Welcome To Our Patreon!

Hello folks, Laurie here, welcome to Chaotic Neutral’s Patreon: a brand new way for you to support the channel in making top tier tabletop roleplaying content!

I’m going to tell you a bit about what this is all about, how you can support us here, what exclusive perks you’ll get and the reasoning behind the decision to launch this Patreon.

Quite simply we’re offering you exclusive monthly Call of Cthulhu episodes! We’ve only got two tiers: a $2 support tier which will help fund the ongoing production of content for this channel and a $6.50 tier which not only nets you the warm fuzzies of helping us make content, but gets you access to those exclusive Cthulhu episodes to boot. 

We’re super excited about Patreon and I’ll tell you for why: firstly because it gives us the ability to do some things that YouTube doesn’t generally reward: like ongoing campaigns! YouTube traditionally loves an ‘episode one’, but you see views drop off for each subsequent episode in the series, despite them all costing the exact same amount to produce. Which is why we’ve been putting everything out as complete one-shot episodes since our D&D campaign wrapped up (though we definitely snuck a series link into Dom’s Cthulhu-verse episodes)! 

That, plus the fact that YouTube revenue across the platform is in the toilet and has been for YEARS now, means that this is really the only way to do the kind of content we want to make at the quality we want to make it at. One Patreon backer is essentially worth thousands of YouTube views and we don’t have to answer to the whims of an algorithm that seemingly changes with the tides. So we can do ongoing campaigns!

Our first foray into that world with Cthulhu starts now: the story of the characters from our latest YouTube video continues here on Patreon with a three episode mini-campaign telling a brand new story in the Dom-verse. Which means from January-March we’ll be journeying through this mini-campaign and after that… It's up to our backers! We can either continue the campaign with the characters (those still alive at least) or tell a new story with new characters and a new cast. 

Our new Patreon plan does mean some changes on the main channel though, we’re going to be putting out fewer videos while the Patreon settles in. We’ve planned to put out one new Cthulhu one-shot on YouTube every three months while continuing to play CoC here on Patreon monthly. That’s still 16 episodes of Cthulhu across the year! The decision behind this move is because YouTube revenue doesn’t even cover the direct costs of the cast and editing for an episode. Our most successful one-shot has nearly 300,000 views and that has BARELY covered those costs, never mind pre-production, Dom’s prep time or overheads like the studio etc. TTRPG content costs a LOT to do well.

But Patreon could change that content plan pretty quickly! We’ve got a really good idea of the number of backers we would need to make this plan sustainable and keep putting out great Cthulhu content both on Patreon and YouTube. And if we exceed that amount we just want to add more content! I want to get to a place where we have Cthulhu one month, then another RPG one-shot on YouTube and an accompanying mini-campaign starting on Patreon the next month. I want us to still be able to play everything from big budget productions like D&D or Daggerheart all the way down to one-page weirdness, rather than just having to do what YouTube rewards… making the exact same thing over and over again until the end of time.

That’s one of the major reasons we’ve splintered this Patreon off from NRB’s: to do all of this we need to be able to accurately see how many people like the idea and want to support what we’re making. To achieve that while incorporating Chaotic Neutral into NRB’s Patreon properly would likely involve adding a brand new tier and then we’d essentially be asking people to pay for a load of content they’re not all that interested in to watch our Cthulhu episodes.

So that’s the plan and we hope you’re up for coming along for the ride! The first episode of our Cthulhu mini-campaign is available right now and we’ve got the others in the can ready to go in February and March, then after that it’s up to our backers!

Laurie x