Hello everyone,

in a recent post we introduced Viktor to you -- our newly joined junior coder. He’s been working with our other junior Unity developer, Beni. Beni has also decided on a career in coding precisely due to his love for video games, especially heavily narrative-driven ones. In fact, he had been wanting to work on a game like Vagrus for quite a while now.

The artbook of Vagrus is finally here (well, technically it is also on its way to everyone who ordered it) and holding it in our hands is indeed fantastic.

Admittedly, putting the book together was quite rough. Some of us thought that pulling it together from already existing artwork and writing texts around the art is going to take a couple of weeks. Turns out, compiling and writing something this big for physical publishing takes a handful of months, more like. All this in spite of doing a sort of a dry run previously with the smaller (A5) art booklet that went into the Collectors' Editions, albeit that had no texts accompanying the images. 

With the Finndurarth miniatures tucked away in Collectors’ and Emperor’s Editions on their way to their new owners as I’m writing these lines, I thought it would be prudent of us to write a bit of a painting guide. Well, two painting guides, to be exact. The first one uses some relatively advanced techniques while the latter goes for a sharper, more “box-art” style. The guides were written with the assumption that they will be used by hobbyists, so the techniques are listed along with the paints we used but not explained in detail. Luckily, the internet is chock-full of all sorts of guides; you can even learn about beginner techniques fairly easily should you wish to paint your mini without previous experience.

We talked about the Collector's Edition of Vagrus in a previous post and now the time has come to reveal the Emperor's Edition! With all the elements that come in the box having arrived and being prepared for shipping, we can show them off, starting with one of the stars of the show: the Finndurarth miniature.

Eylani is a companion character who has thus far been unavailable for recruitment in the game. She is a Half-Elven warrior, wanderer, beastmaster, and huntress. Not only is she a formidable frontline fighter able to tank a lot of hurt but can also use Striker, her falcon, to disrupt enemies, as well as overwatch positions to cause good damage.

The time has come to reveal the miniature of Finndurarth that is packed in the game's Collector's and Emperor's Edition (available via fig)! It is a 28mm scale figure and here you can see the 3D model that is the base of the final product. Soon, we'll reveal painted versions of it, too.

'We don't do alms 'ere, mate.'

- The "honest merchant" Narbo, talking about Scrapheap

The junk pile town of Scrapheap is one of the first locales you can visit in 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland', the standalone narrative scenario of Vagrus, and its location artwork was one of the first to be painted. Bazsó Lossonczy, the artist behind this amazing piece, captured the brooding, oppressive, desolate atmosphere of this town of scavengers in the sweltering shadow of the constantly volcanic mountains.

'This place is death.'

- Thula, apprentice shaman, upon entering the Writhing Oasis for the first time

Even among an abundance of amazing artwork pieces that we are lucky to have in Vagrus, the one depicting the weird and disgustingly beautiful Writhing Oasis is an exceptional one. Anyone who has seen the art of Péter Kovács, our amazing location painter, will know that he is quite at home when it comes to working on dark, haunting, or corrupted landscapes, while biological abominations are especially dear to his heart. Entrusting him with the Writhing Oasis - a cursed grove around a tainted pond that grew together to create a single deadly organism - was a no-brainer, and the result speaks for itself. I love all the little details and the strong call-back to Warhammer artwork.

Tahrar Barak, or the "Grim Plains", is a volcanic highlands region surrounding the Molten Tongue. To the west, it reaches the Molten Kingdom of Dvendar Tharr, while to the east, west, and north it gives way to the less jagged  but still excruciatingly hot Searing Plains. Clefts in the slag and hard earthen crust run dozens of miles in all directions, creating a hard-to-navigate spiderweb of ravines that most travelers shun.

Should the darkness cruelly whisper,

Call upon a kindly sister

Sister, sister, blood drops glister

Revoke now your cruel dark whisper

- From an Imperial children's rhyme

Kindly Sisters are members of the Nosferatis Sisterhood, a coven of mystics and sorceresses who delve into the deepest, darkest arcane secrets one can think of. The organization is one of the Pillars of the Empire, a religious order that serves the realms in an important capacity, although in the case of the Nosferatis, most Imperials have no idea what this service entails - except that it is most ominous. The wise seem to believe that it involves espionage, magical warfare, and arcane research. Members of the coven worship Bal-Ur-Kaal the Demon Prince and Ahskul, King of the Underworld, which is quite telling in and of itself.