In our first WIP iteration, a great deal more polish has been added to the outer portion of the scrying bowl.  It’s got a more ornate design, and more reflective surfaces and shading to speak of.  The ripples in the water are a little more tumultuous and you can quite tell just what’s inside anymore, but that’s by design.  We didn’t want people to be able to see too much detail because scrying is suppose to be a manner of divining, and the results shouldn’t be too clear.

With a bit more polish and radiant coloring within the water itself, things become even more obfuscated.  Does it look a little foresty?  Or is that a room filled with riches?  That’s up to the person perceiving the waters in the scrying bowl.  Regardless, Steven continued marching this art piece along, making it look even spiffier than ever!

Our final look at the bowl, atop a nicely contrasting background, gives us our best look yet at the new treasure.  This is a wonderful addition to any diviners collection, and we’re so happy that we were able to get Steven on board to get us yet another excellent relic from the world of Tellest!

That wraps us up for today, but we’ve still got plenty more goodies coming in the weeks to come, from character art to treasures and more, so be sure to come back every week!

The post Concept Art – Xanadar’s Bowl of Scrying appeared first on Tellest.

Steven Bellshaw once again became our artist for this wonderful project, and right from the get-go, he took this pan flute and helped to bring it to life.

Though the first image definitely helps to sell some level of distinction, it’s the follow-ups that always show the polish, so we’ll take a deeper dive as we go.  We began to see shapes and colors that helped to sell the idea in a more distinguished manner.  But one of the things that we decided to move away from was the “peace and love” sort of message that we felt from the doves.

A touch of gold and a brush of metal adds a richer feel to Fitz’s Whistle.  While your first thought might take you to visions of satyrs playing this musical instrument, it can in fact be played by anyone, regardless of their musical acumen.  While they are probably excited about the idea of playing flawlessly considering they didn’t previously have the talents to pull off such a melody, it won’t be long before they pay attention to the otherworldly wind whisking them off to a new place instead!

Here in our final look at the treasure, you can see the final layers of polish that Steven added to Fitz’s Whistle.  The gorgeous wood and metalwork pops off the screen, really looking at times like you could just reach out and grab it.  This treasure will be making its way to both Quantum Quest and TowerSphere in various ways, so be on the look out for that when we’re ready to show it off.

That wraps us up for the day, but we still have plenty more from Steven to come.  If you’re looking for treasures from the world of Tellest, we’ve got you covered for sure!

The post Treasure Concept Art – Fitz’s Whistle appeared first on Tellest.

The Terraform Lantern may look, at first, like nothing out of the ordinary.  Perhaps the most exceptional thing about it is that it looks as though it has stained glass instead of the normal glass you might see in a lantern.  After all, what good is a lantern if the light can’t pierce through it properly?

That’s a rather important thing to notice, as well, because its an integral part of how the lantern works.  You see, the Terraform Lantern doesn’t just shine light.  It actually has the ability to use that light to change the very landscape that the wielder is shining it on.  An ocean could have a tremendous mountain pierce through its waves.  A desert could have its barren fields of sand turn into lush plains.  A wasteland could give way to a vibrant, verdant forest.

As always, whenever we have Steven Bellshaw working on one of our art projects, there are always a tremendous amount of ways that he adds polish and shine to an art piece.  In this case, you can see the light within the lantern shine through various parts of the stained glass.  The lantern definitely looks a bit different than you might normally expect, but Steven brought it to life in some very cool ways.

We experimented a little bit with some artificially generated backgrounds.  It wouldn’t be something that we would play with all the time, but sometimes we like to have a little bit of fun, so we put the Terraform Lantern on a pedestal, just waiting for an intrepid adventurer to find it.

This wraps us up for today, but we have plenty more coming from Steven Bellshaw in the future, and plenty more artifacts to show off, so keep your eyes peeled!

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The Trickster’s Mask allows the user to shape change to anyone that the person has seen before.  It won’t allow the person wearing it to choose any part of them to adjust or anything.  It’s a one to one facsimile of the person the wearer is trying to emulate.  But, it has one cool caveat that some other shape-change artifacts don’t.  It emulates other parts of the person’s traits.  The sound of their voice, for instance, as well as their smell.  The magic inherent in the Trickster’s Mask is cool indeed.

Right now, we don’t officially know where this treasure could be found in the Tellest universe, but as it sort of reminds of the kitsune, it might be found in a place like Numasa, where we could explore variations of that mythology.  Thus far, we haven’t spent too much time there, but we do have a growing list of characters who are from Numasa who we are going to try to apply to our first comic project.  We’ll see if we can incorporate the two ideas later down the line.

We didn’t really talk about the look of this piece a lot as I was talking more about its place in the world.  You can see that Azot brought it to life in some pretty cool ways.  It almost seems to evoke some sort of steampunk vibes, with the brass color.  So was it made by a tinker, or does it have a more magical, perhaps divine origin?  Only time will tell.

This was our last treasure for quite a while.  As I may have mentioned before, Azot is embroiled in the war in Ukraine.  Send him your thoughts and your prayers, and when he’s safe from harm, we’ll be excited to work with him again!

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Today, we’re looking at another of the projects that Azot worked on for us.  In this case, we’re looking at a magic hourglass (although the sand doesn’t keep flowing for an hour) that, when the user flips it, as its name might suggest, slows down time.  It doesn’t freeze things, so the user has to be careful about what they’re doing, and quick with their thinking.

One of the first things we realized we had to tweak was removing the Game of Thrones-esque dire hounds from the sandy background.  Indeed, we wanted the focus to be mostly on the hourglass itself, so we suggested removing all the background elements.  We also wanted to remove the piece along the bottom so that it didn’t look too influenced by certain Earth-friendly folklore.  This is Tellest, after all.

Once Azot put together a few touchups for the piece, it seemed much more in spirit with a lot of the other artifacts that we had done in the past.  We sort of go a little bit tame with some of the relics, and don’t want to go too crazy with the way they look, but we’re starting to lean more into it as we move along.

In just a little over two months, we ought to have some more artifacts to go over.  Until then, stay tuned to all our other awesome artwork.

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Azot brought our treasure to life, although there is a good chance that it didn’t quite look as pristine and beautiful as this one.  That’s not to say that they couldn’t.  In fact, it would be a good way to have a noble brought under your control.  These collars don’t necessarily have to be collars either.  They could be crowns or gorgets, or anything else really, although it stands to reason that the closer it remained to your head, the easier you were able to be controlled.

Down below, you’ll see the tweaked version of the collar that we ended up with, which felt much more in line with the style that we would have seen in The Enemy Within, where the relic was first revealed.  The leather straps felt more impersonal and gritty.

That’s it for this artifact, but we’ll be back in a few months with a new look at a Tellest treasure.  Stay tuned until then!

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First up, we’ll look at the artwork for the Mirror of Despair that we passed on.  Azot always does an excellent job for Tellest, but sometimes we need to tweak some things about the artwork.  In this case, we got something awesome, but it just didn’t fit what we were going for.  The mirror of despair is more of a handheld object, and you can see we’ve got a skeleton taking a bath in it down there!  I loved the Mayan / Aztec inspiration, but we did think the little limbs looked a little too… uncomfortable.

Below, you can see the changes we ended up making to it.  Here, it was more of a hand mirror, though the influences changed to something looking a bit more eldritch.  We haven’t really explored that in Tellest, but that’s not to say they don’t exist, and I guess with Azot’s choices, there’s at least something going on there!

The mirror of despair reflects terrible things to those who look at it.  It drives them to madness, or shows them dying in a terrible way.  It’s not the kind of thing you’d willingly look into if you knew what you were getting yourself into.

Once more, we’ve got a great new artifact to play with in the Tellest universe.  You can be sure that we’ll see this in a Tellest project before long!

We’ve still got more on the way, so keep your eyes peeled!

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We received this treasure chest as a bonus item from the latest batch of concept arts that we picked up from Azot.  He had an underwater treasure chest that he designed years ago that I loved, and I decided that I really wanted something like that.  The treasure chest can be used anywhere, but the barrel-shaped opening reminds me of pirates, and the magical, circular lock on the face makes me think of something a little more arcane.

The treasure chest is filled with many great and mystical things, and in theory, one of the items we’ve shown off before could have even been found in a treasure chest like this.  I’m sure we’ll have many opportunities to use this image.

That about does it for us for today, but we do of course have more treasures on the way.  I think we have them coming throughout this year, and with luck, I’ll open up enough of our budget to get another set, and then the fun doesn’t ever have to end!

There is one more thing I’ll show you today, as a bonus.  One of the reasons I wanted the treasure chest was because when we can eventually get out into the world, and get back to doing things like Comic Cons, I wanted to be able to give out some other cool bookmarks, and I thought we were uniquely positioned to give some awesome treasure-related bookmarks.  Here’s a look at what the back of every bookmark would appear as.

And as a bonus bonus, how about this one?

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As you can see, part of the fashion statement here is underwater accouterments.  Fronds and seaweed and coral make the boot look very much like it was found beneath the churning waves of the great sea.  But with a splash of color…

This is one of our more colorful pieces, and the surface tension on the water looks so good.  Azot is always surprising us, but this item in particular feels more spectacular than most.  I’m looking forward to telling stories that feature it!

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