Updates from the Wizard - Jan 19th 2026 (Patreon)

(Sorry, at the hospital and forgot to set this to free.)

Audio Transcript:

(Used Davinci Resolve's Audio Transcript feature, apologies for any errors)

Please leave any questions you have for me in the comments below!

Hey everybody, it's Zoran. I thought I could go ahead and try to do these types of videos either weekly or a bit more often—mostly just to say "hey, this is what we're working on this week, this is the progress that we made," and keep everybody in the loop.

Technology & Tools Updates

Donation/Pity Point System Tool

We've had several tools finished for Narrative Declaration. We usually use a bunch of programs in the background that make some of the livestream stuff work—integrations like "if you donate, it fills up a bar" and when it reaches a certain point, someone gets a Hero Point. Now with the Pity Point system, whoever contributes in any way helps fill that bar, and then you can have us be tortured by using the Pity Points for complications.

That tool we basically Frankenstein'd together (Kitsnow helped us out on this one) has now been converted to be its own GUI program, all baked in together. We're very happy to finally get that done because having to launch five different things just to get that going was annoying—and then when something would crash, it'd be a problem.

New Foundry Camera System

The other tool we got was a new camera system for Foundry VTT. This was done by me and an old buddy of mine who knows programming (though he has a full-time job maintaining a website, so he can't help as much anymore).

What it does:

By default, keeps the camera panned to keep all players in frame as everyone explores the map

When combat happens, zooms into whoever's turn it is (including enemies)

If someone targets something, it dynamically zooms back to keep both the targeter and target in frame

For players targeting enemies, draws a line showing who they're targeting

Helps viewers understand at a glance what's happening in combat

Previously, we were using Monk's Common Display, which did some of this but not everything we wanted. Now I can also control the camera myself—before, I'd have to ask Thirsty to switch it, and he'd sometimes forget because he's concentrating on everything else.

Why this matters: A lot of these tools help me pay less attention to production and more to actually playing. The players and Thurston have noticed when I'm "in the weeds" of the tech—like when it gets to my turn and I'm scrambling to catch up because I was fixing something in the background.

Player Health Bars & Hero Point Sync

We've finished a tool for player health bars. This is mostly for Rotgrind (we'll try to implement for other campaigns later).

Features:

Health bars for everybody with dynamic bar and shake animations

Hero Points are now synced to the character sheet automatically

No more manually changing Hero Points when players use them

Player name, class, level, and nameplate info all sync to character sheets

Indicators on top of the nameplate showing buffs and debuffs (fire damage stacks, bleeding, etc.)

This means for other campaigns, it's so much easier to maintain these overlays.

Animated Tokens That Talk

Those of you who watch the video versions of our podcast know we use reaction images through Discord Fuji—it picks up who's in Discord, and when we talk, our images go from idle to talking animations (Skelly animates these for us).

New feature: We've taken those animations and included them for the tokens in Foundry. The tokens now talk when we talk in Discord. So if I'm talking, my token will be talking the same as my overlay image.

I've also added Fast Flip so characters can flip their tokens to help roleplay on the stage more—like actors on a stage having fun with it. This should also help for YouTube Shorts when we want to zoom in on that.

Complication System in Foundry

We've added the complication system baked into Foundry.

How it works:

You submit a complication to us, and it automatically populates a spreadsheet

At the start of each session, I ask players to pick three complications they want

They mark down three, I export an Excel sheet, import it into the module

Whenever they roll a natural one, they get a button to click saying "roll complication"

If we incur something randomly, there's a GM button (a skull) to trigger it

When clicked, three cards pop up on the player's screen with your name, what you described, everything

There's also an option to randomly roll from anything on the spreadsheet

This means when it randomly pulls from there, your stuff actually gets shown on the show—you're more integrated.

Art & Content Production

Battle Maps

I've completed two or three battle maps for Rotgrind so far for Thurston, with more to go. I prefer having a grid when we can because it gives characters and everyone a stage, and it gives viewers context to what's going on.

Jamie usually does a lot of the maps for Rotgrind, but she's not available for a bit due to sickness, so I'm picking up the slack.

Art Assets (Skelly)

Skelly has been hard at work on a ton of art assets for Rotgrind. She has maybe one or two pieces left, and then she can start doing the Black Crusade art pieces.

We've scheduled a lot of this in December, but everyone was on break, then January came and it's "oh god we gotta get this figured out." If a delay happens, I'll let everybody know—I don't want to death march Skelly. As much as we've raised her pay, I don't want her working until 5 AM every night. If we have to delay some recordings to give her time, we will.

Podcast Audio Fixes (Eze)

I've asked Eze to fix some podcast issues. There was a communication failure on my part—the podcast versions of Rotgrind had the entire intro song, which is too long. For video, we keep the full intro because we paid a lot for it and want to show off Lalo's skills. But for podcast, you're not seeing anything, so it needs to be shorter.

Eze is going back to redo all of it, cutting down the intros. I'll be replacing the audio gradually—it takes time for platforms to update.

One episode also got duplicated, which was probably my fault. We'll get that figured out.

Black Crusade Show: "WarHams: A Chaos Odyssey"

The Name

The Black Crusade show is now called WarHams: A Chaos Odyssey.

The pitch involves a ship we are cursed to—we don't own or control this ship. We're using "WarHams" as the name for anything Warhammer-wise we do. Other name options included "Chaos Theory" and "Chaos Divided" (since we're all separate Chaos powers and not really united), but "Chaos Odyssey" fit better because of the ship and the journey we're taking.

Recording Schedule

We didn't get to record on the 12th because Speaker was sick and we wouldn't have everybody. We're doing it today (when this video comes out) later in the night for the first test session. This actually means Hulky gets to join us—he was going to be out until the 15th, so it works out.

Recording dates: 19th, then 26th for test sessions to get characters figured out and mechanics down. We're also getting the D100 system working in Foundry.

Team Excitement

The team is super excited. Normally when we start a campaign, there's a "wait for the energy to build" phase. But our Black Crusade chat has been super active since December—"oh we could do this," "there's this"—they really want to play. I get to be a Tzeentch sorcerer and be scared of wolves the entire time.

Kingmaker Wrap-Up

Final Episodes

We're aware that once Kingmaker ends, this month we'll have about two broken recordings from when things started crashing on us. We're going to try to string that together. Then there's an animation that will capstone what happened—it won't be a 30-minute epic (we don't have enough money for that), but we've asked Mercure to do what she can for a 3-4 minute piece to nicely send off the campaign.

We did a phenomenal job with it. A lot of people liked it—evident from responses and people banging down my private messages asking "where's my episode?!"

Anticipated Patron Changes

We suspect a lot of people will leave once Kingmaker is done, saying "thanks for your time, this Patreon was cool, but I was only here for Kingmaker." We understand—if you came for one service and we don't have that anymore, you're gonna leave.

We don't know how big the impact will be. We're crossing our fingers and preparing for uncertainty. If people aren't into our new stuff, that's okay—money and economy being what they are, you need to take care of yourself first.

We always encourage people to put themselves first. As much as this is my job, I understand this is a subscription for entertainment. Your wallet matters.

Kingmaker Merch

All Kingmaker merch will be gone after this month. If you go to narrativedeclaration.com and check the merch section, get it now—end of January or beginning of February, it all goes away.

Business & Sustainability

My Personal Goals

One of my plans for this year is to offset my reliance on Narrative Declaration. I'd like to better my personal YouTube and Twitch channels so that can be my sole income, instead of taking a chunk from Narrative Declaration plus my personal stuff just to survive.

If I can do that, Narrative Declaration can grow on its own. I can figure out taxes, and the extra money that would be available could go to pay raises or hiring more help so things are better taken care of instead of me doing mostly everything.

If you want to come say hi: twitch.tv/zoranthewizard or my YouTube channel.

Sponsorship Considerations

My philosophy has been that sponsorships shouldn't touch anything that's paid—you already paid, you shouldn't get ads. Sometimes YouTube throws ads in anyway, despite membership.

We've tried to get tabletop companies to work with us. Fablecraft was the only one who really went all-in—they even did voice acting for some modules. They were great, really awesome people. Unfortunately, things happened with that company. Multiple companies in the industry are struggling.

Video game marketing has more money—a streamer with 500 viewers might get $700-1000 to showcase a game. For tabletop, we'd approach companies asking for $500 and offering all this work (six sessions, hundreds of thousands of potential views), and they'd say they can't afford it.

So we're considering other types of sponsorships—Raycon, etc. We've had Hello Fresh and similar offers but passed. If we do sponsorships, I want products we actually like. And paying Patrons will never see ads—that's immoral in my eyes.

Website & Pitch Materials

Our website is done at narrativedeclaration.com. It's a nice presentation of who we are, our shows, where to find them, notifications about ongoing vs. concluded shows. Really happy about that for when I hand out business cards at work trips.

I also need to update our pitch decks.

Additional Updates

Linux Switch

I've been switching over to Linux as a personal thing. Windows has been problematic. Linux has allowed us to get all these types of tools I've been wanting, which has been really awesome.

New Player Groups

I just finished a Discord conversation with some people interested in doing more Pathfinder stuff. Going to try to get them tested through the Pathfinder Beginner Box if we can figure out a schedule—that's always the biggest problem. People have full-time jobs.

I wish I could pay players full-time to play tabletop forever. We don't make enough. If we could, we'd have an episode every day.

There's also another group I'm trying to get in for Starfinder, but it's figuring out schedules. Sometimes people say they want to play, but when it comes to brass tacks, they can only do an hour—and we can't do that.

Returning Players

Question from Electrostatic: Will any of the Kingmaker crew be returning for different campaigns?

Yes! Kabs is ready to play, Salty still wants to play, Minerva still wants to play. Froggy ,Madi will no longer be working with us—we wish them well with their ambitions.

Pricing for Exclusive Content

Question from Alfa: Will Dark Heresy be the same price tier as Kingmaker?

Yes. The entire point of changing that Patreon tier was that paying all players, game masters, getting assets—it was messing up the budget. We looked at how other companies do it (Dimension 20, Critical Role's side stuff) and decided any exclusive paid campaign goes on the ~$10 tier on Patreon.

YouTube membership has similar pricing but is delayed—Patreon always gets things fastest because Patreon gives us a better percentage (YouTube takes 30%).

Warhammer Fantasy

Question from Joshua Chapman: Is there a way to crowdfund a Warhammer Fantasy project?

We nearly did Warhammer Fantasy instead of Black Crusade—it was on the docket because of the new Old World RPG. I love Fantasy and wanted to be a Dwarf Slayer. But the team really wanted Black Crusade instead, so Black Crusade won the vote.

Character Art Tokens

Question from Kaiju: Will you release the character art tokens for the Underground Arc of Rotgoons?

Yes, I apologize for not being good about that. When that stuff came through, I was super busy and dropped the ball. It's on my agenda for this year to get better with the process of PDFs and behind-the-scenes stuff for that tier—GM stuff, monsters, maps, character art.

Some of it is already up for the beginning stuff, but the later part of the show was a case of "putting railroad tracks in front of me as we're building" because we had to take a drastic turn from our original plans.

Closing

Thank you guys so much for supporting us over the years and sticking with us. Whether you're here for a short time or a long time, I greatly appreciate your support—you've basically changed lives here.

We've been doing Narrative Declaration for a couple years, but rolling dice with you guys? Over five years. That's mind-boggling. When we first started, I thought people would give like a hundred dollars and that'd be it. Now people rely on their health insurance from this. It's stressful making sure everyone can pay their bills.

You guys made that happen, and we greatly appreciate it.

I'll report back next week with our progress. Thank you so much, and I'll catch you guys next week!