January’s Update Schedule
January 1st |
Patreon Release:
Artifact Dossier – Body of the Armored Tyrant The legacy of the primordials lives on, exemplified by these repurposed remains of Zyagi, forged into a suit of armor which has shaped the history of conquest and kingdoms. |
January 8th |
Patreon Releases:
Warlock Patron – The Magpie A trickster spirit well-accustomed to the hustle and bustle of the cities, the Magpie is a sociable patron whose ultimate goal is to collect the shiniest treasures of all time. Bard College – College of Conspiracy A confounding bard college which builds a deadly reputation through falsehoods and rumors. (This subclass was released on the blog for free during Villain Month.) |
January 15th |
Patreon Release:
Complete Tamer Class / Underground Oracle Collab A class built around bringing familiars and summoned creatures to battle on your behalf, and who better to know the ins and outs of working alongside summons and minions than Underground Oracle’s Awakened Familiar race? |
January 22nd |
Blog Release:
Artifact Dossier – Body of the Armored Tyrant |
January 29th |
Blog Release:
Warlock Patron – The Magpie |
Not Currently Scheduled
- Subclass options from Villain Month – I’m reticent to commit to releasing all of the subclasses from Villain Month, as “The Big Project™” for January is certainly the Tamer class and collab with Underground Oracle Publishing. However, we all know that if I don’t commit to anything there’s a good chance that material would get lost. To at least break the ice on that project, I’m finalizing the inaugural subclass, the College of Conspiracy, on the 8th.
- Shard Tabletop Conversions – Shard is a 5e-centric virtual tabletop, and a great platform for 5e games. I am currently in the process of implementing character options from my back catalog as playable options within the Shard platform. These conversions will be free to Adventurers and higher-tier contributors, as well as anyone who had previously purchased them. I’ll probably be converting the Vampiric Bloodline sorcerer this month as a test of my current process and Shard’s distribution tools.
Hello, everyone, and happy (almost) New Year!
First of all, thank you all for your contributions in December. With your help, I was able to make a $25 donation to CenterPointe at the beginning of the month. I have no doubt that the organization will be able to make good use of this financial support.
Like I predicted at the beginning of the month, December was indeed a bit of a trial by fire. Not to go too deeply into it, a close friend of mine was hospitalized from covid complications around the middle of the month, and though their trajectory has been in a steadily upward direction, it has certainly a huge scare as we all impatiently wait for a vaccine to become widely distributed enough that we might put this global catastrophe squarely in the past.
To me, January is like December’s opposite – when you’re recovering from the confusing haze of the holidays, there’s a certain clarity that comes from a new year’s ambitions. It’s a bit of the clean slate effect, but also there are very few obligations while the days stay short and the cold persists. On the subject of other obligations, I’ve found myself particularly frustrated with how my university plans on handling the upcoming semester with respect to covid safety. Fortunately, I suppose, I’ve still got about 4 weeks to figure out how I’m going to respond to this, but quite bluntly I believe that the university is being negligent about safety in order to ensure that more profitable athletics can carry on as normal. In the meantime, though, I’ve got the time to try and work ahead on content for you all.
You might also notice that I’ve been gradually changing the visuals around the Patreon page and my social media lately! I had the privilege of working with Twitter user @Ibisnake to redesign the logo – the first redesign of this magnitude since I made the original Toy Box Monolith back in 2009!
On that subject, Ibi recently suggested to me that it would most likely be beneficial for me to change up certain visual aspects of my PDFs. Since I launched TBM Games in 2017, I’ve used color coding as a quick way to note when I’d written a PDF at a glance on DTRPG – lavender parchment for 2017, yellow for 2018, blue for 2019, and orange in 2020 – but it would probably be more useful to color-code my PDFs by their function. Starting with this Friday’s release, being the first of multiple Artifact Dossiers, I’ll try and start working out the colors I want to use for PDFs going forward.
2020 has certainly been a hard year, and 2021 isn’t going to be easy by any measure, but I hope that as always I can count on your support and that you can count on me to deliver quality content for your adventures to come. In fact, if you do bring any of my 5e supplements to your game table, please don’t hesitate to let me know how it went – I love hearing stories about your adventures and getting your feedback.
Best wishes,
Christopher