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Three weeks ago, at Gen Con, I got to wear the Golden ENnie award medal for Gnome Stew’s Best Website award. I very nearly had a legendary wardrobe malfunction to prove it. Receiving the ENnie is a huge honor, and one that I am very proud I get to be a part of. Our Gnome Stew Patrons moved me in a more personal way. At Gen Con, our Patreon exceeded $100, which allowed us to open a beautiful can of worms by providing some good compensation to our authors and letting us increase the sort of content we can bring to the Stew. Finding out our Patreon peaked $100 on the same night as winning the ENnie was incredible.

There is more we’d like to be able to do, like paying our incredible authors more for their writing and sharing some of that with the incredible guest authors who submit articles.  So, we’d like to ask you to help us do that by contributing to the Patreon. If you’ve enjoyed reading any of Gnome Stew’s articles over the past 8 years, we’d love it if you would consider becoming a patron, even at a small amount, such as $1 a month. We think of our Patreon largely as a “tip jar”, since our content is free to everyone. It’s a way for readers to say thanks and help us make more awesome stuff that we get to share with everyone. We will always keep the Stew free for all of our fans, but becoming a patron is an act of trust in what we Gnomes will create in the future.

scroogeMy plan to Scrooge McDuck in our room full of copper pieces was sadly shot down, but here are a few things that you can look forward to soon, thanks to our amazing patrons!

 

Work (the blog) Harder

Our Patreon’s first task is to compensate authors (THANK YOU!), so we can take a little more time and dig more deeply with the articles you already love. Being able to pay authors will help us bring in more guests to bring exciting new content, spicing up the Stew while maintaining that hearty, comforting deliciousness you’ve always known. We can also work towards our goals of bringing in authors with more diverse gaming and personal backgrounds to provide different perspectives on the industry and give some signal boost to different voices.

Make (our content) Better

We’ve dabbled with multimedia articles (see our review of Adventure Scents, Smell-O-Vision still in the beta stage) and have more of these sorts of things being prepared in our prep kitchen – the Patreon helps us invest in the extras like video editing or buying art. More than that, though, we have in the works an entire web video series to bring more people into gaming! It’s projects like these that we authors at Gnome Stew can make happen.  You might know that some of our gnomes are venue-promiscuous and can be found giving GM advice on myriad different podcasts. If our Patreon reaches $230 per month, we’ll create #GnomeCast: a podcast for your earholes under your tiny conical hats, filled with the dulcet tones of our Gnome Authors expanding on articles and talking about other gaming topics. Input from the patrons will help shape what this becomes!

For you game masters out there, get excited: our Patreon will help us produce new system-neutral Game Mastering books like Masks (1,000 NPCs for any game) & Eureka (501 Adventure Plots). Seriously, look at these reviews. It’s gonna be great, and we’ll be able to produce some really cool things for Game Masters and players alike. I think you’ll love the new ways we’re planning to make your sessions easier and better.

 

gnomespotlight

My big personal passion is the upcoming launch of Gnome Spotlight – a blog series bringing you brightness in gaming. Our RPG community and industry has grown and diversified and done amazing, innovative things. There is a lot of important critique being done to help our #NotACasualHobby improve, but we want to make a place that focuses on and celebrates the good being done. Gnome Spotlight will be your regular dose of heart-warming gaming goodness.

Do (community feedback) Faster   

The Patreon gives us another home to chat with fans and lets us dynamically respond to ideas about the Stew and the Patreon itself. Want MOAR STICKERS as a pledge level? Of course you do. Want a pledge level to have Darcy to run a lewd AP of Maid the RPG? Let’s talk. 😉 The Patreon will also be a great place for us to leave you patrons increasingly weirder expressions of our appreciation, which started with the ENnies dinner night video and will only get stranger the more of our own devices we are left to!

GnomestewStickers

 

Makes (the Gnome Stew community) Stronger

We’re not just referencing Daft Punk lyrics here. Every dollar put into the Patreon is one we intend to pay back in one way or another. Patreon dollars paid out to the Gnome Stew authors have already gone toward Gnomes buying new gaming PDFs so that we can cover them on the Stew, as well as donations to game designers in medical need. We’re also looking at ways to increase the community outreach and connect with our readers in more ways, like running online games or providing feedback to reader projects from Gnome Stew. The Gnome Stew reader community is kind, insightful, and generous in so many ways, and we hope you’ll share a bit of that with us through the Patreon.  So please consider checking out the Patreon and supporting us, even at a small amount monthly. Every small bit helps and we hope to be able to continue providing awesome, free gaming articles well into the future with your help. I eagerly await to see what cool things we are going to do together!

What sort of projects would you be most excited for from Gnome Stew? What sorts of things would you like Gnome Stew to do in the future? Are there any changes to our Patreon structure that might make you back it?