Patreon Changes, Character Commissions and Thoughts

Hello everyone! This post is about a few things I would like to talk about and also about things I need to talk about, starting with the latter:

The Pay Per Creation model is going away

As some of you may know if you follow other creators that also use this model, Patreon is retiring the Pay Per Creation system of payment and that means I will need to eventually change my Patreon page to the monthly subscription model, I don't really have plans at the moment to when I'm going to do that, but a loss of patrons is expected and that possibly will be of huge impact on my financial stability, so I need to prepare myself for it. 

My thoughts about this change are… Well, I'm disappointed about the decision and scared about the impact this could cause me. I think the Per Creation model has some solid advantages for both creators and patrons, but unfortunately it felt kind of abandoned as we are unable to use some of the more recently added Patreon features. It also always bothered me that this model lacks a charging upfront system to prevent something that happens a lot: anyone can join, download everything and leave, all for free; while the subscription model charges upfront, easily eliminating that problem, it always bugged me how that was never implemented for the Per Creation model, another reason for me to feel like this model was abandoned for a while.

With all that said, in terms of how my Patreon page works, I’m personally not as impacted by this change as other creators who have much more complex systems dependent of the Per Creation model, but in terms of losing patrons because of this change things are honestly a bit scary. I have until November 2025 to make the change, and I’ll let you all know when the time comes and how all of that impacts your subscription.

Character Commissions

I’ll be taking character commissions soon, I think beginning in January I’ll open some monthly commission slots and see how that works. This is not entirely unrelated to the Patreon changes as the income from these commissions can make up for possible losses from the model change. 

I will be sharing more information on the rates, slots, and a bit of my portfolio in a post next month!

Thoughts about the journey so far and the future

Here I would just like to rant a bit about everything that has happened since I’ve started this Patreon, the experience, what I would change now, what I would like for the future; if you do take the time to read this, please know that I’ll be just sharing some of my thoughts (or dreams), I don’t really know what will happen, only time will tell. :)

The journey so far.

I created this page in late 2019 when I was organizing my first D&D group, finally taking the role that no one else wanted to take: being the DM. I was also working with my mom in our small family business but things weren’t going that well so we decided to close it - in hindsight, with the lurking pandemic coming in 2020, that was a lucky/good decision.

I was making a lot of character fan art at that time and I knew I wanted to take that forward as a job, although I didn’t know where to begin.

Characters I painted in 2019

That’s when I stumbled into a whole new world while looking for maps for my first D&D campaign. It amazed me to see all the amazing artworks on r/battlemaps that inspired me both to make encounters but also to try my hands at drawing a few maps for my games. Eventually, that led me creating this Patreon, where I thought “might as well try it and see what happens”.

I had an idea for my maps and it may sound a bit ambitious or even pretentious, but I wanted my maps to feel like your playing in an art from a Magic the Gathering land card, I know I know, it sounds absurd but hear me out: I also knew from the beginning that I didn’t have the technical level to achieve that, but if I ever got there it would be pretty cool and it would also give a somewhat unique painterly look to my maps. I still don’t have the technical level of design and painting skills of MtG land card artists, but I think if you browse through my maps knowing that I had that intention when I made them, you can kind of see how that impacts the way I make some of them.

The first two years or so were slow but steady, almost every new month I had a couple more patrons than the one before and that was very exciting. The character drawings were unfortunately left a bit behind as I was focusing on making better maps but considering the pandemic things were going well. At that point I think I peaked at 120 patrons and then suddenly the steady growth stopped, and even declined a little bit, I’m not really 100% sure what happened but I’m pretty sure it has to do with my terrible marketing, which is my least favorite part about all of this, being honest I pretty much ignore marketing, I post a map and leave all social media stuff untouched until it is time to post another map - I should change that.

I also got lots of cool opportunities during these years! I had collaborations, worked with some amazing creators, was part of cool projects, made a board game map! (which is still to be announced, can’t wait), even had some offerings to work full time for some pretty big projects, but I always looked back at Patreon and, even with the stagnated relatively small numbers, I just can’t give this up, I love this job and its freedom and I can’t express enough my gratitude to everyone who is or have been a patron over the years. Thank you so much!

The Present.

The changes to the subscription model are a bit scary as I said before, my Patreon is relatively small and my budget is enough for little more than paying the bills, so comes the decision to try my hands at character commissions for the foreseeable future.

Changes I would like to make right now would be: being slightly more active beyond posting 2 maps, such as sharing WIPs on the Discord server, my thoughts on the process of creating each map, and perhaps bringing back polls of what you would like to see next, including a better way for you all to send suggestions. What stops me from doing those things normally? Being kind of anxious and shy about it to be honest, I’ll try to work on that (no promises, lol).

The Future.

These may very well never happen, just sharing a bit of what would be my dream:

I would love to one day be able to make monthly themes and not only have the 2 maps released on that theme, but also characters, items and lore all in a big pack of cool things, maybe even all of it comes together to eventually form a bigger setting! I have tried to do that in the past in small bits, sometimes I posted these attempts in the form of character drawings as an extra for a map and things like that, but it is just very time consuming and requires a lot of creative energy to come up with so many things alone, for this to be a thing I would either have to hire people, which I don’t have the budget right now, or I would have to drop one of the two maps I make to create other things in its place. So it is a distant dream, but who knows, maybe one day. :)

Conclusion.

Whatever comes next I would just like to thank you all again! these 5 years of Patreon have been amazing and I hope to do this for as long as I can, thank you very, very much!

I'll see you soon with the next map!