First up, we have a headpiece from one of our exclusive newsletter short stories.

Devlin is a character that we introduced in Hunters, a story you can only read (for now) if you subscribe to the Tellest newsletter.  He’s a somewhat scrupulous fellow who is tracking down people with powers and capturing them, though as of now, no one knows for sure why.

Of course, to track and capture a powered person, you need to have powers.  Since Devlin doesn’t have any innate abilities, he amasses magical equipment to help even those odds.

Among Devlin’s repertoire of equipment is his helmet, which lets him see through objects.  It works very well with the bracer he owns that expands into a shield.  Being able to see your target through a barrier is a huge boon to Devlin, and one he utilizes regularly.

Let’s shift over to offense, and look at the mythril spear that was meant to kill a mighty frost giant.

The entirety of Bolt and Keota’s quest in Lord of Thunder hinges on being able to craft a deadly spear that can puncture the icy chest of a frost giant that is endangering the lives of a struggling avarian people.  You can’t talk about the spear and not make it, so of course it ends up being forged.

Keota goes on to wield the impressive weapon, bringing it to bear against his enemies despite the dangers.

We’ve got one more Azot grab bag to show you next year, so stay tuned.  Enjoy the rest of 2017, and we’ll see you in an even more amazing 2018!

The post Concept Art – Devlin’s Helmet and the Mythril Spear appeared first on Tellest.

Today’s character is Keota, the avarian who is aided by Bolt Thunderfury against a giant and an army of naga.

As with all of our collaborations with Hozure, we began with a few poses that we were able to choose from.  For such an interesting character, we wanted something that showed off a lot of him.

We opted to go with something that showed Keota’s broad, bronze wings.  He’s no stranger to armor and weaponry either.

Once we added some more luster to the character, Keota nearly popped of the screen.  He made for a great ally to Bolt, and it was awesome to see him realized like this.

Tacking on a background makes this incredible avarian look even more impressive.

What do you think?  Would you like to see more of Keota’s roost captured in art like this?  There’s plenty more on the horizon!

The post Character Art – Keota of the Avarians appeared first on Tellest.

We’ll see how the book does on Amazon, but just remember, every ten weeks from here on out, another Tellest adventure is coming your way.

Once again, this is just the beginning…

The post Lord of Thunder Released appeared first on Tellest.

Part of that could be due to the fact that Tellest now encompasses so many different projects, from a handful of different people.  Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Legacy Novellas and Tales of Tellest Short Stories

A while back, we had mentioned that Brandi Salazar was brought on board to help us clean up our act—Act I, that is, to be clear.  She’s done a very good job of putting a further layer of shine on the stories from the original Tales of Tellest volume.  If you are one of our readers from the get-go, you should be able to update your reading devices to get some cleaner prose than before.

Tellest Legends Project

We’re coming along well with the Tellest Legends books.  The timeline is still looking promising, and we’re getting ready to run our second wave of edits on Lord of Thunder, starting today!  Those edits should go relatively quick; I’m assuming that the book is going to end up being roughly 4.5 hours total in reading time, so usually, my second pass takes about that long as well.  Then, it’ll go to our two wonderful editors, and we’ll get it ready for the Tellest Street Team prior to the March release of the book.

Since it’s November, most of the focus has been on the NaNoWriMo book (more on that in a moment).  We have to shift again in December, back to Dragonspeaker (which is first-pass complete), and to Stealing Seramore, which needs to find its feet again.  Arise, meanwhile, has been seeing some steady progress.  I write that book on the train to work in the mornings when I’m in my satellite office, so that’s been doing well.  I have a feeling that is going to run longer than the previous books of the new collection, but I’m still optimistic that we’ll get that prepared in time for the planned release date. After all, it’s still 2016!

Short Stories

I’m very happy to announce that we’re moving back into position with the Tellest short stories.  In fact, I made a whoopsie and didn’t include one of Aaron Canton’s shorts in the Tellest Newsletter as an exclusive like I believed I had, so we’re starting the new shorts up again today!

With my focus on the longer form novellas and novels at this point, I’m going to be letting Aaron helm our short story department for at least a little while, but I’ve got a handful that I want to put out before the second short story collection comes out in 2018.  Don’t forget, we’re trying to release at least 24 new shorts—but you’ll be able to catch most of them here first.

NaNoWriMo

I went from believing that my NaNoWriMo project, The Silver Serpent Chronicles, was going to end up being too short to fit the 50,000 words required to be a victorious novel.  As it turns out, I’m probably set to reach at least 75,000 words by the time the story is done.

Now for the bad news: I lapsed!  Between funerals, podcasts, noodgie dogs and just a little bit of writing burn-out, I fell about 3,000 words behind.  Now, that’s not exactly difficult to make up—I’ve had 4,000 word days before, and with a four day weekend in front of us, I can likely make that up—but it is just one more obstacle before me.

In any case, I have my doubts that I’ll be able to finish the project in its entirely in November.  What we’ll probably end up doing is shifting some things around to find a focus on the books that are coming out sooner rather than later.  I have to do the same thing for last year’s NaNo project, which is even longer than this one.  Once I fall back into that one, we’ll be in a very good place.

Audiobooks, Now and Future

Phew… tired of reading yet?  If you are, I’ve got some great news for you: the first round of audiobooks are complete, though we’re still waiting for ACX to approve the fifth and final “Tales of Tellest” novella, Awake.  Once that’s done, we’ll have five books in audio form, and that’s a pretty cool feeling.

We had considered also having the short stories produced for ACX/Audible, but there are too many hoops to jump through to do that properly, so the idea we’re entertaining instead is bringing on another voice to our team in order to capture the short stories in audio and deliver it straight to our site.  We’re still prepping that relationship and those goals, but keep your eyes and ears open for that in the near future.

Further away, what we’re anticipating for our audio goals is that we’re going to work on getting most of our novella and novel length projects narrated a lot earlier in the game.  Previously, we waited to see if people enjoyed the written content of the Tales of Tellest novellas before we moved along.  This time, we’re going all in on day one.  The day the new books release, they should have the appropriate level of polish, and we’re going to begin the process of prepping them for audio.  For sequels, we’re anticipating continuing along with the narrators of the first books in each series.  For new properties (Dragonspeaker, Heart of the Forest, Silver Serpent Chronicles), we’ll look for new narrators to bring to our team. There’s a very real chance that we’ll end up running over ourselves eventually.  20 weeks isn’t that long when it comes to whipping up some decent audio, but we’ll see what we can pull off!

Card Game

Yes, we’re still working on this little side project!  In fact, it’s coming along very nicely.  All of our alpha art content is completed, though there has been some thought given as to whether or not we could get one or two more sets of assets.

In any case, we’re getting ready to prototype our game in the coming weeks.  Christmas is a great time to test how all kinds of different people enjoy the game, from nerds to regular ol’ folk.

The great news is that even when we had zero art, the game ended up being a lot of fun to people who liked tabletop.  I’m hoping the gorgeous art we’ve been acquiring for around 18 months really helps to step up the enjoyment of the game even further.

You can see the latest cards—full cards—on our Facebook page. There are adventurer cards up now, but we’ll be showing off a selection of dungeon cards in the coming weeks as well.

Now, there is a spot of bad news here.  Since this is the first time we ever put together a tabletop game, there’s still some things that I’m trying to put together and understand.  The timeline is one of the things that I didn’t realize was going to be so hard to stick to.  Here’s our dilemmas so far:

We aren’t going to make it to Magfest and PAX East (sold out, drat!).

What we are still going to try and do is make it to AnimeNext, Philly Comic Con and Metatopia next year.  I really want to run the circuit for this game, and if we see a lot of genuine enjoyment out of it, we may try and jump into some other places as well.  The ultimate goal is to try and Kickstart this game, ala Boss Monster, but we shall see what we can pull off.  I’m very happy with the journey this game has made (even though I still haven’t settled on a final name for it yet). Time will tell if the destination is a happy one!

That’ll about wrap us up.  Even though it’s only been a month, it seems we had plenty to talk about.  Here’s hoping the next time we get to chat, there’s even more incredible Tellest news.  Thanks for tuning in!

Cheers,

Michael DeAngelo

The post State of Tellest, November 2016 appeared first on Tellest.

You see, we worked with Barnswallow, one of our more recent additions to our collaborations, to have her tackle a character who is a little bit new to the series.

Iliana is a delver, what we call the dark elves of the Tellest universe. Catchy name, right?  Almost makes up for the simple portmanteau. This particular delver also has some history with a somewhat more established character, who was introduced in Son of the Storm.

We started off with a couple of sketches.  These are very similar, but we had to determine whether or not we were going with an extra bit of skin or not.  I opted for more.  Iliana is the kind of person who would use that to her advantage.

As I said, it was a really quick one.  Barnswallow went right for the jugular, and we were so impressed.  Iliana looks gorgeous and deadly, all at the same time.

Well, it’s time to get our noses back to the Kickstarter grindstone. We look forward to bringing you more from the world of Tellest, and from Barnswallow!

The post Character art – Iliana appeared first on Tellest.

Tellest Legends

So, what exactly are we Kickstarting? In 2014, you helped us bring to life a collection of novellas that featured ancillary characters.  This brought them to the forefront and gave them a chance to shine like never before.  Since that Kickstarter, those characters and their stories have earned a lot of praise. It seemed like a waste to move away from that.  And so, on August 15th, we’re asking you to help us bring five more stories to life—sequels to the stories we created two years ago.  These characters are more than just heroes now—they’re legends.

But wait… there’s more!  In 2014, we were finding our feet, and a big part of the stretch goals you helped us achieve gave us some great supplemental material.  The plan for this year is to stretch into even more books.  That’s what we’re here for.  We want to give you great stories.  So for every $500 we raise past our initial goal, we’re ready to launch another book.  And you might be surprised to see how many we have.

A Special Deal

There’s never been a better time to be a Tellest newsletter subscriber.  Not only have they been privy to a preview of the Kickstarter for a few weeks, but they’ve also had a little extra time to partake in a great deal.

All the newsletter subscribers were given an opportunity to commit to being an early backer. That let’s us know what we’re tracking to open at, and shows us how much more we can afford to invest into our campaign.

The best news?  You can take part in this awesome deal too.  All you have to do is subscribe to the Tellest Newsletter before Monday, when another email blast will go out with the early backer submission form (and a preview of our campaign).  All you have to do is tell us you’re with us by Wednesday of next week.

Then, when our Kickstarter goes live, if you pledge at least $10 you’ll be given an extra copy of the Tales of Tellest ebooks—our big project from 2014—absolutely free. We figure, if you haven’t yet joined us, this gives you an excellent base to build off of. And if you’ve already been a fan for a while, you can indicate a friend or family member who you would like to share these fantasy tales with.

There really hasn’t ever been a better time to join the ranks and be a fan of Tellest.  With at least five more books on the horizon, our bookshelves are going to be plenty packed in upcoming months. We look forward to bringing you great new content for years to come!

The post Tellest Kickstarter, 2016 appeared first on Tellest.

We’re working on a new book.  Yes, yes, I know.  It’s quite a surprise. Actually, it’s “at least” five new books, but we won’t get into that just yet.  Suffice it to say, we’re ready to draw back the curtain on one of these books, and this one will serve as the relative flagship release for our other books in this set.

These five books are going to be sequels to the Tales of Tellest that we Kickstarted two years ago.  As such, we knew we needed a face that was going to be… electrifying… to introduce us to the new stories.

That man is—no, not Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson—Bolt Thunderfury:

The protagonist of Son of the Storm, Bolt has already had an awesome story in his life, but he’s got more.  This follow-up, Lord of Thunder, is the tale of how he and a group of ragtag heroes managed to save a group of people from annihilation.  We’ll be getting the full details of the book to you soon, but for now, we’re really excited to show off the beautiful cover that Leo made for it.

Here you can see the rough sketch we began with.  Leo knew what we wanted right away, and there was very little that we needed changed from one form to another.  Seeing as this was the initial sketch, you can only tell very basic things, but it’s starting to come together as to what might be causing the mysterious people issues.

Alright, so things are a little more clear here.  That big guy front and center?  An ice giant.  The guy in the top left corner is an avarian, a birdman in the world of Tellest.  We’ve got a dwarf in the foreground, who may be a little familiar to readers of the first book.  In the background, two more folks.  And on the right side, our hero, Bolt Thunderfury.

Leo made a slight change that we ultimately opted out of here.  He thought that Bolt and our dwarf looked a little too similar in their poses, but we didn’t mind.  We wanted to see that dwarf’s face, by gum!  And then you can also see our other two characters with more clarity.  One of them is called a delver—they’re the dark elves of the Tellest universe.  The other is a haudron, a half-giant.  But whose side are they on?

And there you have it.  That’s our final version.  You can click on it to see it embiggened.  We’re so proud of it being the first big reveal for our next big push.

We also wanted to give a shout out to Matthew DeAngelo, the man who ultimately inspired a lot of what Bolt Thunderfury is.  His birthday was yesterday, and we’re proud of him too!

The post Art Reveal – Lord of Thunder Cover appeared first on Tellest.