In the Beginning
AD&D Toolkit was developed singularly for me and my family in our regular campaign play. We’ve been playing a homebrew campaign of my own design that most closely adheres to core 1e. We wanted to make use of Encumbrance, its limitations, and how it impacts movement; character disease contraction and parasitic infection; and many other systems that make 1e so interesting yet at the same time are so cumbersome to manage. Systems where constant behind the scenes rolling and table referencing are required. There is all kinds of stuff Dungeon Masters simplify or ignore altogether because it’s just too much to manage manually. AD&D Toolkit solved those problems for us.
Too Good Not To Share
After a while, AD&D Toolkit became so essential to our gameplay, we enjoyed it so much, everyone was telling me I had to share it. There would be lots of other people that would get a kick out of it. So I did. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive from the few I could get to try it out. This encouraged me to keep on with development and promoting it.
Discord
I started a discord, mostly for supporting others in using AD&D Toolkit, at first. It quickly filled a niche for supporting AD&D play in general. Dungeon Masters advertise and host campaigns there on the regular. We host games for both newbies to AD&D and veterans. We also host channels where gameplay experts share their knowledge with others, which has proven quite fruitful for me in developing Toolkit.
Youtube
Our fledgling Youtube channel is currently mostly for tutorials on how to use AD&D Toolkit. I would like to eventually get some content on there for AD&D in general.
Our Blog
The AD&D Toolkit blog is a mix of AD&D topics and AD&D Toolkit Manual. You can find a number of posts on the various Dungeon Master Modules(tools) in the Campaign Manager. These posts explain how and why to use these modules, at times going the extra step into offering insight regarding the inner workings of their calculation logic.
Surprisingly, our largest community has been found on reddit. We have several thousand people in our community there, fans all of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons writ large. You can find posts for AD&D lore, humor, products, rules discussion,.. the discussion runs the gamut.
Editions and Expansions
As those numbers grow, I get more and more #suggestions for features and elements from expansions or other editions to incorporate. If those suggestions are popular with the community, I prioritize their development. As one would expect, the most popular requests have been for Unearthed Arcana and AD&D 2e so development quickly moved toward incorporating them. Today, both are fully supported and continue to expand alongside the First Edition(1e).