Not every good idea needs a crowdfunding campaign.

We've been designing tabletop RPGs for years now, and one of the things that happens when you live inside these systems long enough is you end up with a pile of stuff that doesn't have a home. An adventure that's genuinely great but too short for a standalone release, or an enemy pack that fills a gap in the bestiary nobody really asked about, but maybe everyone would notice once it's there. A one-page scenario we wrote at 2 am that turned a random Tuesday solo session into something we couldn't stop thinking about the next morning. I think you got the basics.

None of that fits inside a crowdfunding timeline. Most are too small for a full release, but too fun to sit in a folder on our hard drive without sharing. We just got to a point where there are way too many of these things already in some way or form.

So we're launching a Patreon right after this campaign closes. And we want to explain what that actually means, because it might be a little different than most.

We are calling the Patreon idea “The Lab”, some sort of weird workshop you get to walk through every month.

The content drops are zine-style PDFs across both the Dark Legacy universe and the Nomads Unbound line. We have adventures, artifacts, enemies, mechanics modules, scenarios, and the occasional weird experiment that doesn't fit into any of those categories. Infaernum gets love here, too. And sometimes the drop won't be tied to any existing game line at all; we have a few drafts of standalone mini-games, system-agnostic tools, one-shot concepts that exist because they were fun to make. The format is intentionally fast and raw. No six-month production cycles, and absolutely no waiting for a campaign to fund before we can put something in your hands. If we finish a new Dark Legacy Artifact or a Nomads Unbound scenario on a Wednesday, we can share for playtest by Friday, and they're in next month's drop. That's the core idea.

But the speed isn't just about getting content out faster. It's about being able to try things we wouldn't risk in a full product launch, and then hearing back from the people who actually played them. That's the part we're most excited about. This isn't a one-way content pipe where we publish, and you consume. The people subscribing to this Patreon are the same people running these games at their tables, and that makes them the best source of feedback we have for what's working, what's broken, and what the next big release actually needs to be. We want that conversation happening while the work is in progress, not after it ships.

Some of what comes out of this lab will become the seed of a future full release. Some of it will live as a Patreon-only thing that never needed to be anything bigger. And the stuff that doesn't land gets reworked until it does, because that's what a workshop is for.

The Patreon will have a top tier (we are still figuring out the name), and the real value isn't content but a seat at the table where decisions are made. While everyone will get to send feedback and play things early, members of this Inner Circle will see things first to help filter what’s most urgent or can have the greatest impact, and will have a closer relationship with the creation process. Their names will also get a special thanks in the major releases to cement their contributions.

We're capping the participation in this Inner Circle, and not as a marketing trick. A group like this only works if it's small enough that every person in it actually matters. We're starting with a limited number of seats, and we'll expand when we're confident the experience holds up at a larger size. We'd rather have 20 or so people who genuinely shape the future of our games than 500 names on a list who never get heard. And because you are actively supporting our games with this campaign (and most likely previous ones), we are giving you the news so you get first dibs.

This one's been on our mind for a while, and the Patreon feels like the right moment to make it official.

We're releasing the Dark Legacy System rules under an open license. The Solo10 engine — the d10-based system that powers Legacy of Cthulhu, The Vampire, The Lycanthrope, and The Witch — will be available for anyone to build on. Write your own supplements, design your own settings, publish your own Solo10 games. The license will spell out the specifics, but the intent is simple: if this system gave you something worth building on, build on it.

We've always believed that the best thing that can happen to a tabletop RPG system is other people making stuff for it. More creators mean more content, which means more players, which means a bigger world for everyone. We'd rather be the ones who opened that door than the ones who kept it locked and wondered why the table was empty.

One great example is Mattgreenbean, one of our most active players, who built an event table for the Water tiles in The Legacy of Cthulhu. For context, those tiles in the base game are basically just map limitations with no flavor. His table gives them actual encounters and narrative weight, and it's exactly the kind of thing that makes a game better in ways we hadn't considered. We want to see more of that, and we're planning to build a community repository where third-party Solo10 content gets real visibility rather than disappearing into a Discord thread that nobody scrolls back to find.

There are two things in development right now that don't fit inside a PDF, and we want to put them on your radar even though they're still taking shape.

The first is 3D-printable objects — tiles, miniatures, terrain pieces that you can set down next to your hex map and feel the world physically taking shape around you. We want to be clear about what this is and isn't: this is not a pivot toward miniature gaming only. Every game in the Dark Legacy line and the Nomads Unbound line plays the same without a single printed piece on the table. But if you're the kind of person who wants a Cthulhu Citadel sitting there while you roll, we want to make that possible.

The second is a companion app. NPC tracking, shelter management, resource logs, and session notes. You know, all that stuff you're currently juggling with a notebook or a spreadsheet or the margins of your character sheet. No AI, no procedural generation gimmicks. A clean, deterministic tool that keeps your campaign organized so you can focus on actually playing. The scope is still evolving, but the foundation is real, and it's being built right now.

Both of these will take shape on Patreon first; after all, we want feedback and a centralized way to share them. Subscribers see it before anyone else, and more importantly, they get a say in how it develops. After it is done, we will push publicly so everyone can have it.

We are aiming to start next week, so stay tuned for the follow-up! We've got a lot of pages to fill and details to sort. In the meantime, feel free to share all your thoughts, feelings, and suggestions; they will be crucial to shaping our next moves.

Thank you again for all your support so far; you've been amazing!