Summer Plans and Moving Forward

Hello, everyone! It’s been an awesome 11 months so far – it’s hard to believe that it hasn’t even been a year since I started writing this blog! Since beginning TBM Games, I’ve had great opportunities to meet new friends in the industry, gotten to review a slew of exciting books, and written a whole bunch of new Fifth Edition character options and content. That isn’t to say that it’s been an easy road, or that I haven’t slipped up on updates. (Remember when I was posting two updates a week? I miss those days.) However, here we are with summer right around the corner, and a whole bunch of new adventures to undertake together!

Last week, I posted a long overdue review of Book of Exalted Darkness. My comparatively slow turnaround on that has been due to a few different factors. As is traditional for a college student, the last month of classes was when 90% of the critical work had to be completed, including finals. Additionally, I’ve been specifically focused on legal aspects of TBM Games, making sure all my paperwork is in order so that the business can do what I want without having to jump through unexpected hoops. Finally, as I try to reassure you guys each time I poke my head up with another post, I’ve been hard at work on Primordial Power! The book is coming along well, and we’re about 2/3 of the way through the art needed to bring the supplement to life, and that brings me to my first big point.

Primordial Power Kickstarter

The first and most significant thing to talk about – I recently decided that I’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund Primordial Power’s release. This isn’t a decision I decided to make lightly, but it was an important one. After all, why turn to crowdfunding when the product is almost complete? The dominant reason is for exposure. The Kickstarter platform is a powerful way to get the word out about a project(and by extension a company), and it lets me measure you guys’ enthusiasm for this work in dollars.

Primordial Power is going to be a much shorter supplement than books I’ve reviewed. At the time of writing this post, I believe it’s looking to be about 30 pages, about the size of Deep Magic: Clockwork Magic. Because of the narrow scope of the project and natural potential for expansion, Kickstarter will help me gauge whether you want this supplement to continue to grow through stretch goals, or if I should move onto my next projects.

New Articles, New Adventures

The coming months after the Primordial Power Kickstarter campaign are going to see some changes to how I approach articles, but hopefully, these changes will result in more content being delivered more consistently to you all. In particular, I’m going to be dividing content into series which will each update once a month(Staggered, so that there will consistently be something new for you to read).

Here’s a list of the types of articles you can expect to see in the coming months.

  • Class Archetypes, a lot of which have been playtested by backers on Patreon.
  • Monsters, likely thematically tied to future projects.
  • Combat Cartography, a series of articles about making visuals and combat maps in 5e to get the most out of yoru combat encounters.
  • Reviews of 5e supplements on a slightly slower schedule. This way I’ll be able to get more original articles in and more thoroughly review the books I read.
  • Retro Corner, reviews of non-5e rulebooks and supplements from a modern gaming perspective.
  • System Tweaks, a few house rules I’ve experimented with in Fifth Edition and my thoughts on them.
  • A few Miscellaneous articles, which might be new equipment or spells, or maybe something else? It’s a mystery to everyone, even myself.

Patreon Changes

Like any article in which I mention crowdfunding, it would be negligent of me to forget to mention that TBM Games is made possible by contributors on Patreon. Backers receive early access to original articles, behind-the-scenes content, and content ready for playtesting. I’ve recently added two new contribution tiers on Patreon. The existing Patreon tiers will continue as they are – All backers will still get early access to original articles, and all backers at the $5 tier will continue to receive playtest content to give me feedback before it sees a release. Backers at the $7.50 Storytellers tier not only gain access to the player options for playtesting, but also new monsters, dungeon writeups, or other GM content. Additionally, all backers at the $10 Producers tier will receive credit by name in the upcoming release of Primordial Power, and access to the top-secret TBM Games Discord Server, the earliest point at which other people lay eyes on these projects(and where I often ask for direct feedback before offering game options for playtesting).

If any of these perks have piqued your interest, please head on over to the TBM Games Patreon and back the site at any level! Every contribution helps me to continue to develop the best possible content for you and the site as a whole.

As always, I have to thank TBM Games’ current Patreon contributors for their support. Matt, Jordan, Jake, Andy, and Mitch, thank you all for believing in this site and helping it to keep going!

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