2025 Patreon Changes

Hello folks!

2025 is quickly approaching and as we’ve looked ahead toward the new year, we’ve done reflection on where Lair Magazine is and where we want Lair Magazine to go. As a result, changes to the content you receive each month are coming, breathing new life in the Lair Magazine that you’ve all come to know over the years.

Lair Magazine

First and foremost, Lair Magazine is getting a facelift and heading in a more modern direction with a cohesive storyline told over the course of the year. Instead of providing an assortment of random resources and adventures, Lair Magazine will plunge you into the world of the Shards, giving you and your players the chance to discover more about a new world each month.

Long ago, the planet was destroyed by a catastrophic event, breaking it into hundreds of Shards. Since then, through a combination of magic and machines, life has flourished on many of these planetary fragments, while others remain barren and uninhabited.

However, the magic holding the Shards in place and allowing life to persist is failing. Bright explosions, like newborn stars, often erupt in the night sky as some Shards collide with each other, and it is only a matter of time before your Shard suffers a similar fate.

Can you discover the source of the magic’s failure and set things right before all is lost?

The Content

All right, high-level concept aside, here is the content that you will find within Lair Magazine each month:

• 10 monsters

  • What is there to say? These are bigger, badder monsters than anything you’ll find in official publications, just like we’ve always done.

• 2 stand-alone, local events.

  • Think of the kinds of things that make a city feel like it’s a living, breathing place, rather than a collection of shops and NPCs for the characters to buy things from in between adventures.

• 3 short adventures

  • These adventures are designed with two to three parts and are meant to be completed in one session or less. They act as something more robust than a mere random encounter while serving as interesting interludes between full length adventures.

• 2 full-length adventures

  • These adventures are the same style as we’ve always done, with 10-14 parts and meant to be played over multiple four-hour sessions (unless your players really chew through them!). However, these adventures are designed to form a cohesive, episodic story.

It’s Still What You’re Used To

Rest assured: Even though we are forming the content around a tighter storyline, this storyline is designed to be episodic, rather than linear. What that means is everything is still designed to be dragged-and-dropped into your ongoing campaign, if desired. So, if you don’t want to play in the Shards, no worries; you can still do your own thing!

Shadowdark Adventures

Now that I’ve finished writing Escape from the Fey, we were considering what should take its place for patrons. Another 5e module or a series of one-shots was on the table, but if I’m being honest, that didn’t really excite me. However, I’ve really been enjoying running my Shadowdark adventures, so I decided to share those with patrons!

So, what I’ll be doing is adding my Shadowdark adventures to the Google Drive that I share with all $25+ patrons. Now, these are just my personal GM notes for the game, but I think you’ll find that they are incredibly well fleshed out for “just notes,” usually even including read-aloud text. What can I say, that’s just the level of prep I do for my games.

Even if you don’t play Shadowdark—though I submit that you should give it a try!—converting these adventures to the game system of your choice should be a trivial matter. Since Shadowdark is a rules light system, it lends itself very well to conversions. Just sub out some monsters, be ready to set DCs on the fly, and I bet that’s all you’d really need to do!

Foundry VTT Modules & Map Packs

And now for the sad news. The unfortunate fact is that some parts of the TTRPG industry seem to have been on the decline over the last couple years. I monitor different metrics and sales numbers where I can, and the numbers I track have had a general downward trajectory. In particular, Patreon support for most of the content creators I keep tabs on has been decreasing across the board, and I’m no exception.

This has caused us to have to look critically at our product suite and make some tough decisions. We analyzed our Foundry VTT modules and determined that not only were we not breaking even, but we’ve actually lost money every month. This isn’t actually unusual when you first introduce a new aspect of a business, but for something to be viable it does need to start making money eventually. Unfortunately, that just hasn’t happened and thus, we will not be making new modules starting in January.

However, that’s not to say that our Foundry VTT modules are going away completely. As long as you’re a patron, you will always have access to the entire back catalog of Foundry VTT modules that we have made. That’s a decent chunk of content that will NOT be going away!

The other piece of content that we had to look at honestly was our map packs. It was much harder to analyze the ROI on these, but we reasoned that though our map packs are amazing, they are probably not the main reason folks support us on Patreon and will also be discontinued.

What does all this mean?

Well, the ultimate result is that we are refocusing our efforts onto things that we know you all love and want, namely our core product of Lair Magazine and our Kickstarters. The good part of these types of changes is that they make way for new and exciting things to be created. 2025 is going to be a big year for the DM Lair, and we’re happy to have you along for the ride!

Thank you, as always, for your generous support of the content and products we create! My team and I are super excited to be offering a new take on Lair Magazine and my Shadowdark adventures. I truly hope you enjoy them!

-Luke