EVP Spire: Darrin Drader signs on

Darrin Drader, author of a crapload of RPG stuff, wrote on the EVP Spire Facebook page

Since this group seems to be filling up quick, I'd like to talk a bit about becoming a Patron through our Patreon site, and the benefits you might see of backing us there.

First of all, what is our Patreon site? Put simply, Patreon is where you can subscribe to our adventure gaming publication. More specifically, Patreon isn't just a subscription service, it's also a crowd funding service, not entirely unlike Kickstarter. The main different between the two is that while Kickstarter lets you back a project and pay up front. Patreon, on the other hand, only charges you when something new comes out. You pay nothing up front.

How much does it cost? Right now, if you were to purchase upcoming issues of The Spire through RPGNow/Drivethru RPG, you would pay $3.50, and you would get the issue. With Patreon, you can get exactly the same thing for $2.50 per issue. Pay $3.50 instead and you'll be able to get access to all the bonus content we produce. Pay $5.00 per issue, and you'll get listed in the credits. That works out to $10 per year at the most basic level, assuming we only manage to kick one magazine out per quarter (we are shooting for bi-monthly, but our staff is small, so we'll see how that goes). At most, assuming you backed at the $5 level and we publish bi-monthly, you would pay no more than $30 per year. Why am breaking it down to the yearly price? Because being a patron is an excellent value, and it's better than buying it through the online book stores.

So why do we want you to become a Patreon subscriber? Simple: Patreon is our gauge for how much we can expect to make per issue, so we base our budget on that. If you look at our Patreon page, you'll see our funding milestones. The first one, which is really within easy reach (we've been steadily gaining subscribers since the site went live), means we'll be able to hire freelancers, who write adventures professionally. Now, personally, I write adventures professionally, and I'm happy to writer my heart out for this magazine, but the fact is that you'll get more adventures, faster, and more varied when we have other voices adding to ours. My first choice for people to tap would be the Werecabbages (I am one, so I'm pretty well connected with them), and they have a reputation as some of the best, most prolific, adventure writers in the gaming industry.

Next, let's talk art. If you're familiar with the indie RPG industry, you probably see companies that use stock art. Frankly, there's nothing wrong with stock art. We used stock art in our first two issues, and I intend to at least use it in the next one or two issues, depending on where funding happens to land by the time we're ready to release the next issue. But, stock art isn't tailored to the project at hand. It's kind of generic. If we hit our next funding milestone, we're going to dispense with the vast majority of the stock art and commission original pieces from artists.

From there, the benefits just keep getting better.

The bottom line is this: if you subscribe to The Spire through Patreon, you get a better value than you would get simply by purchasing the magazine off the stand, and you help us make the magazine better. Best of all, you get charged absolutely nothing when you commit. You pay nothing until the beginning of the month after our next release.

So, assuming I've managed to convince you to support us by subscribing to The Spire through Patreon, where do you find it? At this URL: http://www.evpspire.com

Thanks for taking the time to read all this, and welcome again to our Facebook community.

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