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Happy Monday everyone! It's May 11th — hope you all had a great week and weekend. Here's everything that's going on with Narrative Declaration.
First off, thank you all so much for the feedback last week on whether these updates are still useful to you. I really appreciate it and I'm going to keep doing them — I genuinely enjoy this form of communication with you all.
Peppin Plush Update
The Peppin plush announcement went out and I have the preview inspection copy sitting right behind me as I record this. He's about nine inches tall, the bag holds all the individual party members, and you get the whole thing together — you can't buy anyone separately, it's all one package. The little extra cost was worth it to include everybody because this was a massive team effort and I wanted that represented.
I'll be honest — I was even a little uncomfortable centering it on Peppin at first because I didn't want it to feel like I was just doing it because it's my show. But everyone agreed that Peppin works as the mascot and the backpack concept — which was SaltyJub's idea — was the perfect way to include the whole party. So I'm really happy with how it came together.
For future plushies, if we ever get the Rotgrind ones figured out, those will be individual plushes for each character. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.
Marketing for the plush is ongoing — I really hope you guys love it when it fully launches May 15th.
A Note on the Team
Rotgrind got skipped last week because Thurston has been getting absolutely hammered at work — There's just a lot happening over there. He came to me and was honest that he was mentally done for the day, and I told him not to worry about it. That's always going to be my policy: if you come in exhausted and emotionally checked out, it shows in the show, and nobody's having fun. We just don't record.
I also checked in on another player who's been going through some hard stuff personally. We just want to make sure our people are taken care of — they're our friends first.
Thurston is doing fine, and he extends his love to you all.
Show Updates
WarHams: A Chaos Odyssey (Black Crusade)
We have a recording tonight! Everyone's checked in, nobody's canceled, and we're ready to go.
The big combat encounter last session has us rethinking how we handle battle maps for 40K. The scale of these battles makes it really hard to give you a useful visual — zoom out and everyone's a tiny dot, zoom in and context is lost. We're going to have a conversation about leaning more into the narrative side of combat going forward so the listening and acting portions land better.
Chaos Odyssey episode drops on YouTube on the 14th, with the members preview of the next episode going up on the 18th. Patreon as always gets everything as soon as EzeDoesIt finishes editing.
Jers has been doing a fantastic job taking over the Chaos Odyssey art orders. Really grateful to have him in there.
Heads up: next week Thurston is away on a business trip, so there will be no Black Crusade recording and no Rotgrind that week. The week after we should be back with Black Crusade on the 25th and Rotgrind on the 27th. That gap week turns into production and background work time for me, which honestly I need.
Rotgrind
Rotgrind is happening this week and it should be the conclusion of Orin's arc — he becomes his special boy. Really excited for this one.
The next arc after this should be Rahua's arc. I believe we already have most of the assets ready for it, which gives Skelly some breathing room there.
On the Foundry versions of the PDFs — I really want to make this happen but it's a massive task and right now every dollar of budget is going toward the artists, editors, and animators who are already on the team. If I can find a consistent person to work with on it I will, but I'm not going to do one-off volunteer drops since we need someone we can communicate with reliably. I'll keep looking for a solution.
Side note: we now have a lot of monsters in the Rotgrind bestiary catalogued in Obsidian. At some point I really do want to compile everything into an actual bestiary — we have a solid range from low level all the way up to level 25. I want to update the older PDFs too, since alignment is gone from PF2e remaster and some of the math needs a pass. That's a future project but it's on my radar.
Tales of Bravos — Season of Ghosts
Season of Ghosts production prep is going well on my end — I'm ready to go whenever but schedules this month didn't align for test sessions.
Test sessions this month unfortunately aren't happening. Between Kab going to a convention, Horatius having people in town, others traveling for various reasons — basically every Saturday this month got perfectly blocked out. So test sessions are moving to next month when everyone should be more available.
Everyone has signed their contracts — one person needed a small amendment to get it sorted but that's all taken care of.
Skelly has been assigned all the character art and the main overlay. I still have some of the remaining overlay work to finish on my end.
I need to reconfirm with the full group about the streaming setup — whether everyone's comfortable with sessions being streamed live or if they'd prefer offline recordings. Player comfort comes first.
I'm also working on integrating the Patreon API into the chat module so patron tier can factor into NPC raffle priority during live sessions. Still figuring that out.
The plan for the patron wall of tokens at the episode opener is still in the works — I need to coordinate with EzeDoesIt and Skelly to get that implemented properly.
Warhams Second Edition
There should be a planning meeting happening sometime this month. There is genuine demand out there for Warhammer 40K tabletop show content and I think we're in a good position to keep going with it.
Mikura & Animations
Mikura is doing an incredible job — she finished another animation last week and is hitting roughly one per week. Several of them have already crossed a million views on YouTube, which is huge for channel growth. Every view and every subscriber that finds us through those shorts helps us grow the budget and pay the team better. So thank you to everyone who shares and watches.
Other Updates
Someone flagged that an episode may have gotten skipped on Apple Podcasts — I'm going to go double check that today and fix it if something went wrong.
The Facebook page has been revived. I hate Facebook. But some folks live there and I want to be there for them, so here we are.
I'm building out a more consistent social media posting strategy — weekly "here's what's coming out this week" images and clip schedules across all platforms. Slowly getting there.
Ongoing PDF and bestiary work is on the list for whenever I get a production break.
Thank You
Lots of busy work this week but things are moving. Your support is genuinely what makes all of this possible — the artists, the editors, the animators, the players. Every dollar helps us take better care of the people making these shows.
Please take care of yourselves out there. Love you all — see you next week!
— Zoran & the Narrative Declaration Team