Narrative Declaration Patreon Update May 2022

Hey everyone! ZoranTheBear here,

I wanted to give everyone a heads up about what we’ve learned from the previous feedback form. Along with an update on the WarHams/Rotgrind one shot. Amongst other fun bits!

The Warhams/Rotgrind One Shot

To summarize our last update post, we wanted to release a bunch of free PDFs that we plan to use to help grow what we’re doing here. To compromise with spending the time and resources to do some free stuff, we decided to do a fun little one shot of our past WarHams characters.

The current plan will be to do a Sub-only stream on Twitch (if possible) and do a Patreon-only video and MP3 of the episode. The tentative date for the stream, and the couple of days after for the VOD, is currently July 10th. We will let everyone know if this gets delayed or adjusted via a Patreon post and in the Patreon Discord chat.

The Complication System is back!

The complication system from WarHams is coming back! We will soon be opening up the ability for you to submit your critical failure results when we roll a natural 1.

Initially when we were planning Rotgrind, we found the complication system we had in place was a challenge for several reasons. So we’ve decided to make sure this time around we clearly state what is involved with this system.

The goal of adding this to the campaign is to:

1. Add some danger and additional challenge to the campaign.

2. Increase community engagement. We want you to be a part of this show even more!

3. Create some humorous scenarios for you all to enjoy.

How this system will work:

- We will be adding in an additional tier at 7 USD that will house this complication.

- Those in this tier will be able to submit their critical failure result to “the pool.”

The main reason we’re doing a pool system rather than a queue system is due to what we learned doing WarHams. Way too often people would submit results that simply didn’t align well with the show, or the result was way too outlandish or inappropriate to add in. So we had to filter out a lot of submissions. Which meant some people didn’t get to see their ideas on the show.

We want to clearly state to those interested in doing this that it is to submit ideas to a pool. Which means that if you have a great critical failure idea, that you can submit it whenever.

From time to time we will go through all of the submitted complications and add them to a public excel sheet. This is to let people know if their submission made it in. During the filtering process, we may edit some submissions to better fit the campaign, as the concept and idea may be good, but the execution may not fit well with the game system or campaign. So this is a way for us to increase the chances of your submission getting added to the list.

Once filtered, during an episode if someone rolls a critical failure. We will try to pick a result by random or find one that best fits the situation.

Villain Points!

Another system from WarHams that we missed was the Ruin point system. We adjusted it to where the GM could punish the players or mess with us with the point system. We will now be adding the option for viewers to donate bits on twitch to give Thurston or another GM the ability to do villainy! But that isn’t the only way for the GM to get a villain point. A percentage of bits donated live on stream towards the players will go towards the GM’s villain point pool.

Hero points for players allow us to reroll D20s. Sometimes this helps, while other times it screws us over. With Villain points, we plan to let Thurston do a lot of dastardly things. For now it’s just rerolling enemy attacks, so the game is much harder on us. But maybe we will allow him to do more? What if he could spend it to make us reroll our really good roll? What if enemies had special abilities that triggered by using Villain Points? There are a lot of options, and we’re happy to add in the additional challenge.

Is it okay if we accept sponsors/ads?

One of the things we’ve been doing is running relatively sponsor-free. We’ve discussed this internally and we think that we’re missing out on a lot of opportunities by not reaching out to do certain sponsorships. One major concern however, is having these become intrusive and annoying to all of you.

I wanted to ask all of you if this is something you’d be comfortable with letting us do. My plan to handle this is to offer companies “ad sections” or “ad slots” that are placed in sections of the show to be as least obtrusive as possible. Ad places would be either at the start, middle(when we take a break), or end of the video.

The hope is that the extra revenue will help us fund more artists for more PDFs, help support our current artists more, order more assets for the show and world (like a colored world map is like 1500-5000 dollars. Art is super expensive!), and fund potential future projects.

Let us know what you think!


Your feedback

Thank you to everyone who submitted their feedback on the show in the last google form. Your feedback really helped us look at different angles on how we should approach future strategies and projects.

These are the thoughts we gathered from your feedback. This isn't all of our thoughts, but we wanted to share a few.

1) You guys want more Lore!

Patron Feedback:


Non Patron Feedback:


We see that you all love to get more Lore about the world we’re currently adventuring in. And we’re happy to supply it! We’ll be considering shifting more PDFs to be more about the world we’re adventuring in so you all can use it for your own games. And to also get a better sense of where our heroes hail from.

In addition to this, we noticed that folks really liked items and equipment. From talking internally we wanted to get more player facing content out there. So we’ll be highly considering our next PDFs to be more focused on giving you more goodies to adventure with.

2)  You guys really like Youtube!

Patron Feedback:


Non Patreon Feedback:




This is something we expected. Youtube is a fantastic platform to consume this type of content. You’re able to take your time with it, pause it whenever, fast forward or go back.

One of our goals is to increase our Twitch audience participation, as Twitch is one of the show’s major sources of revenue. Youtube sadly is a very small portion of revenue for the show. We understand that it’s a hard ask to dedicate so much time to watch a live stream. To stick around for several hours in a live event is hard for a lot of people’s schedules.

We appreciate those who do come to the livestream! The audience’s response to our shenanigans really gives us a lot of energy to do goofy stuff. So the more activity there is the more we feel energized to do comedic bits. But whichever platform you decide to watch us on, we thank you for giving us a chance. If you like what you’re seeing, please comment and share. We love hearing from you no matter what!

3) You guys really like D&D!
Patron Feedback:

Non Patron Feedback:


One of the things we’ve been asked before was a version of our PDFs for D&D 5E.
We wanted to address this by saying that we’d love to get 5E versions. To do so would sadly require additional funding. As we’d have to pay a freelancer or one of our friends that work on D&D 5E for their time. And that could make the PDF creation process a lot more costly.

If the Patreon gets more support. We can look into making this happen!

And if we reach our further Patreon Goal for the second campaign, we would be able to do another theme. Maybe something Sci-Fi?

4) How we label our PDFs and world.

We asked in the feedback form this question: “How would you feel about us titling our PDFs to be ‘The World of Tyne’ or something similar. Instead of just ’Rotgrind’."

The purpose of the question was to see how we should tackle how we present the work we do here at Narrative Declaration. What name did we want people to focus on and talk about online? What do we do if we do another show or a One Shot?

What we’ve decided so far is to focus on the name Rotgrind as the setting name instead of “The World of Tyne.” And if we ever do another campaign, it would adjust to something like “Rotgrind: The hee hee hoo hoo.”

One thing we will do with our PDFs and branding is add an addition to the logo. By placing a “Narrative Declaration” at the top or nearby. So we can let people know of the group along with the show. Preferably in a subtle fashion.

5) Overall

Everyone’s feedback has been extremely positive via the form. We also like to check outside sources as well, so we don’t suffer an echo chamber effect.

We can always improve things, and some habits we can definitely improve on. And we’re striving every day to do even better and better.

Thank you all for your continued support!