July Update: What's coming up, and Kibbles situation.

Hi Folks,

June has been a slow month for a release schedule around here; there's no getting around that. I've been working on a handful of stuff, with the Occultist at the top of the queue, and some of it's close to release, but ultimately we saw less content than I'd hope this month.

But I think I can promise some substantive change there for next month, as my situation will be changing; next week is my last week at my current day job. Without getting into the details, the landscape of my day job has been shifting with the pandemic and my company going through some upheaval - this is no small part of my limited presence around here recently - and ultimately in that I'll be parting ways with it.

I think there's a silver lining there though - that means I'll have a lot more time to work on things like making D&D content. For the next year, I'll be seeing if I can develop my hobbies into something sustainable. From there, I'll re-evaluate.

I'm not asking for more money here. My goal is to see if spending more time on making content can grow the patreon in terms of size and value. I don't expect this to be one hundred percent of what I do, but rather something that takes up a bigger role in my schedule supplemented by my other hobbies and likely contract work in my old field (software stuff). If I can provide greater value to you, and you want to put in more money to keep it going, I'm certainly appreciate any and all support, but I also don't want people to put in more than they feel they are getting out of it.

What does all this mean:

• In the short term (this week and next) not much. I'm still working, and my time is slightly more crunched as I try to help my day job through the transition.
• In the medium term in the second half of July, we are going to see much more reliably and consistent content; with at least a weekly update, and probably more.
• In the long term, we are going to see more extensive projects, potentially including a Kickstarter near the end of the year - I cannot make any promises there yet, but I have some ideas that might be fun.

I wanted to write this for two reasons; first of all, some people are understandably not thrilled with the content releases of June - there's not been much published. There's a reason for that, but not a reason that really matters from a patreon point of view. It's a combination of making sure that the Occultist has the correct foundations, and the fact that due to what's going on, I've been busy.

Second of all, I wanted to let you guys know what's coming up, and what'll change.

I will end on a simple note: I don't really plan to change how I monetize my work in this process. I may end up putting more perks on patreon, but the core of my stuff (classes and subclasses) will still be free. I don't really intend to make this my job, just see if I can make this a bigger part of what I do because I have a lot of fun working on it, and many people get a lot of enjoyment out of it... which is more than I can say for many things I've spent many hours on in my day-job-career :)

I really hope that you are all doing well out there - I know the COVID pandemic has changed the landscape, and I've seen so many of you having to drop pledges due to your own troubles with it - trust me, I 100% understand that situation and never feel bad about that. That is part of why I release as much as I can for free.

Moreover than that even though, I hope all of you out there are healthy and getting by. It's a rough time, and the only silver lining I can offer is, well, I'll be posting more stuff to have fun playing D&D with next month :)

Hoping for the best for everyone out there,
-KibblesTasty

PS: Occultist update soon, and feel free to drop in on the design stream today at the usual time; 10pm GMT, 6pm EDT, 3pm PDT... we'll be working on something a bit simpler, the Circle of Spirits druid - what it is, what's worked about it, and what it's update will contain, and than start crunching into that :)