Greetings travelers, and welcome to a new year filled with possibilities and—more importantly—incredible fantasy! Today, as a special treat, we’re taking you behind the scenes to look at some of the stuff that is available over on the Tellest World Anvil if you’re not already familiar with it. Let’s dive right in.
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!
Michael DeAngelo
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