Greetings, comrades.
GNE hasn’t been particularly active much; I’ll occasionally put out an update for some of my homebrew when I’ve found a feature needs some tweaking, but otherwise I haven’t spent much time writing articles or putting out new content.
Part of this is the lack of inspiration; I am very much against the use of click-baity, low-effort content that I see floating around the Internet (whether it’s Facebook, YouTube, or any other site). When I write something for GNE, I want it to be something with some value. It doesn’t have to be Pulitzer-worthy, but something with a purpose beyond just getting views. Hence why I try to focus on stuff I feel like I have something to really talk about, or homebrew that I feel is “up to snuff,” as it were. I think this is also why GNE is extremely small; we have maybe 50 people following us on Facebook, and our lack of constant content certainly contributes to that. But you know; that’s okay. I’d rather be small but have everything on the site have a purpose than be huge and putting out dribble.
This shouldn’t lead you to believe that we are doing nothing, though. Jenn and I have some ideas still being tinkered with that should add some more content here or there. Nothing I want to discuss just yet, but it’ll hopefully be some level of entertaining when it finally hits.
Looking elsewhere, I decided that a majority of my time (and GNE’s content) is going to be spent on homebrew for Dungeons and Dragons; it’s something I’m very passionate about, enjoy working on, and something that I think has a lot of value for people. I’ll still occasionally write articles about “other stuff,” including information about my D&D setting, but these will be few and far between.
Of course, even making homebrew has its share of issues.
One of the frustrating things I face in regards to my homebrew content is making it available to others without burning myself in the process. For example, I could go on Reddit and make constant posts about my content in the various D&D-related subreddits, but at the same time I don’t want to spam. There’s a balance there I need to hit that I need to work on, and it’s clear that few people know of our D&D content because I very rarely see it shared. Another issue; I want my content to look good. This is partially out of my opinion that people will be more likely to give it a shot if it looks well made. In order to do this I need art, and in order to use art I need to get permission from artists who made it. This is especially true for DMsGuild, where it’s of utmost importance that you have the right permissions when using art. And I like DMsGuild because it puts my content out there better than any other media I have access to.
Right now I’ve been sitting on a few homebrew pieces that I haven’t put online because of the lack of said permission; either I can’t seem to reach the person or the content isn’t actually owned by them either and it turns out I was looking at some concept art for a AAA game or blockbuster movie. This is a frustrating conundrum; do I upload without any art, but at least get the content out? Or do I continue to wait until I get permission and then move forward from there?
Ultimately, I decided that waiting is making the content literally worthless; even without art, even if the content doesn’t look very pretty, it’d be better to get it out there in some form than not at all.
So starting now, I will be uploading early-version homebrew here at GNE, with the hope to eventually get permission to use art assets. Once I have that permission it’ll hit version 1.0 and be put onto the DMsGuild, a place where I only want to upload “complete” work (complete in the sense that it looks like a finished product, not that it will never be in need of balancing again).
With that in mind, you can find links to some new homebrew subclasses below.
Monastic Tradition: Way of the Mystic Force
Arcane Traditions: Blue Magic and Sangromancy
The Arcane Athenæum 