One of the first things you’ll notice is that, at its foundational level, the Tellest World Anvil is a place first.  That is to say that while you can build a World Anvil of your own in a lot of ways, we have the world of Tellest as the backdrop of sorts, and we’ve placed our people, and treasures, and cities and everything on top of it.  When you first go to the Tellest World Anvil, you’ll see a lot of maps that you can venture into.  For our example, we’ve used Draconis, as its the continent that we’ve spent the most time developing.  Right from the get-go, you’ll be able to see things like landmarks and cities right there for you to peruse.

Now, we’re always looking for new ways to try and expand what we have, but Tellest is a great, big world.  Sometimes we have some of the basics in place, but are still working our way toward developing the world further.  For the most part, any time you see a city sigil, that means that we’ve identified where that city is.  But writing an entire article about it takes a bit of time more, so you might only see a brief snippet about it, such as its name.  Rest assured, we are working toward putting together additional information all the time, and before long, that city with merely a tag will be expanded on, and you can see how you might use it in your games, learn more about how it applies to the entire tapestry of Tellest stories, and more!

Let’s move onto the next interesting bit.  In the top right corner of the screen, you’ll notice that there is a layer selector button.  When you click this, you get to see a lot of different options, some which are dependent on what kind of subscriber you are to Tellest content.  Two of the most popular layers you’ll see below are the Artifacts and Characters layers.

Everybody has a favorite Tellest character, and enabling the character layer will show all of the characters who we currently have art for, and you’ll see them show up on the map where they would most closely align.  As Kaiyonani is a kaja from Saveon, you would not see her on the Draconis map, for instance.  But you would see Adelia Kreegan, and you can see her below.  The below information screen that you see for Adelia gives you some basic details, but you can see her entire profile by clicking the button under her name.  It’s a cool way to go down the Tellest rabbit hole, and move from one section of the Tellest universe to the next.  We’re always working on ways to link one entry in the Tellest World Bible to the next, and this is one way to accomplish that.

By the way, you might have noticed that above the individual layers on the bottom, there are some adjustments that you can make to the overall appearance of the map as well.  Typically this is something like showing you the influence that a kingdom has over its associated continent, but every now and then we have another special thing that we add as well.

Speaking of special things, we have something very special that is available only to Tellest Patrons at the Scholar level and higher.  You’ll notice below that we have something called the Character Portrait Map.  This collects information for a humongous chunk of our characters who we’ve had art commissioned for over the years.  These will also link back to character profiles so you can get a bit more information on all the Tellest characters.

It also gives you information right from the profile pop-up, so you can see what sort of powers characters have, and how you might be able to identify them.  We’re adding characters all the time, thanks to our collaborations with great artists, so be sure to check back often.  We’ll have a new page up before you know it!

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek of the Tellest World Anvil.  We’re always working on trying to enrich the world of Tellest, and the World Anvil offers us some very interesting ways to do that!

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First off, let’s take a look at the kingdoms from the continent.  We begin on the left, with the darker orange color, which represents Runassa.  This small island is home to a variety of races, including dwarves, orcs, and trolls.  One of our characters from Quantum Quest is the lone resident that we know of from Erenea, and she hails from a city on Runassa, but we’ll show more about that in a minute.  Then, moving over to the right, we have Ganore, which has a mixture of a few of the fairer races, like elves and humans, and some orcs as well.  In yellow, we have Libra, which boasts the second largest freshwater lake in the world.  All sorts of races inhabit this kingdom, especially around that lake.  And finally, in the lighter orange zone, we have Auralia.  Again, it’s known mostly for the fairer races.

If you’d like to see the continent without the color overlay, you can see that here.

And then farther below, you can see two very brief sneak peeks at the behind the scenes content that you can only see embiggened when you’re a Tellest patron.  The first image is a version of Erenea that shows the one lone writer-ready character, Quirl Rockfist.  She’s one of the characters we introduced in Quantum Quest, though we’ve yet to see her used out side of it.  Then on the right, we have our city, which she belongs to.  Grim’s Hold is a troll city with an awesome sigil that we have a long way to wait for, as we’ve got so many other things lined up between now and then.  But suffice it to say, it’s a pretty cool sigil.

Erenea has yet to be truly graced by a Tellest writer’s presence, as we’re spending time in many other places at the moment.  But this continent will get its chance to shine, like so many others.  It’s just a matter of time!

We’ll be back with a look at another map soon after the New Year.  Stay tuned!

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We’ll start by looking at the three kingdoms that have the most influence on the continent (whereas you’ll see a lot of unclaimed land in the northeast).  In the yellow, you have Karnath, ruled over by a man named Jaxom.  Interestingly, in the previous timeline, Jaxom had much more influence over the world, having essentially annexed parts of Saveon to serve his purposes.  He’s got no such luck here, unfortunately, as his primary goal is just stopping the infernal demons from spilling over into his kingdom.  Those demons are mostly coming from the kingdom represented in red, Eldea.  There are portals to another world there that have not been closed, no matter how hard Jaxom has tried, and no matter how many allies he’s called on or made throughout the years.  Unfortunately, it seems it is a battle of attrition that he cannot win, and he’s slowly preparing for the end.  Those in blue, however, the kingdom of Raskon, could care less about the demons—as long as Jaxom keeps up the fight.  They’d just as soon retreat to their mines, where a tremendous amount of valuable gemstones are found.  Of course, there are those who think that, if gems can still be found on the eastern side of the mountains, there must be many more worth risking on the western side.

Without those three kingdoms changing the color palette of the continent, this is how everything looks:

And then of course, we’re also going to show an ever so brief look at this part of the world if you were to pull the curtain back a bit.  We haven’t spent a considerable amount of time here yet, but we do know of Jaxom, and a few other hidden characters that we aren’t prepared to show off yet.  But, in addition, we know that one of our characters from Quantum Quest, Breggin Toll (not popular enough to make his way into the novelization though, I’m afraid) from Narwynne is part of the continent as well.  We show both of them on the “writer read” and “city” layers that you’ll see a quick look at below.

Tarson hasn’t seen much of a change to the map since I first completed it, but we do know that it is going to be a fairly considerable part of the series as we move forward.  It’s just a slow march before we figure that out a bit more.

Now that Tarson is done, we just have one more map for the year, which is coming up just at the end of December.  It’ll be here before you know it.

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First and foremost, we’re going to be starting with our borders and influences version of the map.  You can see here that there are six kingdoms that make up the continent.  Starting with the reddish orange color in the lower left, we have Vesperia, where demons from another realm have settled and long for peace.  I’ll bet you didn’t think that any demons could be anything but evil, but they’re not all warmongering as they’re presented to be.  Northwest of that, in the darker green, we have Fiore, where things start to get a little harsher and colder.  We know definitively that their are orcs and dwarves in this region.  North of that, in the darker blue, we have Aerest, which is home to both harpies and avarians, meaning there are constant battles there.  East of that, in the orange color, we have Kilgis, which is home to many an elf.  Then, below the mountains, in the lighter green, we have Tereval, which is home to minotaurs, and finally Skaiya, in the southeast is represented in that teal color.  There’s not much that we know about Skaiya, but there are rumor of some otherworldly powers that originate from that area.

Below, you’ll see the map without any kingdom overlay, and it’s here that you can see a bit more of the frost that covers the northern kingdoms.  Lionel is the second northmost continent in the world, so it does make sense.  It’s a bit of an odd shape for a continent, and it unfortunately makes for a terrible potential for infighting and war, which is what the kingdom has suffered through for many an age.

I mentioned that we don’t know too much about Skaiya beyond what I’ve revealed already, but we can give you a sneak peek at the early information we do know, which is that two of our Quantum Quest characters, Al’az and Barak, call one of the cities, Felwain, a home.  If you’re a patron on the Tellest Patreon, you’ll have access to high-def maps where you can see these hidden layers.

That will about wrap us up for today, but we still have a few more maps on the way.  Our next map also has some affiliation with demons, but that’s about as much of a hint as I can give you at this point.  Until next time!

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Below, you’ll see the three kingdoms that make up the archipelago.  In green, we have Neka, in violet, Richus (pronounced Ry-kus), and in orange we have Krill.  Despite the fact that these three kingdoms are ruled by different factions, there have been alliances made from those across all of the borders.

With that in mind, maybe it makes sense to look at a version of the map that doesn’t have the overlay.  Those of you who were around for the parchment version, and who have a good memory, may recall that there were no mountains or rivers in place on that iteration of the map.  I wanted to give it a little more realism, so I added a few places where you’d find mountains and rivers.  Culturally, these have some big significance in a lot of stories, and I didn’t want to lose an opportunity to explore that.

Right now, we only have art for a few characters who have yet to actually grace any Tellest pages.  We also have a character who Aaron introduced who doesn’t yet have art, but who we may see in the future again, so she may be yet another character who gets a chance to shine, and get her own art made.

Well, that’s going to wrap us up for today.  We’ve got another continent that we’ll be showing off in a few weeks, and that will get us back to our larger continents.  Stay tuned!

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First and foremost, we have a map that shows off some of the kingdoms of Ravane.  The only one that we’ve spent time in so far was the violet one on the eastern side of the continent.  That one, Vanicus, is the kingdom in which the Halloween story Searchlight took place.  We’re certainly not done with Searchlight yet, as it was a very formative place for Icarus well after The Fall.  To the west of Vanicus is Qimar, a place where gnolls and minotaurs often come to blows.  In the brighter green, further west, we have Jameen, which is a sort of wasteland area of the continent.  In previous versions of this map, the wasteland was much worse, but things have changed since then, leading us to believe that maybe there was some reason as to why.  Ruinus, in that sort of orange-red color, has a large archipelago in its influence, and considering how close they are to the mainline, it makes you think that perhaps it was all one unified land at one point.  There’s a slight yellow overlay in the kingdom to the north of Ruinus, which is called Hogora.  That would be home more to tribes than big cities, except for perhaps the areas near the northern coast and mountains.  The dark blue is a very resource-heavy land called Tycharma.  Tycharma has the biggest sway over the lake that you see there, said to be the deepest freshwater lake in the world of Tellest.

Further north, we see the dark overlay of Domissus, where the weather is starting to take a cold turn.  Further north than that though, we have Kassoya, which is frigid indeed.  We haven’t explored either of those kingdoms too closely yet, but one of the players in my D&D campaigns is considering running a one-off that is staged in that location.  We’ll have to see how that all goes.

Below, you’ll see a version of the map that doesn’t have any overlays or anything of the sort.  I have to say, I am very happy with how this map came out.  It looks pretty vibrant compared to some of my earlier works, and it feels very lived-in from what we see so far.

We don’t have too much to show by way of characters or artifacts or anything of the like yet, but as we mentioned, we do have one city that we know the location of, and it’s right here in the small image you’ll see below.  Searchlight is the one place we’re pretty familiar with, thanks to our story about the lost elves of pre-Fall Tellest, and the corruption of thousands of years without seeing their home.

That’s it for now, but we still have more maps to show off.  In a few weeks, we’ll be looking at a place that we’ve only seen in passing, but we’ll be aiming to spend more time there very soon.  See you then!

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From left to right, we have Draug, in the sort of Kelly green, which is where a gremlin city named Glisgin is.  We don’t have any main characters who hail from any of the kingdoms here yet, but we do know some of our Quantum Quest characters are from Mistfall.  Glisgin is home to Kor Laros, our ugliest gremlin. Then we have Mevia in red, and an as yet unnamed kingdom in orange, with neither having much details filled in yet.  Lorvis in the final kingdom, represented in teal below.  There are two cities that we know about there.  One is Radzryn, which is where our almost definitive goblin, Jass Gore, is from.  Radzryn is known for a lot of violence, and it’s not even a safe place for goblins, really.  Then, we also have another city that’s really more of a pirate den, called The Black Lantern.  Our hero, Jerrick Tull, hails from there.

If you don’t want to see the continent all carved up by color, you can see it here, without the overlay.

As mentioned before, we don’t have any mainline characters leading the charge in Mistfall yet, but we do have the cities, on the left, and the writer-ready characters on the right.  So far, we haven’t had any story work really done in Mistfall, but that’s bound to change before long.

Just as with some of our older maps, we’ve since added sigils to Mistfall’s cities.  There’s still a lot more exploration to be had, and a lot more cities to create.  You can be sure we’re already planning out when we’re going to post a refresh of this map.

In about three weeks, you’ll get your first look at another map from the world of Tellest, that one a little more explored in some ways than others.  In any case, we’ll talk about that when the map arrives.  Stay tuned!

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From top to bottom, we have, in teal, the kingdom of Karsica, which is where Lyla, Retrus and Seeger are from.  In fact, at various points, they’ve found themselves in the capital city of Valtega, which we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of in the years to come.  Below that is the savannah kingdom of Seradel.  It’s home to some Rhinotaur folk that we may have seen in the past.  To the west of that, in the dark red, we have Flintwell, which is allied with Jaxom, one of the lords of Tarson.  It’s a bit of an uninhabitable place, thanks to volcanic ash and rock that fell all over it in the past.  It’s essentially become a wasteland.  Below that, we have Iradel, in light green, which is the desert stretch that is basically made up of the Kehara desert and the various oases there.  We know Kaiyonani from there, of course, but there are other heroes we’ll be seeing from there soon as well.  To the east of that is Vendra, which is also home to some Rhinotaur who we’ve seen before.  Then, the lime green is Dathala, which we don’t really know a lot about right now, along with Gerivus, which has gone unexplored by myself or any other Tellest writers yet.

And if you don’t want to see all that overlay, here’s what the continent looks like when it’s not being divided by the kingdoms.

Below, you’ll be able to see some quick looks at a few of the things that we’ve got going on behind the scenes.  The first is a version of Saveon that shows the “writer ready” characters who our freelancers can write about (although technically, two of them have since been taken off the board, as Aaron Canton brought them to life in his Halloween story).  The middle image is just a quick look at the continent with just its, at the time, cities present.  And the one on the right shows our official characters, including Kaiyonani, Retrus, and Lyla.

We’ve actually since added sigils and characters to these places.  Francois did an absolutely wonderful job with the sigils, and helped us add a new city that we didn’t originally have here.  Meanwhile, Wern has been giving us characters like crazy!  There’s a very good chance that in a year or so, we’ll just do a sweeping cartography update that shows a variety of those things all at once.

We’ll be back with a look at another map in three weeks, so stay tuned!

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Today we’re looking at Lustra, possibly the continent that we’ve spent the second most time in.  Lustra is home to Versali-Virai and Lakmari, but we’ve also seen it in use for some short stories as well.  In the below art, you’ll see some color overlays that show the various kingdoms that carve up the continent.

If you’re not looking for political influence or borders or anything like that, we have a map for that too.  Below, you’ll see Lustra in all its unmarred glory.  Lustra is known for a couple of things geographically.  It’s got three of the tallest mountains in the world, first and foremost, and we’ve mentioned them long, long ago, when we first allowed Gaston Camlann to kind of give the foreword about Tellest on this very site.  Lustra itself doesn’t have too many varied biomes.  There’s some deserts and mountains, but it’s also know for more temperate plains and forests.

Just as we had shown with Draconis, we’ve got some special layers for Tellest readers, subscribers, and writers over on the Tellest World Anvil page.  In the first image, we see the known cities of Lustra.  When I first drafted this post with the images, we did not yet have the city sigils for some of those settlements, but since then we’ve more than filled in those gaps.  The second image shows the characters who we have art for who have shown up in a Tellest story, or at least have plans to, although this doesn’t include people who weren’t born in those areas.  That’s why you won’t see, say, Maravek in Virsali-Virai, as he grew up somewhere else.  And in the final image, you see some pins that show our writers what characters have yet to have stories written for them.  In almost all cases, they happen to be for Quantum Quest characters who are looking for their big break!

That’ll do for today, but remember, we have a ton of maps left, and there’s some new revelations in each of them.  It’ll likely be about another three weeks before we’re back with our next continent, but stay tuned!

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We’re going to start off today by looking at a sort of political kingdom influence map.  There are essentially seven kingdoms in Draconis, with the largest ones being run in the north and northwest, by Blacklehn and Gandarst, respectively.  Ippius, in green along the bottom, isn’t quite one kingdom, but it’s represented as one here, as though it’s been a bit fractured.  Then, in the central, east, and south areas, you have Raleigh, Carthis, Daltain and Warus.

But what if you didn’t want to be beset upon by color overlays?  Well, we have a map for that as well.  Down below, you’ll see the continent of Draconis without anything much with the exception of the compass rose, and a few sea creatures meant to give it a little more character.  Here, you can’t tell anything beyond geography, which is pretty cool indeed.

Now this next step is a little bit different, and it’s pretty cool in its own right.  The map was created in Inkarnate, which is an awesome tool, and I recommend it to anyone who is trying to make maps for their fantasy world, whether its for a sprawling book series, or even D&D.  But there’s a second tool that works so well in tandem with Inkarnate, and that’s World Anvil.  World Anvil is able to do some pretty cool things, and I have been learning how best to use it, so I’ve made some layers on the map that are interactive, and allow someone who is interested in the world of Tellest to come in and see a bit more about where the stories they’re reading are taking place.

Below, I have three layers additions that can be toggled which show the artifacts that we’ve explored so far in the stories, the cities that we’ve seen or read about, and where characters originally hailed from.  In some of these cases, the layers are accessible only to Tellest patrons, who get to see some secret information.

Well, that about wraps us up for today, but as you can imagine, we’re going to continue this treatment across the board with the other continents of Tellest as well.  There’s a huge world to explore, and we’ll get to every nook and cranny before it’s all over.  See you on this next leg of the journey!

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