First of all, the awesomeness of the monthly Patreon update.

May sees the Patreon campaign at an astounding $423.61 for the first map of the month, then rapidly settling down to more reasonable numbers as the month progresses. The first four posts of the month are above the $300 mark (meaning they will be released under the commercial license), and I’ll be releasing at least the next two after that (so six of nine releases this month).

Also worth noting is that at this point we are less than $30 away from going into the back catalog and releasing older maps under the commercial license every month. Once we reach the $450 mark, I’ll start every month with a list of 4-10 maps previously published to the blog that I would not be embarrassed to find in a commercial product. Then we’ll leave that list up for patrons to vote on and the top map will be re-released under the commercial license at the beginning of the next month when I put up the next list.

Thanks again to all the awesome people who are supporting the blog through Patreon. Because of you, I’ve been able to significantly improve my cartographic skills, spread my wings into new directions, and really FOCUS on my mapping.

With all the maps done for the Mega Delve, I spent a couple of days last month reconnecting the various areas and fixing a few “drift” errors that occurred along the way (where areas don’t quite line up properly).

I’m now into the harder part of putting the rest of the delve together. I’m working on the wandering monster tables which I then have to convert into die drop tables, while also stocking sample areas and providing a bit more detail to the various factions presented in the maps. Getting it out this summer as originally hoped seems like a distant pipe dream now. But progress continues and I should have a bunch of new drop tables to show off in June.

Why June?

Due to some recent changes chez Dyson, I’m currently working out of a different workspace for the month of May. This means significantly less access to a scanner. I’ve already scanned all the May maps (they went out to the backers at the Backstage Pass level at the end of April), but scanning the new drop tables will have to wait until I’m back sitting right beside my scanner again. So that’s June.

There are two other things I’m working on in May:

Dyson’s Deck of Delves is the deck of geomorphic playing cards I posted the sample of at the beginning of April. I expect that once I’ve got these last two commissioned maps off my desk I’ll be focusing a lot of attention on the deck and should be ready to start doing something with them at the beginning of June. A kickstarter was my original goal, but the possibility of just going straight to PoD is also there because it keeps me completely out of the fulfillment portion of the process.

Snail Lords of the Salt Flats is a project I’m writing up and doing bits and pieces of art and maps for also, but that I will not be publishing. Instead, once the manuscript is done, I’m handing it off to Paolo Greco of Lost Pages for him to handle the art, layout, production and distribution aspects – keeping it from consuming all my time while I get to focus back on the other projects of the Dodecahedron.