March 2022 Creator of the Month – TaleSpire Community

Well this month, I wanted to do something different. As we approached the 4,000 slab and board mark I wanted to do a special shout out to the entire TaleSpire Community as well as the team at Bouncy Rock. So as we got closer I was monitoring the counts, and with the normal pace I had expected us to reach the goal in a few days.

Well as life would have it (surgery for me, ER visit for my son), what was supposed to take about a week took four days. We got 57 new slabs and boards within the span of four days, over double the standard pace which was already good.

So here we are, as we write this we’re already at 4,038 slabs and boards and growing. I’d love to point out some highlights but there are so many it’s virtually impossible. I’m so proud to be part of this community, to see it grow, and see the amazing creations and creativity this community offers. From the Bouncy Rock team who has done an incredible job, to the incredible builders, the modding community, and all the players.

On a personal note, I’ve been excited since the kickstarter about this, and as with any kickstarter I wasn’t sure if it would really happen. I’m so glad it did and proud to be part of this community.

Community Builds Then and Now

February 2022 Creator of the Month – Scarnor

Welcome to February! This month we’re featuring Scarnor as our creator of the month.

Scarnor has been building since beta and ever since early access and as we get closer to a full scale launch has been more proactively building.

He’s also a good friend of fellow creator, Istallri, and so they’ve worked together on a number of big projects.

He’s a big RPG video game player, and has lost endless hours to mods on Skyrim and Oblivion (so many CTD). The TES series has a big impact on his building style and visions he brings to life in TaleSpire. He keeps in mind how dungeons work in TES and then tries to reproduce the same in TaleSpire.

Outside Talespire, he’s an illustrator and a concept artist. He loves drawing monsters, maps and even character sheets! A part of his work can be seen here : https://www.instagram.com/antoine_amelin/ . Personally I find this very impressive.

Well congratulations Scarnor for being our February 2022 Creator of the Month. Great work, and can’t wait to see what you create next.

Featured Scarnor Slabs & Boards

January Creator of the Month – PsiaBaba

Happy New Year from Tales Tavern! This month we’re featuring PsiaBaba as our creator of the month.

PsiaBaba joined the TaleSpire creation bandwagon back in June of 2021. He missed the kickstarter by a day, and kicked himself ever since until he could finally get it in Early Access.

A map building enthusiast from childhood he would draw battle maps and tape them together for his toy soldiers, and it hasn’t gone away. Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon all the way up to Cities Skylines fed his need.

Well now he finally got TaleSpire and we’re so glad he has. The constant perfectionist has to fight his urge to nitpick his way through things and so intentionally pushes to release things before he would ‘consider them done’, because, they’d never be done.

Hey also loves drawing, chess, and apparently can never have enough tea.

Well we just want to say congratulations to PsiaBaba for being our January 2022 Creator of the Month. Great work, and can’t wait to see what you create next.

Featured PsiaBaba Slabs & Boards

Slab
5443 Assets32.75w x 24.5d x 17.25h
Slab
4493 Assets63.75w x 45.25d x 18.75h

December Creator of the Month – HolloFox

December, the last month of the year. And the end of our first year with creator of the month awards. This month we’re taking a different tact. As TaleSpire grows and develops the community around it grows and changes. Part of that is the TaleSpire modding community that is doing amazing things and bringing things to life in new and exciting ways.

HolloFox, is an avid gamer for over 20 years and has been in to TTRPGs for almost 10 years. He loves fantasy and sci-fi settings and can’t get enough of Starfinder. But more related to TaleSpire, he has been running the modding community since before Early Access. He’s been responsible for liaising with Thunderstore and the community to get hosting. He builds primarily framework plugins that give future mod developers the ability to expand and write their own mods with his tools. His goal is to really streamline the mods and continue to lower the barrier to using them. All his projects are currently open source and driven by demand in the community.

He’s well connected in the TaleSpire community having good connections with Demongund, BlueBoxRPG, and of course modders like Lord Ashes. One of his biggest projects with Lord Ashes is the Extra Assets framework which allows importing of custom assets such as Minis and Particle Effects. He’s also develops a lot of quality of life plugins to improve the entire experience.

For those interested, make sure to check the TaleSpire modding discord where he posts bounties and gives support for anyone who asks. He also has a Patreon if you’d like to support his great work. And even if not, check out his mods on ThunderStore

HolloFox, we just want to say a personal thanks from us and the community for all you’ve done and all you continue to do. It’s impressive and we can’t wait to see all the things coming that you build, or that your work has helped foster.

November Creator of the Month – BrotherHanan

We’ve reached November and our next to the last creator of the month for the year! This month we feature a creator who doesn’t just think outside the box, he isn’t anywhere near it.

BrotherHanan, dubbed Lord of Kinetics after a petition in the TaleSpire Discord, is the incredible mind behind some of the most notable and unique creations you’ll see in TaleSpire. He started an entire discord group who developed a modular system for quickly building modern cities (Mod City) which was impressive enough. But he also built giant monsters, huge and creative vehicles, and eccentric structures like Baba Yaga’s Walking Hut. Months ago he went dark…. Turns out that he and Istallri were busy collaborating with College Humor’s popular D&D Show, Dimension 20: The Seven!

Well now he’s BACK in action with a fistful of new creations to share, and all of the official Dimension 20 battlemaps are now available for you to sink your claws into– along with the rest of his ridiculous constructions! He’s also recently discovered a love for live-streaming, where he has just crafted a crazy Dwarven City Set, complete with Statues!

BrotherHanan wants to thank you for being a part of TaleSpire, and is sending lots of love from Canada. 🍁

You can click Here to join his Discord Community, or enjoy some extra perks and support him on Patreon by Clicking Here!

And keep up to date through your favorite social media:
YouTube.com/BrotherHanan
Twitter.com/BrotherHanan
Twitch.tv/BrotherHanan
Instagram.com/BrotherHanan

Featured BrotherHanan Slabs & Boards

October Creator of the Month – Demongund

It’s October! Okay, yeah you probably already knew that. But what you didn’t know, until you read the title, is that Demongund is our October creator of the month. If you’ve been around TaleSpire for any length of time you’ve probably heard him, seen him, seen his work or any of the above.

He has been around here since the start of Beta, and has created some of the highest quality work in his builds. Forge of Fury and Curse of Strahd are his standouts and he’s got full collections you can check out. Curse of Strahd Collection and Forge of Fury Collection.

He’s collaborated with Istallri, Hollofox and the modding community, worked with John from BlueBoxRPG and has an incredible patreon where he interacts and creates incredible encounter boards. He has two youtube channels one for Demongund and one for Virtual Tabletop Journey, plus we even have some things going on with him that are in the works now and can’t wait to see them. So he’s one busy guy.

But who is Demongund? He’s a dad and long time video gamer. He loves building maps and creating quality work for TaleSpire and it shows.

Great job again and congratulations Demongund! Keep up the good work.

Featured Demongund Slabs & Boards

Board
Slab
6480 Assets75w x 66d x 38.5h
Slab
5954 Assets71w x 60d x 18.75h
Board
4110 Assets56.25w x 25.5d x 59h
Board
3773 Assets64w x 65d x 21.75h

September Creator of the Month – Gogots

We’ve made it to September and we’re excited to announce our fifth creator of the month. Gogots is a new creator who was chomping at the bit during Beta and jumped on TaleSpire as soon as Early Access went live. He’s come out of the gate guns blazing and has an impressive array of slabs and boards already with 48 slabs and boards and many of them put into some great collections of modular pieces.

Gogots has been creating maps for role playing games for a long time. First of course in 2d, but now with TaleSpire he’s moved on to 3d and we’re glad to have him. He loves being able to share what he creates as it’s something he’s always done and TaleSpire lets him continue this tradition.

As another french speaker, like our previous Creator of the Month Istallri, he also makes tutorial videos in french you can see at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z34qirh_9XY&list=PLtnDce8wD7UGqdEFF69ZapFdIbASDADRF .

As mentioned he’s created a lot of modular slabs such as the set at https://talestavern.com/collections/modular-tiles-2/ and we’re excited to see more to come. He also creates many complex slabs for his games that you can see some featured below or check out his profile for more.

As always we’ll be sending him a Tales Tavern mug and T-Shirt in appreciation for all his hard work. Great job again and congratulations Gogots!

Featured Gogots Slabs & Boards

Slab
by gogots
538 Assets18w x 18.25d x 21h
Slab
by gogots
1047 Assets34.25w x 34d x 9.75h
Slab
by gogots
808 Assets17.75w x 17.5d x 28.75h
Slab
by gogots
3181 Assets41w x 40.25d x 14.5h

August Creator of the Month – Istallri Astra

Welcome to August! And another featured creator of the month. This month we’re back to covering one of our creators that has been here since the beginning of the TaleSpire Beta. Istallri is not only one of our more prolific creators, he’s also given back so much to the community we just want to do him justice, and no matter how much we say, it won’t be enough.

Istallri is definitely a big time geek and cocktail lover, but he’s done so much more for the TaleSpire Community, lets see if we can list some of it.

YouTube – First he has an Amazing youtube channel with build tips, guides, trailers for TaleSpire packs, and much more. Whether you need building tips, photo tips, or simply want to watch his amazing visuals on his creations, you must check it out!

Charity – Istallri not only played in the BlueBox RPG Charity Stream for St. Judes Childrens Research Hospital but also helped to create the video of the whole charity stream

Community – Not only is Istallri got great tutorials but he helps out others though his amazing video editing skills and even helped create our logo and a few graphics for Tales Tavern.

Despite all this he’s had time to create 3 Free Fantasy Adventures with Tolkraft that you can get at https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/18585/Dendrobat-Prod that include so much, including maps for TaleSpire.

Oh, and before we forget, he and Brother Hanan both created all the amazing battle boards for the upcoming season of Dimension 20. Wow! Check out the new Dimension 20 trailer.

What can we say? This community wouldn’t be the same without him and we here are proud to feature him as the creator of the month. Great job Istallri! We’ll be in touch to get you your Tales Tavern mug and t-shirt.

Featured Istallri Slabs

Enter to win a Steam Gift card and more!

July is an exciting month here at the Tavern. We’ve got a lot in the works and wanted to give you a heads up on it all. Check what we have below. There’s something for everyone:

St. Jude Children’s Hospital Charity Event

BlueBoxRPG is hosting a charity streaming event with LordGosumba to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Hospital. We’ll be providing more details soon, but block out time on your calendar on Saturday, July 17th at 2 PM CST (Noon PST/3 PM EST). During this very special event you can see Demongund, Istallri, Jonny Ree and Jason (Dwarf) from Bouncy Rock, and myself, the Mad Wizard of Tales Tavern as we play D&D and support a very worthwhile charity. Come to watch the fun, or if just to see what kind of stupid crazy moves we make.

Tales Tavern Author Search

On the Tavern you’ve always been able to search for slabs and boards by creators by searching their names. To further simplify finding your favorite creator, there is an option to search for creator profiles, specifically. Just change the drop down to ‘search creators’ on the ‘results’ page or on the ‘browse by creator’ page. You can easily find your favorite creator by typing their name. It displays their four most liked submissions and you can click to their profile as well.

Need some Ko-fi? Coffee?

Ko-fi is another way to support your favorite creators. Besides the links to their twitch, youtube, and patreon pages, creators can now add a link to their Ko-fi page on their creator profile. Because any creator can use more Ko-fi !

Slab Asset Replacement Tool in Beta

Last month we rolled out our Slabalyzer tool that analyzes and optimizes (mostly removing duplicate) assets, but now we’ve got more cooking. Our Slab Asset Replacement Tool will allow you to remove or replace tiles and props in a slab. This tool also updates the slab format from V1 to V2 (it does not replace the actual deprecated assets at this point).

We’ve got a lot of plans for this tool with both a free version and an enhanced Patreon only version. For now we’re rolling out this in beta to our Patreons at any support level. If you want to check it out and help support this site in developing new tools, you can find our Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/talestavern .

Note this is a very first blush and there are a lot of hiccups we’ll have to work through, but wanted to get it out so you can play with it and help us make sure we catch them all and we make this as useful as possible.

Badges! I do need stinking badges! And a chance at a Steam Gift Card

Well, enough serious work, we wanted to add some more fun interactivity on the site. So we’re rolling out new badges you can earn later this month. Post a slab, earn a badge. Post a lot of slabs, get another. Like something, comment, etc. now you’ll get rewarded (if only in a small way) for being active on the site.

Before we do that, we want your input. We could spend all our creative juices coming up with titles, images, etc. for the badges. But why do that when we can bribe you to do the work? Simply take the survey below, and let us know your creative ideas for what badges we should give out, what they should be named, and what images should be used. We’re using TaleSpire asset pics for the badges, so it will take some creativity. And come up with your best D&D or TTRPG names for the badges. Let’s have some fun with this.

Everyone who fills out the survey will get entered. And if we use any part of your idea (name, image, etc) we’ll give you extra entries into the drawing. Go crazy, have fun, we can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with.

The deadline to enter is July 16th so we can review and pick a winner and announce it the weekend of July 17-18. Thanks in advance for everyone who enters!

Click here for the Tales Tavern Badge Survey

June Creator of the Month – Squid

Welcome to June! And to our second creator of the month. This month, you the community, picked our winner. We looked at all the new creators since Early Access began and you voted. Squid was voted as our creator of the month and besides getting accolades from the community, we’ll also be sending him a Tales Tavern mug and t-shirt.

Squid is 29 year old from the UK and has been playing D&D for only 3 years. Despite this he has already turned out to be a great creator and supporter of the community. He’s active in the TaleSpire discord as well as part of our collaborative Rime of the Frost Maiden build team. You can see many of his builds as part of the full Rime of the Frost Maiden TaleSpire Campaign build and he’s been a huge asset there.

Squid uses TaleSpire as his wind down after work, and also preparation for his weekend campaign he runs. Squid truly is a community asset and in his own words, “Sharing creations and building together is what truly makes TaleSpire special and I look forward to seeing more from everyone.”

We here at TalesTavern can’t wait to see more from him and we’re so glad he joined the collaborative build. And really proud to showcase him as our June 2021 creator of the month. Great job Squid.

Below you’ll find a few of his builds, and please follow him as there will be many more to come.

Featured Squid Slabs

Help us pick the June Creator of the Month

TaleSpire has many great creators that have been building since Alpha or early Beta. But this month we want to look at the new creators. Those who have only had the software since Early Access release are the ones we want to to focus on this month.

So help us out, and simply go visit our list of new TaleSpire creators and vote on who you want to win. Help them earn the accolades of their peers, and a little recognition and a gifts from us here at Tales Tavern. It’s as simple as that. You must be logged in to vote. Click here to go and start voting.

The voting will stop on May 31st so we can announce the winner on June 1st.

May Creator of the Month – Gengus4

We’re kicking off the celebration of TaleSpire Early Access with our first featured creator of the month. For May 2021, our creator of choice is Gengus4.

Gengus has been a prolific digital creator with 79 slabs published on this website since November 2020 and growing. At this point he’s created more slabs than any other member, but quality isn’t lost with the sheer quantity of content. His slabs have incredible complexity and are simply beautiful while also quite useful to game runners. In the TaleSpire beta they’ve been used consistently for live games and it’s always an incredible experience.

You can see all his slabs and boards on his Tales Tavern Profile Page, or by simply searching for Gengus4.

Gengus, besides being an amazing content creator, is also a dad. He shares his TaleSpire passion with his son which is always fantastic to see. He’s been playing adventure games and designing boards for approximately 25 years with friends and family, and has played Heroquest and Warhammer for 35 years.

We here at Tales Tavern are proud to feature him as our first creator of the month and look forward to his many more creations to come! It’s so hard with so many slabs to pick a favorite, but below is linked a splendid selection so you can get a feel for the impressive quality of work.

If you want to support him further, he has a Patreon Page where you can help sponsor his “hobby” and a Youtube Channel with his growing library of videos.

Featured Gengus4 Slabs