Patron Comics: What Comes Next?

As I've been mentioning and working up to over the last six months, I've now drawn the previous Patron Comic series to a close. Why? It's simply time to try something different.

When I first created the Cameo Pledge Tier at $100/month, I thought to myself "Nobody's going to stick around. They'll pledge, get a comic with their character in it, and then step down." Imagining that I was going to have a constantly cycling cast of characters, I knew I'd never be able to manage a story; so instead I opted to be silly with it.

Apparently I had no idea what I was talking about, because the Patrons that grabbed those four top-tier spots held onto them. For YEARS. And so where I expected silly, random characters, suddenly I had a steady cast, and I had to come up with stuff for them to do month after month. It was not what I expected.

And though it's been fun for these past five years, I'm ready for a new challenge, and I think I've come up with a doozy.

Starting next month, the top-tier Patron spot is going to be evolving. I've already talked about this in past months, but we have a lot of new Patrons, so here's the recap.

I have spent the last half a year brainstorming and developing an dungeon-diving fantasy adventure series that will combine my traditional comic-based Choose Our Adventure approach with some basic tabletop RPG elements. Using a modified Cypher system, the four top-tier will create characters (using their likeness if they wish) which I will then use as the heroes of our adventure.

As their characters traverse through the story I write, the Patrons will be able to make decisions for their characters, including rolling dice to determine outcomes, and I will take all of that input and fashion it into the Patron-only ongoing comic series.

BUT that's not all. While the top-tier Patrons get to make decisions for their characters, ALL the rest of my Patrons will get to help vote on what dangers and troubles they'll face! What monsters appear, how those monsters act, what traps lay in wait and what those traps do, offer suggestions for treasure, or NPC motivations. Because Patron allows posts to be restricted by tier, the top-tier Patrons will never know what you’ve all voted in store for them. I may even randomly choose Patrons from lower tiers to have their likeness featured as an NPC or enemy in the dungeon!

Should a top-tier Patreon step down, or their character perish in combat, someone else can pledge into the spot and roll a new character, which will then be summoned in to join the party on their journey.

This is a wildly ambitious project, involving audience participation the likes of which I have never tried before. But I'm super excited to try it, and it all starts next month.

Beginning in July, whoever our current top-tier Patrons are (I'm expecting some of the current ones will step down) will work with me to create their characters. I'll likely produce a couple of strips introducing the adventure, and then in August the characters the Patrons made will hit the ground running as we all pitch in to craft this new series.

The next few months should prove to be pretty interesting!