The 2025th Trooper (Important Updates for Our Site)

Happy New Year everyone!

We have a few announcements to make, I appreciate you falling prey to my clickbait dogs, that’s Freya on the left and Ghost on the right if you’re curious.

I’m gonna be tactful for those of you who don’t want to read my bigger thoughts about what I’d like the website to become, so I’ll start with the bottom line up front.

• Effective a couple weeks ago, I am now the Managing Editor of all of The Fifth Trooper’s content. Jay is still around and will be restarting Iron and Tentacles soon but is stepping back from other managing roles, though he does have another project we’ll show off soon. The short version of my goal is to make this site a resource that a wide variety of Star Wars table top gamers can rely on for years to come.
• We have COMPLETELY re-done our Patreon tiers in an effort to shift to more deliverable benefits that also allow for more engagement with the community. Please consider taking a look if you like what we do and want to support us, I get more into my bigger thoughts of what I hope to do with Patreon funds below
• Please tune in to Notorious Scoundrels over the next couple of weeks for another important announcement or two.

Ok, if you wanted the important stuff there you go, also we just posted an update of Count Dooku’s Unit Guide so take a look, and we’ve got more unit guide updates coming next week. Thanks for checking in, and feel free to read below if you want some #deepthoughts.

2024 was a crazy year for me. Right at the beginning I moved to a house after years of apartment living, then right after that I scooted myself over to Spain for the first time to play Legion with a bunch of talented dudes. It was an amazing time! Work unfortunately kept me away from Adepticon but I at least had fun with my April Fools gag right after it ended which definitely succeeded in convincing ONE of my friends to finally watch Gremlins 2.

Soon after that though, it felt like my entire world crashed down. My sweet dog Nymeria passed away on the operating table when she came down with a sudden illness. She was only 7 and she meant the world to my wife and I. Here’s one of my favorite pictures of her, looking appropriately angelic for an extremely sweet, perfect little dog.

My wife and I are slowly healing from it, we have each other and Nymeria’s older brother Ghost as well as our newest edition, the extremely mischievous puppy called Freya who you saw in the thumbnail and there’s one more picture at the end too if you’re curious! Here’s the point I’m getting to as far as this site goes though: this, right here, was also something that helped pull me out of that hole a bit more. My next article after she passed was this bit of cosplay at corporate reporting which I had a good time writing and researching, and it got great feedback as well which I really appreciate (by the way, a few months later Embracer gave almost half of the debt amount BACK to Asmodee so…just gonna say, called it, our games will be fine).

I first took this role because writing has always been something I’ve enjoyed doing but I was too much of a wimp to try to make it a career so aside from a brief period where I wrote nonsense for an L5R blog I had this dormant desire to share my stupid thoughts with the world but no appropriate medium to do so in. So, luckily, I decided to apply to be a writer at The Fifth Trooper a little over a year after I started playing Legion. It’s been a wild ride since then and I am grateful to be writing for a website that thankfully basically allowed me to do whatever I wanted as long as it was a good read, which I hope it has been for all of you who have chosen to read it.

All that said, change is present in all aspects of life and so it is here. The Fifth Trooper’s founder, Jay Shelanskey has started a new career recently and it (along with another sort-of-separate project that we’ll reveal soon) has left him with little bandwidth to run things the way they had been run in the recent past. He’s still gaming, but mostly he’s playing MCP now so he felt like he wouldn’t be able to honestly keep up with the content side even if he had the time to do so. Additionally, changing economic realities with production and shipping costs made it so the physical products aspect of The Fifth Trooper became too expensive to keep up. This led to a point where Patreon rewards were taking longer to fulfill as well. In the last month, Jay especially has been making one last push to get a set of tokens out to owed Patrons, while also revealing in our discord and Patreon that the rewards were going to mostly change to ones centered on engagement with the community. We’ve offered people who want to back out during this month of transition no-questions-asked refunds if they got charged for something when they expected different rewards, I don’t want a single person to feel like they were taken advantage of.

After a discussion with Jay in November I agreed to take helmsmanship of the site because I think we have a legacy of good…ugh I kind of hate the word content but I guess it’s used because it’s accurate. Stuff is also accurate, we have a legacy of good stuff here but I think we have a lot of room to grow outward and upward. For starters, I think I’ve loosened some restrictions on post comments from a spam filter that was a bit overly aggressive. I’m looking into new plugins and features that can make the site work better for you as well.

I really want this site to succeed, a lot of people have put a ton of great work into it and I think it has a bright future, including expansion into a bigger footprint in Shatterpoint and Star Wars: Unlimited as well as our guest writing program, which you can find out more about right here at the bottom of the About Us page. We’re also going to be launching a new season of Notorious Scoundrels later in January, which will fully incorporate our newly updated Patreon-outreach, like showing off your paint jobs or giving advice on Legion lists. I’d like to get Shatterpoint and Unlimited videos and casts going so we can shine a little more light on those games and their players. Finally, myself and a couple other volunteers are going to be hard at work updating our Index content (crap I said it) so players can have a reference point for unit guides, strategy articles, and a whole bunch of other stuff that we largely had to trash when Legion 2.6 came out (can’t wait for the other half of the cards, but yikes its a lot of work!).

I can tell you personally that I ain’t doing this for money, I didn’t even ask for anything over the usual article pay I’ve been getting since I started here. It’s true that The Fifth Trooper was once a “business” but that’s not the case at all anymore. Aside from a small bit from YouTube along with the possibility that we’re gonna try to figure out a tasteful way to incorporate some ads here and there in the future, all we’ve got is the Patreon as far as a way to support the work we’re doing here. So, we’re a fan project in the way many others are now, but my hope is that that enhances what we can be for the community. Whether its because the new outreach stuff interests you or whether you just want to support our work, please consider contributing. Hosting and necessary plugins for a site this big are expensive, plus video editing software and podcast hosting fees. The “cost” that I feel proudest of though is that we pay our writers, whether they’re on staff or guests, not because it’s gonna pay their mortgage or anything remotely close, but because we value quality and we want to show our appreciation for the effort that results in that quality.

If you’re on the fence about becoming a Patron, then I’d encourage you to see how the website and its output over the next couple months and then decide for yourself whether we’ve proved we can deliver on our promises.

There is another announcement we’re saving for next week’s Notorious Scoundrels, but its nothing that changes any of the above. For now, let me just say thank you, both to Patrons and to casual readers, for being willing to click on our stuff. It’s honestly just nice to create things that people enjoy, and that’s exactly what I hope to keep doing.

For now though, here’s me and Freya, she just got out of the groomers as you can tell from her lovely bows and she was very sleepy! I hope your new years are already going great!