Some people don’t know this about me, but I love changelogs. Absolutely adore them. I so deeply appreciate being able to take a peek behind the curtain at the development of games, designs, and processes. So, in honor of changelogs, and in the spirit of transparency with which the rascals are trying to run this site, we have a changelog for y’all! 

Rascal: 1.2*

*to be fair, we’re probably at around Rascal 1.582, but this is our first changelog. So we’re going to keep this all in order. 

Pay-Per-Article

If you are not a subscriber, you may have noticed that we are currently offering articles a la carte. To date, these have all been priced at a cool one dollar (with the exception of the Lay it on the Table column, which has been five big ones). This has gone really well for us! We’ve had about 250 individual purchases of articles, and the feedback we’ve seen on social media is positive. We’re keeping it!

However, we are updating this. For articles that require extensive reporting, we are going to ask for three dollars. We hope this encourages people to subscribe, and we also want to reflect the work that we’ve put into these longer pieces. Right now, we estimate this will affect one or two articles a month. 

The weekly Lay it on the Table column is advertised as an exclusive for the Party and Paragon tiers. We’d like to honor that. In the future, we will be taking down pay-per-article access to this column. As soon as Acta (the pay-per-article software we use) updates with this feature, we will likely remove this option from all past and future Lay it on the Table articles.

Pledge Drive

In July, and ending in August at Gen Con, we are going to be running a pledge drive! The current  goal is to double our subscribers, and we need to do some math, but basically that will come close to paying ourselves a living wage, and set us up for success for the next few years! Our overheads are ridiculously low, so we just need to be able to pay rent. 

If you have a couple minutes, we would really appreciate it if you filled out this feedback survey. It’s going to help us with our pledge drive planning, and we’d love to hear from you. 

Gen Con

We’re going! Please tap us for interviews, kaffeeklatsches, drinks, and games! You can email info@rascal.news to get on our radar. We’re mostly going to be there to pass out our business cards and a REDACTED—a free Gen Con merch thing, but we’re happy to chat. Invite us to parties. We’re a lot of fun, I promise.

Additionally, we’re hosting a Meet the Rascals panel at noon on Saturday, August 3. Get your ticket here. We’ll talk about Rascal, go behind the scenes on some of our articles, and officially close our pledge drive! 

Site Improvements

These are on the docket. 

• Make it clearer when an article is available for free with an email membership
• Update our pay-per-article systems. 
• Create an anonymous tipline
• Creating two separate RSS feeds: one for announcements, one for articles
• Separating announcements from our articles in other tags (much like the homepage)

When will Rascal be out of soft launch?

Fair question. Soon? We’ve mostly decided that full launch means we have all our ducks in a row and we’ve got an ongoing 2-year-plan we’re working towards. So… soon? Fingers crossed. 

Reminders:

The announcement section is open to all! Here’s a rundown of how to submit your work. 

Our public articles are typically behind an email-only Lurker membership. We publish one to two of these a week. You can read our public articles here. 

We have a subscriber’s only Discord. We will send this link out via email again soon. 

Once again, we humbly ask that you fill out this feedback survey if you have time! We'd love to be able to do better, and we need to know what's working.

Thanks all, and remember to keep biting ankles.