The last time I spent a few moments to talk about how Tellest was doing, we were deep in the throes of several projects.  Now, just a few months later, several of them are almost ready to be ushered out into the world.

If you’ll allow me a few moments, I’d love to talk about what’s coming soon to Tellest, and how you can get your hands on it!

Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon

The first big bit of news is that Tellest’s first spin-off video game, Quantum Quest, has officially been funded on Kickstarter!  Just last week, we wrapped up that campaign, and it looks like we’re going to be launching the game as expected in just a few weeks.

Merge Dungeon has been a very interesting project to work on, and it’s another very cool item that I can tick off my bucket list.  I’ve always wanted to make a video game, so the fact that it’s this close to coming out is almost more than I can bear!  We’ve got a lot planned for it as well—even though it’s a casual game, we aren’t being casual about its development, and we have a pretty extensive road map planned for it over the next year.

Best of all, Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon is completely free to play.

If you want to see more about Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon, definitely feel free to check out the campaign page at the Kickstarter.  The campaign itself isn’t active anymore, but you can watch the video for the game, and play the demo!

Quantum Quest: Reinforcements

Merge Dungeon isn’t the only Quantum Quest getting some love.  We’ve also got the Reinforcements tabletop expansion coming to your gaming table later this year.  We’ve still got a tiny bit of testing to do, and we’ve got to tell a bit more of a story for a few characters, but the new expansion will be here in time for the holidays.

And best of all, when the game is gearing up, we’ll be getting new characters from the expansion into Merge Dungeon, adding further connections between the two.

Finally, Quantum Quest is getting some more love with an official novelization.  This companion tale connects Tellest and Quantum Quest in some very interesting ways, and leaves room for the world of Quantum Quest to continue to grow and feed into Tellest.  More on that later, though!

The Whispers

You’re seeing it left and right, I know!  The Whispers has been a project that I’ve been working on for more than half a year now, and it’s definitely one of the stranger ones that I’ve done.  But with dozens of votes cast, I’m not the only one telling this story!

Remember that when you see an email for The Whispers drop into your inbox, that’s your chance to help Declan save all that he’s ever known.  I anticipate that we’re nearing the halfway point to this story, but that means you still have plenty of power in your vote—join the Council of Whispers, and help them do what’s best for our unlikely hero!

Tellest Legends

Last but not least, it’s been a long time coming, but we’re still working on the final books in the Tellest Legends set of books.  Part of the delay there is me adding more books to the mix every few months, but I really should have committed to my schedule!

The good news is that among the two books that we have left, The Maelstrom and Tales of Tellest, Volume 2, the latter is nearly complete.  Since the anthology is being cleaned up by our editor currently, I imagine it will only be a few weeks before we start putting some more stories on the Tellest website.  Then, probably by the time we go to Keystone Comic Con later this year, we’ll have the newest set of shorts ready to dive into!

I want to thank you for being a part of the world of Tellest.  It’s people like you that keep me inspired and excited to make all these projects, and I feel like we’re exploring new and creative ideas all the time.  Hopefully soon we’ll have a slew of other cool projects to show off to scratch your fantasy itch!

The post State of Tellest – February 2020 appeared first on Tellest.

Back in October of 2017 (really!), Silver Serpent hadn’t even been released, and since then, we’ve had a handful of other books come down the pipe.  Quantum Quest wasn’t out yet, and we hadn’t even started the first Kickstarter for it.  Since then, though, we have seen a lot of momentum on a lot of different battlefronts.

Tellest Legends and Beyond

We’re nearing the end of this beautiful, long-gestating project.  I’m so close that I can almost sense the impending doom of when I have no more books I’m “committed” to writing!  I kid, of course.  While The Maelstrom is the end of a new era of Tellest books (Tales of Tellest, Volume 2 not withstanding), I’m excited to wrap up this second phase of novels.  This was the biggest commitment that I’ve ever made for Tellest, and I’m happy that I’ve been able to show people that it can be done!  I’m going to be even more careful about it next time though, because as we know, my writing process is a little on the slow side.  My game plan for the next big “set” of books is to have more of the books done prior to running an event like a Kickstarter.  While I’m incredibly blessed that people have been so patient, it also kills me that I can’t be as quick with the stories as I want to be.

That’s not to say that there won’t be little one-offs here and there to shake things up while we wait.  As you know, there are little secret side projects that I’m always working on, and they’ll fluff up my library over the long spans between those big releases.  Speaking of…

The Whispers

Back in June, I began the process of starting a new project that honestly has been very interesting to try and adjust to.  The Whispers is a story that has a life of its own—it’s what I’m calling an interactive novel, because the story doesn’t quite write itself, but needs the input of other people, in this case the readers.  This month we wrapped up the third chapter, and gave the story’s protagonist, Declan, his third set of choices.  I know a lot of the beats, but I’m being surprised in more ways than one about how we’re getting to where I expect to go.  Because of the structure of the tale, I have to be aware of more than just the linear path.  It’s strange and exciting, and knowing that the way that I expect to go could be the “wrong” way gives me a detour that I have to adjust to on the fly, but it’s actually been really fun putting it together.  I thought more people would have voted the opposite way as they did in the first chapter, and I’m excited every time I wrap up a chapter, to see what choices come next.  If all goes well, the story will go on for quite a while, and when it’s done, we’ll have a book to publish with a lot of acknowledgements inside!

Tellest Visions & Art from the World of Tellest

Also back in June, I finally put something really awesome together that I’ve been dreaming of doing for a while.  Tellest now has an official artbook, which chronicles the Tales of Tellest and Tellest Legends.  Believe it or not, we only barely scratched the surface of all the art we’ve amassed over the years, and if things keep going the way they are we’ll have a second book before we know it.  Tellest Legends collects more than 100 beautiful pages of artwork from so many of the great artists we’ve collaborated with, and you can get your signed copy right through the Tellest website.

Just as important as where we’ve been is where we’re going, and I can tell you that you’re in for another fantastic year of art through the end of 2020.  We’ve got new artists, new art styles, some old favorites returning for new sets of art, and more.  As we continue to perform well with all that we offer, we’ll attempt to surprise you in even more ways!

Quantum Quest: Quarterly, Reinforcements, Merge Dungeon and More

I didn’t realize just how much content we’ve put into Quantum Quest until I wrote out that header.  We’ve got a lot of love for this spinoff, it seems, and it should show based on how much we’ve done for it, and how much its expanded.  This is the piece I’ll probably spend the most time talking about, since we have so much coming out (or that has already come out).  First and foremost, hey, we released a tabletop game!  Within months of our last “State of Tellest” feature, we officially released Quantum Quest: The Living Dungeon, and it has gone on to be a hub for other projects that we’ve worked on over the two years since.

First, let’s talk about the Kickstarter that brought our game to life.  We missed our mark on the original Kickstarter, which would have allowed us to have the game printed overseas for a much better price.  From there we would have had to figure out distribution and storage and things of that nature, so it might have been a good thing that it didn’t work out quite like we anticipated.  A Kickstarter with a smaller goal several months later meant that we were able to have a domestic print run which completely blew up and did beyond what we needed.  That was fantastic, and we’re so blessed to have such awesome fans that helped us make that a reality.  All of our games were delivered and it sounds like people had a lot of fun, and we’re still adding value to that in a lot of different ways.

At the front of the pack, a few months ago we released a supplemental magazine for Quantum Quest that told our story, including the new projects we were working on, tips and tricks, and even a short story that will be exclusive to that magazine until Tales of Tellest Volume Two comes out.

Let’s talk about the other projects that are coming down the pipeline though.  We’ve been talking about Reinforcements, the first expansion for Quantum Quest, since the first Kickstarter came out.  And it’s remarkably close to being done.  In fact, the only thing we have left to do for it is continue balancing and tweaking to make sure it is as tight as it can be.  Although, to be fair, we’ll also probably get together a few more cards to do a special Kickstarter and Convention exclusive like we do for the original box.

The project that’s coming out before that, though, is one that we’ve been working very hard on for the past few months.  Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon is a game that’s got the specifics in the name.  The objective is to merge monsters for the dungeon master.  In doing so, you make them stronger, and more valuable to the Living Dungeon.  Originally, it was a game that strictly adhered to the merges, and the need to see what monster you were creating next, but it evolved to also include a pretty cool arena, where you’ll see the adventurers from the card game, done up in an entirely new style—yet still with Sergei at the artistic helm.  We’re also adding awesome support in the form of our programmer, Jordan Hoover, and our composer, Dakota Pawlak.  We’re so close to putting together an open beta where people can actually play the game on their own computer, and give us feedback as to how to make the game play better, and what else they’d like to see.  We’re aiming for a late 2019 or early 2020 launch, depending on how things go, so keep your eyes peeled.

We’ve got even more potential Quantum Quest video game stuff coming down the line, too.  In addition to Merge Dungeon, there’s another project that we’re working on that we’re incredibly excited about.  It’s still in the very early stages, but we’ll be giving news on that before you know it.

Finally, we’re not far off from one last piece of bonus content from the Kickstarter we ran, and it’s going to be going out to backers from our Quantum Quest and Tellest Legends campaigns.  Quantum Quest is getting its own novelization, and I’m so close to the end of that story that I can almost taste it.  It’s surprisingly deep for the novelization of a tabletop game, and it leaves tons of room for intriguing questions and as yet unanswered mysteries.

That will wrap things up for now, but as you’re always aware, I’m constantly trying to explore new things for Tellest.  We’ve done so much already, but by this time next year, maybe we’ll be offering up some brand new ways to experience the world of Tellest.  Make sure to check back weekly for new art, and monthly for a new chapter from The Whispers!

The post State of Tellest – August 2019 appeared first on Tellest.

I have got an awful lot to talk about, so let’s get down to business, shall we?

Tellest Legends Books

The Tellest Legends project ended up getting a lot bigger than I expected! While Tales of Tellest was a set of novellas, each of these Tellest Legends books is a little bigger. Silver Serpent, the next one up in the queue, is much bigger than the books I’ve done recently.  Intended only to be about 50,000 words for last year’s NaNoWriMo, it ended up becoming a 210,000 word novel. It’s the biggest book I’ve worked on since The Enemy Within, and is nearly as long as The Bindings of Fate.

Now, part of this is awesome news. In my opinion, this is the best book I’ve ever written—not because of the word count, but because of the time and care I put into it. The downside is that there is a lot of work there, and it needs to be carefully curated in order to be ready for release. It’s already put me at a bit of a delay. It’s gone through its first editor pass and come back to me, and I have to clean it up before it gets delivered to our second editor.

Originally, the plan was to get it released last month. That unfortunately will not happen, but it will be out soon. Unfortunately, its delay has impacted the other books that are also coming out—Arise, Heart of the Forest, Stealing Seramore, The Maelstrom and the second short story collection are all coming a little later because of Silver Serpent. I thank everyone for their patience while I get these stories prepared.

Quantum Quest

Another big culprit of the writing delays is our upcoming tie-in tabletop game.  Quantum Quest is a massive undertaking spanning almost three years, and we’re trying to give it the best chance it has to shine before we go to Kickstarter with it next month.  We’ve been holding playtests, gathering fans, working on new cards and so on all summer long. As we draw closer and closer to November, you can be sure I’m going to end up losing my mind a little more each day—I can’t wait!

Fans of Tellest are going to get an early preview of our campaign page in the next couple of weeks, but I can give you a preview excerpt right now:

“This is where things start getting really awesome. We’re offering up a pack of adventurer cards that you can only get here on Kickstarter or directly from us when we attend conventions—these will never be available at retail. And that’s just to start—the more we raise, the more you get. “

Suffice it to say, we’re incredibly excited for Kickstarter next month. I feel like we’re batting 1000 with this game, and I can’t wait to show it off some more.  If you’re at PAX Unplugged, definitely consider stopping by our table to play a game yourself!

NaNoWriMo 2017

This one ties into Quantum Quest in a big way because… it’s the Quantum Quest novelization!  Yep.  My aim is to get 50,000 or so words cranked out by the end of November that will add some lore and backstory to our upcoming tabletop game. Since we also have the Kickstarter going on, this is the first year where NaNoWriMo has to come secondary, so I’m not 100% certain that it’ll be finished, or that it’ll be 50,000 words.  That said, I’m going to make sure the book is complete and polished by the time Quantum Quest reaches backers in May of 2018.

Here’s another bonus: Everyone who backed the Tellest Legends Kickstarter is going to get a copy of the ebook since it’s pushing off the other books.

Short Stories

Short stories are going to continue to fill in the gaps between the big releases.  We have a couple of stories that are currently backlogged, and we have two holiday stories coming as well.  Once Silver Serpent moves onto the second editor, we’ll make sure these stories get their chance to shine.

That’s it for now, but you can be certain we’ll be talking a lot in November, on account of the Quantum Quest Kickstarter.  See you soon!

The post State of Tellest, October 2017 appeared first on Tellest.

As always with Hozure’s collabs, we started off with some sketches. You’ll see here that our characters are a man and a dog.  This is the first time we’ve had a pup done up (not including Dirk, mind you).

We chose to go with something a little more stoic than runny or playful.  Emmett is a proper highlander—not an immortal who is going to behead you, but someone from the highland, that is.  He’s got a very gaelic look to him, and Angus is always by his side.

After some more details, our heroes were complete.  I love the layers/tufts on Angus, and Emmett’s gear and outfit are fantastic. Hozure really outdid himself here.

A nice background makes it pop that much more.  Here’s to hoping we get to see these two in their own story soon enough.  We’re just about halfway done with the books we committed to last year.  Then it’ll be time to start some new tales!

The post Character Art – Emmett and Angus 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.

We’re already doing pretty well, and it’s only been up for a little over an hour on a Monday morning.  It’ll be very exciting once everyone has got their morning coffee in them!

The post Tellest Kickstarter is Live 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.