A bunch of stuff about Dread, Titansgrave, Armada, Brewing TV, and TNG

There’s a lot of stuff to share, which all happened in the last 24ish hours for some reason, so I’m just going to put all that stuff here in one post, instead of spreading it out.

We released a video and some information about Hank Green’s Titansgrave character, Aankia. Similar introductions will be released throughout this week.
I filmed a wrap-up thing for Dread, instead of a winner’s wall thing, because a winner’s wall felt inappropriate for that episode. For some reason I’ve forgotten, it didn’t get into the final cut of part 2, so we put it on Geek & Sundry today as a bonus.
I talked to the Mission Log podcast about working on The Next Generation, in a way that I’ve never really talked about working on The Next Generation before. If you enjoy it, and you’d like some additional context, you may want to listen to The Big Goodbye, from my book The Happiest Days of Our Lives: The Extended Edition Or Whatever I Decided To Call It.
I made a video with Brewing TV a couple months ago, where we made an IPA that was inspired by Pliny The Younger. The first part is online, now.

Huh. When I put it in a list like that, it doesn’t seem like that much stuff. In fact, it’s not as impressive as it felt when it all came into my inbox or whatever one at a time over the last couple of days. Maybe I should have split it up.

Anyway, I’m still working on the audiobook for Armada, and I’m about halfway through. It’s a really fun story, and I’m having a great time performing it. In the last two days, though, I’ve learned to have tremendous empathy for people who have a daily commute, and boy am I grateful that I don’t have a daily commute.

Titansgrave: complete concept art image

Here’s the entire image I’ve been sharing bits of for the last week:

You can click to embiggen, and it’s huge. In fact, this image is so large, you could probably use it for your desktop if you were so inclined.

So this brings together everything that we wanted our artists (we have a team of artists from around the world working with us) to know, going into the show. You can see the elements of science fiction and fantasy, all living together. You can see the gleaming towers of a futuristic city in the back, looming over the more modest buildings in the foreground. You can see a few different races, including the Saurian walking with that robot, which I freaking love.

Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana premieres on Geek & Sundry this June.

Titansgrave: Unpacking some of the technology.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in this piece of our concept art. I’ll unpack some of it for you, and let your imagination do the rest. This section focuses pretty heavily on the science and technology aspect of the world, but you may notice those little dragon-like creatures perched up on the wires … I really love those things, and have this idea that they are maybe like pigeons or something in Valkana.

This is off to the right side of the full image, looking toward an alley that you probably don’t want to walk down if you’re not looking for some kind of trouble. In fact, maybe that’s Grell’s Alley, back there behind them.

I originally wanted those weird little quadrupedal, canine creatures to be tearing through a corpse or something, and I can’t remember why we ended up not doing that in this image. The idea was to convey that not all of Valkana is shiny and safe, or even clean. Some creatures that are similar to those things end up making an appearance in the show, and they’re pretty nasty.

Because this image predates the existence of cities like Nestora (where our PCs spend a fair amount of time), it ended up shaping a little bit of what that city looks and feels like in some districts. Parts of Nestora are as futuristic as they can be in a post-apocalyptic word, but there are other parts, like we see in this image. Guess where most of the masses live? I think it gives a clear sense of the divide between rich and poor in Nestora, and it helps explain why that city is in such turmoil when we first get there.

Other things in this image that I really like are that assassin dude in the doorway, the security camera/turret above him, and the armor that female warrior is wearing. Those glowing things on her leg are batteries, which power her weapon. We decided that there aren’t fossil fuels in Valkana, and batteries power just about everything from vehicles to shields to blasters. There are three different kinds of batteries, representing small, medium and heavy. We’re calling them Fulgin M, Fulgent, and Carsilorate. I really love how they all work, and I really want to just paste it all right here, but I can’t. Eventually, though, you’ll get to see that, and so much more, and now I’m going to hit publish and get back to work on some of that stuff.

Some more Titansgrave art is revealed…

We needed to convey to our artists and other creative partners that Valkana is a world where science and magic co-exist, feeding and supporting one another. Part of getting that across was showing this spaceship in the background of our first conceptual art image:

You can also see some skyscrapers in the deep background, as well as some smaller, fantasy-style structures closer to our Desmage in the foreground. We ended up going with a slightly less British countryside look for most of our buildings, just because I felt like a Tudor look was a little too on-the-nose and too much of a common fantasy trope.

Those wires have something really neat associated with them, and we’ll show you that when the whole image is revealed.

Titansgrave: The Saurian Empire

Continuing with our slow reveal of the world of Valkana, here’s another piece of art:

So what you see here is an early rendering of our lizardpeople race, who we call Saurians. In the history of Valkana, the Saurians were the dominant species for a very long time, due to their mastery of technology. While the other indigenous species were crawling up out of the mud, the Saurians built mighty war machines, and dominated the world. They enslaved the Orcs (the Orcs are still pretty upset about this) and subjugated the Elves, Dwarves, and Cloustra, among others.

But one day, there was an apocalyptic event (every species and society has their own version of the story, and their own explanation of the sky falling down). When the sky fell down on the world, the Orcs took it as a sign and rebelled against the Saurians. The other peoples of Valkana saw the Orcs rebelling, and decided to get on that train while it was still chugging along.

A long and brutal war ensued, but eventually the Saurians were defeated, at great cost to all sides.

Now, the world is mostly at peace, and though old tensions still simmer, the Saurians and Orcs live side by side with Elves, Humans, Dwarves, and the Professorandmaryann, in a world they built on the ruins of the old.

In our campaign, Hank Green is playing a female Saurian, and Yuri Lowenthal is playing a Half Saurian/ Half Orc. They both have incredibly interesting back stories, and we had a great time exploring them.