As Atalatha was the inception of this idea, it stands to reason that Atalatha would be the first place to really embrace it and have a team.  We’ll be looking at the arena that their matches take place in, as well as seeing our first look at their top five players in the Atalatha Firebirds.

Below, you’ll see the initial sketch that Wern provided for us.  It was important to nail down three things: the towers, the arena, and what exists outside.  You’ll notice that there are towering statues on the outside edge of the arena, and that is because we wanted to have the heroes of Atalatha and Raleigh embodied and memorialized

We briefly lost the towers when we were designing the look of the arena a little further.  You can also see we dialed back the number of statues outside.  Where’d the towers go?  Well, typically speaking, the towers are themselves magical, being constructed on the day of the event.  Because the towers can be placed in a zone on a team’s side, it needs to have a bit more flexibility in the way that it is “built”, so to speak.

For the sake of visual appeal, we’ve kept the towers in an established order.  You can see that they’re pretty standard in their appearance (although one thing we did need to work on was a proper entryway into the towers—you can’t play without an entrance).  Wern also touched up the environment both inside and outside the arena.

Here we’ve got our doorways in the towers.

And here, we have another quintessential part of the towers: the flags.  The flags are magically enchanted to react to the other very important part of the game, the sphere.  When the sphere passes through the tower, the flag atop it will change to the color of the sphere, represented by which player holds it.  Atalatha’s team flag is often blue, because of their team logo, and the color of their city’s sigil.

Here in our final piece, you can see the top five players of the Atalatha Firebirds.  From left to right, we have Harun Jadar, Luca Kreegan, David Garus, Degrad “Dirk” Camdy, and Venathryn of the Whisperwind Elves.  They’re a very competent team, and Atalatha is lucky for not only having been the place where TowerSphere was born, but by having a great set of contenders who are eager to keep the championship in their city.

That’s all for today, but at the time of this writing, we have three other teams and their arenas which we’ll be showing off in the months to come, so keep your eyes peeled!

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First up, we’ve got our Ironbark Arborescent.  This corrupt, sentient treefolk in the dungeon is a tough cookie, but defeating him could give your monster army all the resources they need to develop something truly spectacular.  In fact, that’s just what happens, unlocking new features in the game.

After that, you can take your army up against the Aetherite Lord, basically Tellest’s equivalent to a genie.  When you defeat the genie, you’ll unlock the ability to make wishes every so often.  You’ll even end up using the cage you freed the Spectral Hand from earlier!

Finally, we have the Mysterious Merchant.  Our merchant was in the original card game, but he shows up as an enemy in the Merge Dungeon spinoff.  Just like with everything else, beating the merchant boss unlocks some new things for you, specifically, two more specialized merge chambers that allow you to merge together equipment instead of monsters.

That’s all that we have for bosses in the game for now, but if we’re able to continue our work on the game, we’d love to continue developing some other cool bosses.  We’ll see how everything goes though!

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To begin with, we have Al’az Leoric, a mighty orc warrior who shows up as one of the bigger characters in the Quantum Quest novelization.  He’s powerful enough to survive almost anything the Living Dungeon throws at him, though I think he’d have a few hurt feelings when people point out how tiny his head is compared to how huge his armor and his axe are!

Next up, we have Darris Urza, who is one of the cover characters from the game, as well as one of the big starter characters from the novelization.  Those two things go hand in hand, actually, so the other cover characters get their chance to shine in the book as well.  We’re not going to see all the characters in this first novel, and indeed, as we release more games in the series, the chance of us ever truly catching up is probably not too realistic, but we certainly have our favorites!

Perth Eritan is our third hero, and she’s got a neat pseudo-Egyptian vibe here.  It seriously looks like she could swap out for a deity, but what we really have here is a gnoll cleric who is very generous and giving of herself.  It just goes to show you that you can’t always judge a book by its cover.  In this case, most books about gnolls would probably say they’re bloodthirsty maniacs.  You show ’em, Perth!

Foe’Gen Liath is a character with a lot of potential.  Every now and then, I get an idea for a story that one of our Quantum Quest characters can jump into, and with Foe’Gen, I know it’s coming.  It just hasn’t quite hit yet.  But as an orcish assassin, she’s got plenty of upside, and she could definitely be used to tell some grittier Tellest tales.

Finally today, we’ve got our littlest hero, the brave Jasper Breth.  This kobold may be tiny, but he packs a big punch, and Sergei brought him to life in his little glow-up in a big way.  I feel as though Jasper could be a mascot for Tellest, he’s so adorable.  Who knows, maybe I’ll begin using him in my newsletters or something.

Well, that’s it for today.  We’ve got our latest five presented to the world, but in about three weeks, we’ll have another set to look at.  Until then, be safe, and enjoy your favorite fantasies!

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We’ve got a nice collection of characters in this week’s feature who not only show up in Quantum Quest and Merge Dungeon, but also short stories, novelizations, and full-on Tellest novels.  In fact, our first character, Mordek Thunderfury, was in Son of the Storm.  Mordek was one of our first tests with Sergei for the new style, and he blew us away with the new look!  Mordek is a dwarf from clan Thunderfury who has magical acuity.  It’s not that common, so a lot of people are impressed with the dwarven mage’s power and his wisdom.

Moving on, we have the gremlin, Cravat Keeno.  He’s got a decidedly darker look here in Merge Dungeon.  He ended up being a cutesy character in the card game, and it may be that his appearance there (as well as his demeanor in the Kickstarter video) informed my take on him in the upcoming novelization of Quantum Quest.  Sergei went a different way with him here, and as we sort of treat Quantum Quest as a multiverse of sorts, we’re content with letting a more sinister Cravat show up in Merge Dungeon.

Lannis Jarl is the sole hero among this set who has not shown up in another Tellest property.  We had our first rhinotaur show up in the 2021 Halloween story, Blood in the Desert, but that was Noth Vox.  Lannis is from the same city as Noth, but not quite the crusader as his kinsman.  Lannis is a stout protector regardless, however, leaving him quite prepared to face whatever dangers are present in the living dungeon.

Callieflynn Xaxos is a rarity in that she’s an elf on her own.  Typically, the elves of Tellest lean on each other for community, having a shared past that is tumultuous.  Then again, Callieflynn is a relatively young elven maiden, and she’s one with somewhat darker powers, so maybe it was just a matter of time before she was driven from the familiar.  She showed up in Aaron Canton’s story, The Elf of Black Iron Lake.

We’re saving our most famous character for last.  Among this first set, Alicia Mane is understandably the best known, thanks to her appearances in three Tellest novels (with a fourth, the Quantum Quest novelization, on the way).  Alicia shows up in the original Tellest trilogy, where she begins to learn her powers.  Here, however, in the Living Dungeon, we get a more world-weary Alicia who knows what it takes to survive.  Sergei crushed it when he gave our noblewoman her upgrade.

Well, that is it for our first look at Merge Dungeon for 2022.  As I mentioned before, we have a lot of stuff to show off over the next year, so be on the lookout every few weeks for new characters from the series!

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We begin today by looking at the human clerics.  In the Quantum Quest tabletop game, we pretty much established that clerics typically have spellbooks to help convey their magic, but we also decided to sort of sell the clerics with their censers here.  We have a varied set of looks, with different parts of the outfit changing color, from the robes main and secondary colors, to the draping undergarments that they have as well.  As you’ll see with all the humans in today’s post, each of the adventurers have something blocking a full view of their face.

Next up we’ve got a quartet of human magi.  Here, it’s not just their outfits, but their weapon that changes color.  We managed to put together a few different iterations of the magi, including one that almost looks like he (or she) is made of stone.  We also removed the amulet from that one.

Here we have another set of darker characters.  The human thieves stay in the shadows, and it made sense for the sake of the art to keep them darkened.  Of course, for the sake of the game, especially in the arena background, we need to enhance them visually a bit to bring out their highlights.  We actually have a couple different color patterns for the thieves here, as you can see, and their armor and hooded tunics can be altered separately.

Finally, we have the human warriors.  The helmets kind of lend to a more malevelont look, don’t you think?  There’s not too much that we could do with the warriors to make them look too different from one to the other, so you’ll see our big alterations were either the shade of their armor, or the color of their capes.

We always knew our generic humans would be kind of, well, generic.  That was kind of the idea.  After all, it’s our human heroes that really have the character and personality.  In any case, next time around, we’ll have some goblins, trolls and gremlins for you, so be ready for that to drop in about three weeks!

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We’re starting off today by looking at some of Tellest’s orcs.  As I mentioned last time around, the big concern was making sure that the adventurers got a lot of mileage, since you were going to see the same heroes again and again.  With that in mind, Sergei gave us a few different versions of the orc warrior, and here you’ll see the orc is probably the most varied out of all of the heroes we get.  That’s because not only does their outfit change, but so does their weapon.  Beyond that, even their skin color changes.  And beyond that, there were several different styles of face paint we could play with!  The orcs ended up feeling very personable, and are some of my favorite of all the “generic” adventurers.

Next up we’ve got some of Tellest’s minotaurs.  One of the challenges we had in a lot of these generic sets was making sure that we evoked the idea that these adventurers could be different people.  It’s challenging to do when you can see the character’s face, which is why you see a lot of coverings.  In this case, our minotaur warriors wear hoods over their heads and horns, which ended up looking awesome.  The minotaurs have some of the biggest weapons in the game, either a large axe, or a spiked club.

After that, we move onto our kobolds.  Our anthropomorphic canines are some of the most varied people when it comes to race, but we’re kind of restricted by our budget and the size of the game, so this kobold cleric is more standardized, kind of like a Finnish Spitz or a Shiba Inu.  They’re also the brightest-colored adventures, with a range of pastel colors that you’ll see, which sits atop fur color that can be changed as well.  Sergei even made sure to capture their whiskers!

Finally, we’ll look at the most petite of these four sets, the kaja.  The kaja rogues have varying outfits (including their scarves), fur colors, and weapons, though only one of them wields the rare crossbow.  The kaja have a very flowy presentation compared to a lot of other adventurers.  Their scarves draw back, their cloaks billow, and their tail sways—sometimes a bad sign that some of our cat owners might be aware of!

So that’s it for now, but we do still have more coming at you on the other side of Halloween (after a new, non-QQ art piece from Dennis Van Kessel).  We actually still have three more sets of these generic heroes before we start looking at how Sergei captured our named heroes from the tabletop game.  Keep your eyes peeled!

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