This week, we’re revealing something that we hope you’ll never have to visit in game: the village the Cleansing Conflagration – the gang of pyromaniacal, murderous scavengers – call home. Though it may not look much, it is a place of terror, sacrifice, and depravity, where there are artifacts and effigies aplenty to remind you of what goes on here.

Today we have another teaser for you in the form of character art – an essential component of our upcoming At the Heart of Ruin expansion, where many new humanoids, beasts, creatures, and anomalies are set to be introduced. And yet, this one is hardly ostentatious; it does not aim to dazzle or inspire fear, but simply to show you one of the various factions of authority that exist in Scrapheap, the focal point of many coming adventures.

This week’s location showcase for our At the Heart of Ruin expansion reveals the Ember Mines, a highly contested site that once belonged to the Dwarves of Dvendar Tharr, but has recently become a den for the numerous scavenger gangs that plague Varnurud. Whether it's sacrificial burnings or the enjoyment of human flesh, these savages are hardly the kind you’d be happy to encounter in the Ember Mines’ depths. No wonder that few go near the site – to do so is to invite death – though the resources within are said to be plenty, and there is talk of far more down the shaft than mere scrap.

The theme and look of this week’s location reveal for our upcoming DLC, At the Heart of Ruin, is quite different from the previously teased ones, all fiery and desolate. It is true that vagri who brave the Mountains of Fire will mostly traverse a volcanic hellscape replete with peril of the scorching variety, but what lies beneath is also intriguing.

After revealing our trailer for ‘At the Heart of Ruin’, our second region DLC, we’re now ready to share a little more about the new realm you will be able to explore. The first area we’ll look at here is Varnurud, which is one of the traversable parts of the great Mountains of Fire. As harsh and unforgiving as it is, most vagri will spend a great deal of their time here, as they navigate searing magma flows and the seemingly endless hordes of madmen who run roughshod over it.

Fellow vagri,

2024 is coming to its inevitable end and so we are closing the books on this year’s adventures as well. For this occasion, we thought we’d look back on the past year and list some of the things that happened around Vagrus before signing off.

How It Started

We kicked off 2024 with a post about our plans for the year. In retrospect, wanting to release smaller bits of content at intervals while developing two very content-heavy DLCs with our tiny writing team was wishful thinking. Why it did not exactly pan out like that also involved a lot of other factors, like the many, many other aspects of the game we’ve worked hard to improve. Also, it seems that there’s no such thing as “smaller bits of content” when it comes to Vagrus. With millions of words worth of written content behind us, everything is interconnected and adding things can be very tricky. Also, players now expect meaty additions, so just any odd small story just won’t cut it. Still, this effort gave us Clandestine, so it was not in vain.

Vagri! We’re sure many of you’ve been waiting for more information about our next DLC (shaping up to be expansion-sized once again) and the time has come to deliver just that – in the form of a special story trailer we’re excited to share:

So, there you have it. Some exposition delivered by award-winning voice actor Phil Rowe, along with a title reveal and the year of release. Although the latter is fairly vague, we can already say that we are aiming for the first half of 2025, as we’ve been working on it very diligently for months now. There’s still a lot to go, but we’re making good progress and we’re very satisfied with how it’s shaping up. Can you guess where it’ll be set? There are quite a few indicators, we think.

For today’s post, we’re pushing it further with teasers, and we have one of this writer’s favorites in store: the Hollow Men. The Hollow Men are a gang of warriors, ex-legionnaires, and mercenary criminals, and they have a long history going back to Legio. IX, or “Mortis”, with their story beginning when they lost on the battlefield to Raokan in p.c. 1074.

As we move into full swing with teaser season, we come to you today with another reveal of a group of foes. These predators of the wasteland may not feed on the flesh of their victims like the bloodletting miscreants we showed you previously, but they are an efficient lot with an affinity for hunting and slaying beasts, many of which you will come across in our upcoming region DLC. For now, we can only show you one of their ilk, but rest assured: the Wasteland Stalkers – their name among themselves and others – are deadly and exacting in their modus operandi.

Well, one lost pilgrim to be precise. On 7th September, I was fortunate to have participated in Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 in the UK, representing Lost Pilgrims there in exhibiting the City of Thieves graphic novel I’ve been working on with Chameleon Comix’s founder Gyula Szűcs and mega-talented graphic artist Krisztián Balla. We met and chatted with a lot of enthusiastic Fighting Fantasy fans, encountered living legends, listened to intriguing talks, and saw a ton of cool stuff, including the new gamebook The Dungeon on Blood Island by Sir Ian Livingstone himself.