Important Update to Adventurer Tier reward scheduling

Starting on the quest poll scheduled for March 31, there will be a change to the Adventurer tier reward. Instead of there being a strictly monthly quest poll, every third month will focus on smaller encounters.

For the "off" months, instead of a full on quest being voted on, there will be a shorter list of encounters with challenges and rewards that are not officially part of any one quest. Think of the wheezing dogwoman in Whitetail Watch or the cat thieves in Aledock town. These help populate the maps with more characters and short stories, as well as smaller challenges and a more diverse recruitment pool. On average these encounters are about 5-10 pages long, so the top three winning encounters will be chosen per poll.

The schedule for the next few months will be as such:

February -- Regular quest poll

March -- Regular quest poll

April -- Three (3) encounters poll

May -- Regular quest poll

June -- Regular quest poll

July -- Three (3) encounters poll

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This is becoming a necessity for three main reasons:

First, the average length of quests keeps on increasing over what they were in the first public releases of the game. The new quest, The Horny Dragon's Hoard, is currently at 95 pages (in Google doc form where most writing is done). The Dollhouse was 96 pages long, Strange New Silk was 70, and Reprogramming in Progress was 65. Earlier quests like Den of Mischief was 41 pages long, in comparison, and Oh My Darlings at 54. This means it takes most of a month's development time to write, commission art, create maps, setup encounters, squash bugs, and proofread. This is more than I originally intended, though it has resulted in longer, complex quests with more variety in events, transformations, locations, mechanics, and multiple possible endings according to the player's decisions.

Second, I (JudooTT), have been continuing to have medical concerns persisting since last summer, which has made programming and writing less reliably done on a schedule. These are unlikely to change anytime soon and may result in possibly more serious procedures anticipated this spring or summer that may require days, weeks, or potentially months to recover from.

Third, the main story questline has been neglected for a while now, with Spelunking for the Signet being a crucial quest to open the planned town-building feature, as well as connections to world maps in Aphrodisia that depart from the greenlands for the other areas such as the desert, jungle, and ice road maps seen in Exile. Aros Starchime is due for his first companion quest, and Willow Hawkwing's second quest is already (just barely) started. Allowing periodic months that are lighter on patreon-driven writing content will allow for these to progress as well.

Plans may need to change according to medical and workload needs, but we're going to try this schedule out and see if it works better. If any changes like this happen, we will do our best to provide at least a month's notice ahead of time.

Let us know if you have any thoughts or concerns about this new system, and any suggestions you have for these new encounters.

Thanks!