We decided to revitalize an older series of posts that detailed companion skills and displayed some poses for these characters. This time we will take a look at the Dark Elf scout Renkailon in all his grim glory.

First and foremost, Ren was designed as a ranged-melee hybrid character with some really useful support capabilities. His damaging attacks are all Armor Piercing, which helps against armored foes quite a bit. Though Ren is not very sturdy, his high Evade stat allows him to avoid damage effectively.

The greatest cause for mutations in the Riven Realms is a mysterious arcane disease that people call the Taint. There’s no telling how it spreads or why it attacks the ones it does; its workings have eluded medical science altogether. These days, every third human on the continent is Tainted. The Taint begins with a period of incubation when the victim falls gravely sick and suffers seizures and spells for days or weeks. About half of them perish during this interval.

Stone forests are comprised of thousands upon thousands of standing, pointed stone spires or pillars of varying heights and girth. Carved by arcane winds initially, and further chipped by the unceasing gales ever since the post-Calamity wastelands were formed, these forests are now mazes of rocks and gullies where one can easily get lost. Occasionally, a 'stone tree' falls when there's movement about, which makes navigating these labyrinths even riskier.

This time we would like to introduce a brand new game mechanic to you that you will see quite a lot in Vagrus: the acquiring and delivering of news across vast tracts of wasteland. Carrying news between settlements not only makes sense from a gameplay perspective but has its foundations in-world, too, that is, comitati are known to have a vital role in distributing news and taking messages all over the continent of Xeryn.

Hargad Tuul (an old name meaning 'The Hollow Plain') is our next location artwork reveal that is found post-Prologue. With its fog, overcast sky, solitary gnarly trees, and greenery the area is a far cry from the usual arid wastelands and rocky deserts of the rest of the continent. The art captures its melancholy dampness and bleakness perfectly.

Well, we have just passed another major milestone in our content creation progress.

As mentioned in our post last week, with our Prologue ready from a content perspective, our writers have been already working on the Early Access stories for Vagrus.

In the Prologue we have well over one hundred thousand words worth of story and lore coming together from Events and Codex entries. Actually, even a bit more since the Narration and Tutorial texts are coming through another source and so are not included in the above numbers. Those two make up over four thousand words on top.

A lot of the Riven Realms are endless wastelands and deserts. Yet even in the deadliest of deserts, some life remains; thrives even. Most of that life tends to be found around an oasis.

It's spring 1990 and I'm in elementary school. My best friend brings a book to school that he reads aloud to a small group of us during our big walks at lunch break. The book has a weird old wizard on the cover conjuring smoke from a crystal ball. More interesting are the illustrations on the inside: intricate black and white drawings of strange fantasy creatures and dungeon locations. The little book is Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson's Warlock of Firetop Mountain, translated to our native language. Most of you probably know that it's a gamebook that you do not read from start to end but in branching numbered chapters that make the story personal and add replayability. Yet they are much more than simple choose-your-own-adventure books because they include a stat and combat system you have to manage throughout the adventure - albeit a really simple one.

It is finally time to look at the stats and systems related to the vagrus, that is, YOU, the player's character in the game (aka Leader). You can interact with the Leader UI screen (opened by clicking the leader's medallion in the bottom left) in order to manage said stats and improve your character.

This week's character reveal is the Orc Marauder. Orcs are popular fantasy characters with many different iterations since their addition to fiction by Tolkien. The Orcs of the Riven Realms are creatures prone to violence, sharing a mystical past and origin but they were created fairly recently. They are tribal in their homeland called Darkmoor but rarely travel in groups when far from it.