Happy 2019!

This is it, the launch of the new version of this Patreon! If you haven’t already, please go ahead and update your pledge level for the new monthly structure!

My 2018 in Review

2018 was kind of a weird year for me. Mundane life changes made it so that I wasn’t able to have weekly hangouts with friends anymore, which was a pretty radical change compared to the past decade or so. 2018 was my second year of working at a contract job for a big tech company where I was mostly telecommuting, which has been kind of a weird situation where I barely know anyone at my workplace. I spent a lot of time at home doing stuff on the internet like I was a Homestuck character or something. (Also, I sat down and read all the way through Homestuck.) Since I had a contract job, they wouldn’t keep me around for more than two years. It kinda sucks, and now I get to figure out a new day job, and boy was it frustrating wading through December knowing that no one was really hiring until the new year.

On the plus side, my roommate adopted a pair of cats named Spider (tabby) and Monkey (tortie), and they are adorable little bratty weirdos.

Part of what prompted the idea to change to a monthly format for my Patreon is that I realized that in 2018 I’d only done three game releases, and they were all generally much more time-consuming and produced thicker books than the mini-games I was doing when I first started on Patreon. There were Spooktacular (my sorta-retroclone of the West End Games Ghostbusters RPG), Angel Project (which retools the rules of Magical Fury for stories about cute girls in power suits fighting evil), and The Dungeon Zone (a weird meta-RPG where you play gamers sitting down to play D&D). When I finally got around to asking IPR if they’d like to stock Angel Project and TDZ, Jason surprised me by outright asking for 100 copies of each. (Also, Angel Project has been selling a lot better than I’d expected, so apparently there’s a market for optimistic games with cute anime girls.)

In 2018 I was also involved in three Kickstarters, which is a big part of why I held off on doing the Kickstarter for Dragon World. Evil Hat picked up Channel A and launched it with a Kickstarter that just barely got funded, I ran the successful KS for Twilight Tales that hit all the stretch goals we’d set up, and a friend of mine did a KS for Kamigakari, which I’ll be translating roughly half of. Of the three, Kamigakari wins the “Least Stress Caused to Ewen” award, though of course it caused plenty of stress to other folks involved. Running a Kickstarter is stressful I guess is what I’m saying.

I also got a Nintendo Switch, took up fuse bead pixel art as an occasional hobby, expanded my culinary skills a bit (rice porridge, gazpacho soup, fresh whipped cream, cheese plates, and most recently slow cooker stuff), started a new podcast with some friends, and had some family stuff that I won’t get into here. It was a pretty weird year for me.

And of course there was the whole thing where in late December I got hugely inspired to start making zines and selling them on Etsy and itch.io. I’m currently working on ones about Palladium Books (“All That Glitters is Palladium”) and Guardians of Order (“Small Company Big Mess”).

Anyway, here's hoping for a great (or at least less bad) 2019!

Tables Tables Tables!

I’ve got the January Ewen’s Tables pack and Secret Bonus Table just about ready to go. The Ewen’s Tables pack is called “Studio B,” and it has tables for generating titles and premises for American B-movies from different eras, and the Secret Bonus Table is called Rainbow Magic, for generating ridiculous magical girl spells in the vein of Star vs. the Forces of Evil.

So I put it to you, my dear patreonistas: What do you want to see future table packs about? I have a bunch of ideas:

Anime Boys, Anime Characters, Anime Random Events, Book Club, Cartoons, Fantasy Cities, Fantasy Random Events, Fantasy Scenery, Fantasy Settlement Generator, Fantasy Towns, Glyphs, Holidays, Japanese Folklore, Literary Stuff, Locals, Magical Girls, Medical Stuff, Movie Night, Mutations, Names for Pets, Nerd Pandering, PC Gaming, Political Stuff, Project Idols, Restaurants, Ring of the Lords, RPG Design Challenger, Scenario Generator, Spoopy Stuff, The Mall, Video Game Pitch Generator, Weapons, Writer Assistance, YouTube