What If... I Did Only Sci-fi/Modern/Cyberpunk Maps?
Added 2020-10-05 12:10:17 +0000 UTCThe recent survey regarding the game systems you are running or playing has made me think about my focus lately. There seems to be a lot of sci-fi and cyberpunk gamers and only a minority of Fantasy Explorers, for example.
Splitting the Explorer tier into Fantasy and Sci-fi Explorers was a try to offer an option to choose the genre you prefer, but almost always in my surveys and polls sci-fi maps have the majority of votes or it is otherwise apparent that people seem to wish more sci-fi, cyberpunk, and modern content.
Another thing, last month my income from cartography surpassed my monthly income from my day job. I've been working towards this goal for almost 15 years and now things are looking like this is actually within my reach.
In practice, this means that I'm seriously planning to move to full-time cartography, BUT this would still need a little boost to my Patreon to make the switch safer for my family AND I would probably need to make this gradually over a year or so for practical reasons.
Anyways, I'm thinking about how to optimize my Patreon offering to you and on the other to reach my ultimate goal faster.
What I mean by this would be more maps supporting games and settings such as:
- Star Wars
- Starfinder
- Traveler
- Stars Without Number
- Shadowrun
- Cyberpunk
- Mutant Year Zero
- Eclipse Phase
- Alien
- Expanse
- ...and some science fantasy settings like Numenera, and even Eberron or Ravnica to some extent.
In case I would switch to making sci-fi maps only:
- I would do it starting November the earliest. So this would not affect the ongoing month. Could be even only at the turn of the year. All this is still at an idea stage.
- I might have to update my tiers a bit. This would not affect my current patrons, but it's likely I would unpublish the Fantasy Explorer tier to make the tiers more focused and maybe add a new tier between Adventurer and Hero tiers.
- In case you have an annual membership at Fantasy Explorer tier, I would of course want to discuss with you about how this would affect your patronage. Also, I would probably still do fantasy maps through some channel (which is still open at this point).
So, what do you think?
What would be your reaction if I did maps only – or at least mostly – for sci-fi, cyberpunk, and modern genres?
Comments
I'm focusing on sci-fi, but I still do fantasy too. Because of this, I cannot anymore quarantee a certain number of fantasy maps per month, so I decided to discontinue the separate fantasy explorer tier. Of course, some maps are clearly for sci-fi games, but it kind of bothered me to make the split between fantasy and sci-fi as some maps work just fine with both. I've been also thinking about making sci-fi and fantasy variants for some maps, so this is one possible direction I'm going to take. But, I have another patreon set up for D&D and fantasy maps only. This is a world-building project which I'm planning to grow over time to other things than maps too. You can find it at www.patreon.com/atherune, if you are interested.
Miska Fredman
2020-10-15 04:43:17 +0000 UTCSorry but I mainly play D&D so I'd have to bail if all that you did was scifi.
Valerie Vixen
2020-10-15 03:27:49 +0000 UTCI'm a game master for Starfinder, so I definitely like having a source of sci-fi maps. You are getting a lot of sci-fi support from your subscribers simply because there are few sci-fi map creators. I don't game frequently, so more frequent maps is nice but not a necessity for me. I have noticed that many of the encounters I need could be played on a fantasy map, and I have in the past converted fantasy maps into sci-fi with the judicious placement of a few pieces of futuristic clip-art. Perhaps some of your less tech-heavy scenery can also satisfy fantasy gamers in the same way. As some others have suggested, having maps published in layers will allow some maps to serve either sci-fi or fantasy by switching different layers on or off.
Ken Tanaka
2020-10-08 04:36:24 +0000 UTC
