Retiring the $5 Tier (Legacy Access for Active $5 Patrons!)

Hey everybody, Matt Colville here!

On December 1st we'll be retiring the $5 "Master of Locusts" tier. It will become a "Legacy" tier, and the Master of Locusts patrons who keep their subscription active will still get each new issue of ARCADIA for only $5 a month and retain access to all previous rewards. On December 1st, new patrons who want to pick up the current issue of ARCADIA (as well as all the back-issues) and the Illrigger class can do so with our updated $10 "Topaz" tier (previously known as "Master of Ravens").

However! And this is super important for those in the Legacy Master of Locusts tier: if for any reason Patreon can't process your monthly $5 subscription (you cancel your pledge, there's an issue with charging your payment method on file, etc.), you will NOT be able to get back into the $5 Master of Ravens tier if your payment can't go through. Unfortunately Patreon doesn't give us the tools we'd need to fix this, so double-check that your payment method details are up-to-date — not expired, correct billing address, all that stuff. If you get a payment failed/declined message from Patreon, they do have a support article on how you can manually retry your payment which is currently the only way to try and resolve this.

If you want to get ARCADIA after your pledge becomes inactive, you’ll either need to buy the individual issues on the MCDM Shop or rejoin at the $10 Topaz pledge level.

We’re doing this for… well, for a lot of reasons actually, but mostly because $5 was just way too cheap from the beginning.

We wanted to make “the best 5E ‘zine” and put it out every month and we knew about how much it would cost to produce, but we deliberately avoided establishing a word-count. We wanted to let the articles be as long as they needed to be. We routinely read an early draft of a new article and say “This needs more.” We want our articles to be easy to use; that means including stuff like… encounters or mini adventures that show off new rules, or including retainer-versions of subclasses.

When we picked $5, we didn’t know exactly how long a given ARCADIA issue would be, so we didn’t know exactly how much it would cost to produce. And it costs more now because we’ve hired a full-time artist/art outsource manager (yay, Nick!) to help coordinate getting all the dope art in each issue and we've contracted our Supertesters for more dedicated playtesting support. We've also added an accessibility pass, so every issue is screen reader-friendly now, which  includes a grayscale version that's more printer-friendly. All this increases the production cost for every issue.

We’re proud of ARCADIA and we think… it really is the best 5E ‘zine out there! But $5 was not a reasonable price, and it’s time to course-correct based on better data now that we're almost a year in.

So that’s the straight dope. We’re raising the tier price for new patrons to $10, but if you’re a current patron at the $5 level or join at the $5 Master of Locusts tier before December 1st, it will continue being $5 for you for as long as your subscription remains active.

FAQs: Tier and Pricing Changes

Q: When's the latest I can join the $5 Master of Locusts tier?

A: We'll be retiring this tier on December 1st, so you have to subscribe before then if you want to take advantage of the reduced tier price. Our advice is that you join that tier by November 29th at the latest so Patreon has a chance to collect your subscription payment for the month of November. This way if there's an error with your payment method you have time to resolve it before the tier is no longer available.

Q: Is the price for ARCADIA changing on the MCDM Shop?

A: Yes; to reflect the changes in the Patreon tier pricing and to keep up with the production costs, each issue's price will be bumped from $7 to $12 on December 1st (this affects previous issues as well).

Q: I'm already pledged at the $10 "Master of Ravens" tier. Do I need to do anything? Is anything changing for me?

A: Nope! The only change we've made to that tier is the name (it's now called "Topaz" and added the cute lil' Topaz Wyrmling art to it). One thing to keep in mind: if you want to change your pledge to the $5 tier before it goes away, follow the steps on this Patreon support article before December 1st. This will update your monthly subscription to $5 instead of $10.

Q: Just double-checking… as long as my $5 pledge remains active, what are the rewards I get?

A: Same as usual :D You get each new issue of ARCADIA, keep access to all the previous issues' PDFs, and also can download the Illrigger PDF at any time. You'll also be able to view the future ARCADIA Table of Contents preview posts as well as any previous posts locked to the $5 tier.

Q: I need to cancel my monthly $5 pledge. What's the best way to keep the rewards I've earned so far?

A: Understandable — you'll want to download all the ARCADIA issue PDFs and the Illrigger PDF. You can either save them to your computer or host them on your cloud storage service of choice, such as Dropbox or Google Drive (just make sure those files are set to private). You can find all the issues of ARCADIA attached to this post, and you can download the Illrigger PDF here.

Q: If my subscription to the $5 legacy tier isn't renewed, can I rejoin it?

A: Unfortunately, no :( Patreon does not provide the tools necessary for us to add anyone to a tier or resolve payment errors. We wish we could! If your $5 pledge becomes inactive, you would need to rejoin at the $10 "Topaz" tier to get the current and past PDFs of ARCADIA and the Illrigger.