Starting off with the biggest news first: our new partnership with Wizards of the Coast! As mentioned recently on D&D News and our podcast episode of Dragon Talk, we are now working with Wizards in an official capacity! We've gotten a licensing agreement that allows us to produce D&D content in braille, as well as acknowledgement of our work being done on image descriptions in preparation for the completed books. There are still a few things that we're working out with them, but getting the official go ahead from the biggest name in the industry is so incredibly rewarding. We're always in need of more volunteers, so if you'd like to work on the D&D 5e books with us, please let us know!
Please join us in welcoming our newest Guild Leader, Lilah! She is our Master Wordsmith, responsible for communications which includes blog posts, social media, emails, and possibly more as we work on getting her involved with all of our behind the scenes happenings. Lilah is a tabletop lover like the rest of us, having spent the last five years involved in GURPS, Pathfinder, and D&D 5e games. She primarily plays a war hammer wielding hill dwarf paladin who dreams of being the greatest brewer in the realm. Lilah brings a lot of love and passion to our group, aspiring to create her own nonprofit in the future to help underprivileged youth. We're excited to have her join the DOTS Guild, and have some great new content planned she'll be taking the lead on! We do still have many things we could use assistance with, so if you're interested in helping out please give this post a read!
We teased some Penny Arcade news last month, and can finally share a small part of it! When we were at the PA offices we recorded an episode of This Old Lair with Jerry Holkins (TychoBrahe) for the Club PA Patreon. Normally, these episodes are restricted to Club PA patrons only but they love us so much and wanted to share our chat with as many people as possible. They were generous enough to make the recording available to everyone, patron or not! You can find that recording here. If you're not already a patron, please consider supporting those amazing folks.
Speaking of the lovely Penny Arcade folks, we have a PAX Unplugged update! We were not able to get a booth this year but will be attending all three days. You may be able to find us hanging around the Die Hard Dice booth again, but we're still working on that. In other news, we will be hosting a panel (currently) scheduled for Sunday, December 8th at 12:00pm in the Leviathan Theatre. This panel will not be streamed by PAX, but we may see if we can stream something through our own channels. Panelists include: Jess Dempsey [President/Director, DOTS RPG Project], Tyler Palermo [Operations, DOTS RPG Project], Adam Davis [Executive Director, Game to Grow], Jennifer Kretchmer [Executive Producer, Monsters & Fables], Samwise Gamegee [Co-Producer, Heroes Without Limits], Nathaniel Kreiman [Producer, RPGKitchen]. We're super excited to be able to speak to everyone here and hope to catch the attention of new publishers so we can work on even more accessibility improvements. We're also looking to host a meetup the night of Saturday December 7th, so if you have any recommendations for an accessible location please let us know!
We're moving forward with some new plans for our braille dice, and hope to start working on casting them in the near future. The 3d printers are wonderful for some tests and prototypes, but we're finding they'e not great long term for mass production. With handmade dice being much more common now, we've found some great partners to help us through this process. Unfortunately there's been a few snags so far with problems with the files and master prints, but we're working through them! Hopefully we get it squared away soon and are able to begin this entirely new process. Running the numbers on things we realized this will be a lot more effective, efficient, and cheaper in the long run. We'll be able to get even more dice out and donated in a shorter amount of time once we're in the full swing of things, which is super exciting!
We've started talks with some of the well known wood making companies in the gaming industry, trying to create items that will be able to handle the size of our braille dice. All of the creators are still currently in the brainstorming phase, but knowing these companies we have the potential for some beautiful pieces. They may be available to the general public as well as be used in charity auctions and raffle prizes. More news to come on that when we have it!
We're now registered on Amazon Smile! When you shop on Amazon.com, a percent of your purchase gets donated to us! Visit our page to set DOTS as your Smile charity: https://smile.amazon.com/ch/83-3541185
Note: Amazon Smile is currently only valid when used on a web browser.
At the recommendation of some supporters, we've also set up some Amazon wishlists! There's a list of our supplies we go through on a regular basis as well as dream items we plan on purchasing in the future when we have more funding, or items we wish we could use for various projects.
That's all for this blog! Be sure to follow along on our social media channels for more updates as they happen. Thank you for your continued support!
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