Celebrating 5 Years BirdieMaps (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

I can’t believe BirdieMaps has existed for more than 5 years now. In that time, so many things happened. As time flies by, it can be easy to forget where I started and how far I’ve come.

Originally, BirdieMaps was meant to share my maps with all of you and earn a little money as a side hustle. Soon it grew from a few dollars to a couple of hundred. When I finished my Master thesis, I had to make a decision that would change my life:
Focusing on the career, or focusing on the thing I love.

Back then, it was a tough decision, yet I’ve never regretted it. All the support and positive feedback I received from all of you helped me go in this direction. Whenever I am depressed or afraid of the future, I see your messages, the love you share, your little stories. And that reminds me, that there is much more purpose behind my decision:

I can bring joy to your table. I can help you escape from the harsh reality in a play of make-believe. And this joy sparks motivation.

Compared to back then, my income is much more stable now, and I can survive well enough to feed my cat Ciri, pay taxes and rent, and even have enough left to feed myself. That’s all I ever wanted.

Thank you all for making this possible!

To celebrate the 5th year of BirdieMaps, all tiers can be joined for free with a 7-day trial. During that time, you can download all maps, modules, update posts, and even surveys and once downloaded, you have them.

What can be expected in the future? Where will BirdieMaps go in the long run?

With the integration of sounds, teleporter and simple scripts in my FoundryVTT Modules i am reaching a limit of additions i can provide to the modules. The Idea was always to offer the library that helps you prepping your session, not offering a complete lore to the map. I could implement moving elements, like patrols of tiles or more animations, but i consider these less helpful and performance heavy. Next up will be levels Integration for all Scenes ! I still wait until i have finished this season of my own campaigns before updating to Foundry V14. Then i can take a closer look at how the levels system works. After that it's just a matter of time until i get all Scenes done with levels.

I am very happy with the FoundryEssentials Module. It offers exactly the options to customize the maps to your needs. I plan to expand the existing libraries with more content.

Next huge project will be "The Evil Guide: Cults" Kickstarter. This Book Trio is made for anyone who wants to embrace the evil side of campaigns. It offers Guidelines, prepping tools, cheatsheets and massive amount of content and a whole campaign. Everything you and your players need to feel like evil overlords.

We made huge progress: currently counting 100 new creatures, 55 new spells, 50 new items, 30 powerful rituals, dozens of new rules expansions and much much more covering more than 300 pages of plain text. We want to make this Kickstarter BIG and RIGHT no matter the cost and time it takes. We test everything, rebalance, throw away ideas and develop new things to improve the quality of our content. But the reality showed us that if you want to go big you need to invest.. a lot... And we did. But sadly thats still not enough. Even with good amounts of savings we are not close to get this heartproject project funded in a way we imagine. We are against the use of generative AI which means all Arts and Designs are handcrafted and done by Human Artists. To get the necessary fundings we aim for minor kickstarter project before. In which we demonstrate the usage of The Evil Guide, in form of small evil Adventures.

What else to Improve?

A huge issue i see is the accessability. 50 unique Maps are easy to grasp. 200 are hard to remember but 1000 is impossible to know. The current thumbnails in FoundryVTT are not useful, same with scrolling patreon to just find a single map. Moulinette is a nightmare to set up and always comes with problems, specifically sounds and scripts not imagining levels... I think it is possible to offer a good working library that can be easily accessed in foundry without a horrible upload system. Luckily i have tracked tagged all my maps internally for a long time now so all this data can be used to build an online library. This will be a huge financial investment. Server mangement is something i definetly need to source out. But thats something for the end of the year.

And lastly BirdieMaps will get its own website. I am very late with this but its time for this Bird to build its own nest. I already set up a domain and need to find the time to build a website.

Thank you for your support and dont forget to grab the free content. :)