NarDec Update - January 2025

Happy 2025, everyone! Your friendly neighborhood wizard, Zoran, is here to update you about everything that's going on with Narrative Declaration!

Formation of the LLC

Thanks to your overwhelming support, I'm now in the process of setting up an LLC to handle better the funds you provide us, as well as future proof ourselves for any potential growth!

The goal of Narrative Declaration, even at the start when we called ourselves "WarHams," was to help my friends who were in various degrees of financial ruin. To be honest, I did not think this TTRPG thing would take off like it did. I figured we'd make a maximum of 300 USD a month, and I'd just split it with everyone so they could pay their bills a bit easier.

Now that we have a growing team, I'm doing my best (well, mainly YOU!) to support each team member in their arts.

Whether it be writing, acting a character, art, animation, audio, etc. Thanks to all of you, we can enrich people's lives on the team and support amazing projects such as Rotgrind & more!

You have greatly improved my life and theirs. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. The rest of the team greatly appreciates your continued support!

The Eclectics finally get paid!

Thanks to your support, we can also afford to compensate the Eclectics players for their time.

My personal rule of thumb is to always compensate the players in the campaigns, but at the time, we didn't have the spare funding to pay everyone. It's a good chunk of change to pay all the players, game master, the editor(s), the artists for all the overlays, character art, animations, and then the music licenses. It all adds up pretty quickly, making each episode range in the thousands. Regardless of this, the desire to play with our friends won out, regardless of the financial hurdles. So the team agreed to play without pay until the show did well enough to support it.

Thankfully it did do well enough, to this degree we didn't expect. We're still surprised so many signed up for the campaign, which also scares us, as we don't want to assume that support will last forever. We still don't, as we're still unsure if folks will stay with us once that campaign concludes. We've definitely learned our lesson with WarHams in the past. But, we will endeavor to do our best to keep everyone entertained!

With this notice, we wanted to give you a heads-up where your money is going—and it's now going to the very Eclectics you love! We didn't want to do this prematurely in case support suddenly disappeared, leaving us in an awkward spot.

Rotgrind's Premiere date has shifted!

The Holidays hit some of us hard. Several caught covid, and some of us were in the hospital! Due to that, we had several art projects delayed that were needed to get the Rotgrind campaign going. So, the expected start time now is March 5th 2025.

The show will stream weekly, with occasionally a week or two break as we prepare assets for the next bout of episodes. And just like Wrath & Glory, the episodes will release to the public bi-weekly. You here on Patreon will receive the raw VOD as soon as we can upload it.

Basically, the same distribution method we've been doing with the Wrath & Glory campaign.

Speaking of Wrath & Glory.

Wrath & Glory continues!

We've been having a blast returning to the 41st millennium. Due to Rotgrind's delay, we decided to finish out the rest of the Litanies of the Lost Adventures from Cubicle 7 to fill in the missing gap. So we'll be doing our best to finish the adventures!

Be sure to keep an eye on our google calendar content schedule for when we go live!

We're changing how we use Hero Points & the Complication system for Rotgrind.

After we finished season 3 of Rotgrind, we had several internal meetings about what we could do better. One of the glaring downsides of playing the campaign was the "no, and further no" improv imposed with the nat 1-complication rule and during some complications. We all agreed it sucked eggs and was not fun to play with.

We also wanted to change things around with the complication system as it had a few major flaws.

One of the major issues was that submitted complications often did not follow the instructions; they were too specific towards a character, too niche, or had other factors that made them unusable. As much as this might feel like we're pointing fingers at you, I'd like to clarify that the fault lies with us. We should have provided better guidelines and safeguards to execute this process more effectively. So don't feel guilty!

The goal of complications is to enhance the role play. Improv wise, we want our players to fail forward, not fail and get kicked down the mountain. So, we made some adjustments.

Hero Points & Narrative Declarations

No longer on streams will you be able to donate directly to a player to grant them hero points. Instead, hero points will be given out by the game master for various actions, usually for making a great joke, being a good player, or doing good role play.

Instead, the audience will be able to donate to a pool of "Pity Points" the game master will be able to distribute at their whim. The goal is to give these when a player wants to "negotiate" by doing a bit of role play or take a complication to reroll their dice similar to a hero point.

The goal of these "Pity Points" and the change to distributing hero points is to encourage role-play and cool and funny moments throughout the campaign.

What happens when players reroll?

Now when a player rerolls their dice, their dice will also be at a base 10. Meaning they can't roll lower than a 10.

(You might recognize this as Jason Keeley's homebrew rule for hero points)

In addition, they can make a Narrative Declaration if they want to, to add a bit of flare to the situation. This is to fix the issue where we didn't want to use our hero points to declare a narrative due to how useful they were as rerolls.

What about complications?

The rule of "If you roll a Natural 1, you trigger a complication" is still in effect. The change we made is allowing players to reroll out of a Nat 1. But, you cannot Narratively Declare, and you -still- have to trigger a complication. In which, instead of the game master finding one, the players will be picking them out for themselves.

We will be testing this system out with several test games in the coming weeks. Once we finalize the system, we will publish a standalone post detailing our system. Along with how you can re-submit your complications for the upcoming campaign!

Future Projects in the Works

We've announced our interest in these before, so this is more of a reminder that we are still interested in doing them!

We're still prepping ourselves to give Starfinder Second Edition a go! Due to our current investment with Rotgrind, we won't have time for a super-long adventure. So, sometime after 2025's Gen Con convention, you may see us back in the stars hitting it up with Starfinder Second Edition!

Additionally, we're looking into a one-shot of the Alien RPG still. We're doing what we can to make it as unhinged and silly as we can make it.

And of course, for those who keep memeing it up in my Twitch chat. Yes, I have the Lancer book, and yes, we're looking to see if we can fit it in this year. We're all excited to play with big smashy robots!

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Thank you again for your continued support! We're excited to tell amazing stories with all of you!