The big number has been hit in the Dodecahedron Patreon Campaign. This is the “Commercial License” goal. And it requires that I start updating my patrons on how this will shake out.

First off, here’s the text of the goal:

Commercial License

$300 per Map or Adventure

I want to be able to just give away my maps to everyone to do whatever they want with them. However, the constraints of capitalism require that I somehow “earn a living” in order to pay rent and eat and access the internet. If we hit this goal, for every map that I get $300 or more for I will also release that map completely into the public domain so you can do whatever you want with it. Unlike other goals, this will be measured per map – so I’ll release the exact amount raised by each map once we reach this goal, as the first release of the month brings in roughly twice as much as the eighth or ninth release.

What will happen once we break $300 funding is I’ll post what the actual funding for each map is – after the first map each month, funding starts to drop, after the fifth, funding is significantly lower. Each map over the $300 line will be released under a free commercial license for anyone / everyone to use. As a bonus, for the first six months (maybe longer) any roll-over funds above the $300 on a map will be applied to the next map in the month to try to push it over the $300 line, and so on until we can’t quite hit $300 for a map – at which point the rest of the maps that month will still be released for free, but under the current “personal use only” license instead of the “full commercial license”.

Now, I’ve talked about how funding works on Patreon – a lot of patrons are funding one, two or five maps in a month. Some hit their monthly cap early, others don’t have a monthly cap. Here’s what December funding looked like (it’s a screen capture of the actual Patreon back end):

We’ll ignore the “processed” stuff in green (although if you want to look closely at it, roughly $4 per map was lost to bad credit card information or abandoned patrons that month – pretty good overall compared to some months where it was as high as $13 per map). What we are looking at for this is the amount pledged for each map, and how it drops off at a rate of roughly $20 per map.

What will happen next month (and all months going forward while we are over the $300 line) is I will post the actual pledge total with each map as I post it. For now if the total is over $300, I’ll also roll over the extra to the next map to try to get it over the $300 mark, and so on.

Every map that hits the $300 line using this system will be released under a free commercial license for anyone to use. The only restrictions in this license will be the requirement that the credit still be given to me (“Cartography by Dyson Logos”, “Maps on pages X and XX by Dyson Logos”, etc).

Maps that are posted later in the month (that don’t hit the $300 goal) will be posted under the current license (free for personal use, and free for non-commercial use under the gentleperson’s agreement on the Copyright page of the blog). So all maps remain free for the end-user, but some will be free for commercial endeavours also.

My goal is to try to put out something stunning for the first map of each month. Something begging for adventures and modules to be written for it. We’ll see how this adventure in cartography pans out over the next few months. But even more important than all that is to acknowledge the incredible flow of support we’ve received for the campaign in the past week. Last Tuesday I posted the Patreon funding drive article because we were at 87% of the way to the $300 target. As I’m writing this post (actually on Tuesday morning, but it is getting posted Wednesday so it doesn’t overwhelm the Tuesday map of the dwarven outpost in the Dyson Mega Delve) we’ve reached funding of $308.75 – 103%. All in a week! Extrapolating from the current reduction in funding per map after the first, every $20 over the $300 line we get will free up another map for commercial release!

You are all awesome. Thank you for your continued patronage to make this project a success!