way they were before, free packs for everyone, but then complete packs with different variants for patrons etc. I will put some more details in those new posts for content as they go live. Also with smaller packs means more regular posts so that should be good!

Hopefully, this is very exciting for people that like my style, especially over the last year or so and have been dying to use my stuff but may have felt it was a limiting before or smaller res than they wanted!

Thanks for reading and as always if you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas for future packs, tokens, assets etc let me know! 

TLDR

New stuff, higher resolution, smaller packs with much higher quality rather than large packs of lower quality.