Greetings and salutations! A blessed new year and hopefully a wonderful Chryssam and winter festivities for you all. We here at the Dungeon are unspeakably grateful for a very successful first year with Blake’s Dungeon Quarterly Magazine, and doubtless an even better one in 2018. Here are a few things we did in 2017:
- Made our first four issues of BDQM, self-published and hand-curated by yours truly! We want to thank everyone who contributed to each magazine, to Ka-Blam! for being a spectacular publishing platform, and to lots of tweaking in our editing as we learned what worked and what didn’t for future layouts. Everyone loves these things! They’re beautiful, high-quality magazines, and anyone who has touched one is astonished at how good they are. Well worth the price.
- Our beautiful new logo by Jessica Feinberg was absolutely GORGEOUS. The design was based on my original cartoons (which, admittedly, aren’t as awful as I make them out to be) and yet she just elevated them into something absolutely beautiful in such a short amount of time that is certainly black magick. I look forward to working with her more in the future with a remodel of our Patreon artwork, seasonal specials, and more as funds allow.
- We have a shop now! I love a little shop! The website now has its own shop, and in it, we have staff shirts, geek shirts, magazine subscriptions and back issues, and a whole lot more coming. No, really. There’s a really long list of cool shirt designs and coffee mug ideas that we are perpetually adding to and working on.
- We’ve got goblins! And crew! In accompaniment to the new logo design and shirts and shop, we have our first goblin running wild in the Southwest! He’s already taken our magazine to a couple different cons with his “Quest Giving NPC” shirt and is fully stocked in back issues to show off to those we might lure into our Empire, as well as a stack of Goblin Quest tickets for fun times. Likewise, the Drake and Resident Bard have their own shirts, and if you are a contributor and you’d want one, let us know!
- We did our first #DrakesDrawing and already have the next one live!!! One of the cool things I’ve wanted to do is a themed giveaway packed with cool stuff that we can gift to a lucky member of the Empire. The winter giveaway was a Labyrinth-themed box that actually went to one of our regular contributors, Raz, which made me really happy because I got to take pictures of her unboxing to share with you lot later. The next one is Alice In Wonderland themed, and I already have a few fun things to go into the box…
…I’m sure there are more things, but those are the ones I can think of right now. Still, lots of really cool and exciting stuff, and hopefully more of that in the future. right now our goals are:
…Yeah, a lot of those are basically “get this thing to pay for itself” because we have a dragon here and he’s a bit obsessed with gold. But also, we want to do that in fun ways — find advertisers that actually have really cool things that you WANT to see, special events and quirky holidays you might enjoy celebrating, getting to conventions to MEET YOU GUYS and get some awesome content! All very important things.
Anyway, I’ve rambled enough, but I hope everyone has a very prosperous new year, and I hope to see more of you soon!
~Blake the Drake
Resident Dragon & Goblin Wrangler
