Tales from the Spire Download!
As a holiday gift to our wonderful community, we’re incredibly pleased to share our “Tales from the Spire: Volume One” PDF, containing a series of prose stories that have appeared here on the site in a conveniently digestible form–and with brand new spot illustrations by Rachel!
Download the PDF by visiting this link right here. ENJOY!
I’m sitting in Chicago Midway Airport right now as I type up this post! Whilst traveling across the country to spend the holidays with my family, we got trapped in Chicago thanks to an unfortunately timed snow storm, but it’s left me with (at the very least) an airport wifi connection and enough time to put this post together for you all!
It’s been a heck of a year–and while we work on producing the Music of the Western Deep: Volume One album with Nolan Markey (now expected to launch around February, 2023) and preparing our Volume 3 crowdfunding campaign (expected to hit Kickstarter around Feb/March shortly after the album launches), we know it can seem like pages have slowed to a crawl. We feel it too!
But since we’re coming up on the new year, it feels only fair to share what we’ve been working on!
Music of the Western Deep: Volume One is a given, of course, as the successful crowdfunding campaign has enabled us to give composer Nolan Markey the freedom to create a number of amazing tracks. We just sent backers some work-in-progress music and we’re looking forward to sharing more here and on our Twitter account as things materialize.
Beyond the Western Deep: Volume Three Kickstarter is our next big project. We’ll be working with Sara McHenry once again to help us handle the logistics here, and we’re planning to include some really fun goals and stretch goals. More to come!
A New Western Deep Adventure Game is in the works, with character animation being handled by Knights of the Light Table (who did the amazing animation for our Volume Two Kickstarter campaign). Unlike Wintersdawn, this game is intended to be a full-length tale featuring a new protagonist and telling a brand-new story that takes place concurrently with the events of Beyond the Western Deep. We’ve been working on the prototype build for over a year now, and it’s very exciting to see how far it’s come. We’ll hopefully have more details about this in 2023.
And of course MORE PAGES! Once the holiday season dies down and the artwork for the Volume Three Kickstarter is squared away, priority will return to the pages, and we’re excited to continue the story at this very interesting crossroads.
SO! Those are the big new projects we’re working on for 2023! We can’t wait to share more with you. But until then, have a wonderful holiday!
Wow! Lots of new content coming up is pretty sick, and Tales of the Spire sounds promising! Looking forward to what will be in store next year, but in the meantime, Happy Holidays to both of you! :)
Thank you, NaniKitty! Happy Holidays to you as well!
I’m slowly unraveling all this content I’ve found recently. For now, it looks marvelous, lively and wonderful characters.
Thank you for all this content, and will have better words to share, when I read the PDF.
You still planning to create a Patreon?
Thanks for the PDF. And the illustrations are very nice!
Regarding “The accused”: When this story take place? It’s the present (the events of the main comic)? The past? Or even the future?
Perhaps always specify the time period of each side story, or publishing a timeline for all of them, would be a good idea?
We’re still considering it, yeah! Though with all the other projects going on taking our time it isn’t likely to materialize anytime in the immediate future.
Forgot to say this yesterday.
MERRY (LATE) CHRISTMAS AND HOLIDAYS! For those who don’t celebrate the holidays, happy day anyway!
Hey there! I have a few questions about the comic, if that’s okay:
1.) What works inspired your comic? I’m sure Redwall was one of them, but any others?
2.) What species are sapient in this world? I mean, clearly there’s Cats, Wolves, Foxes, Otters, Squirrels, and Mustelids like Weasels & Minks, but any others?
3.) Why don’t you have more in-depth pages (for the site itself, not in-story) on the lands and species?
Hi Mara! Thank you for reading and reaching out! :)
1.) Redwall is of course a huge one, but we pull inspiration from a variety of sources–not just in terms of the world, but overall tone and presentation, and even how we go about marketing the story itself. Things like The Secret of NIMH, Disney’s Robin Hood, Zootopia, Mice Templar, and Mouse Guard all get pulled into the mix for example. I’m also inspired by video games like Vagrant Story (where Hardin got his name!) and Quest for Glory. It’s an eclectic mix :)
2.) This is something we’ll probably save to answer in the comic itself. There are certainly other sapient species we haven’t seen yet, but we’d want their reveal to be a surprise.
3.) We’ve considered doing that–it’s certainly not a bad idea! I’m generally averse to having too much material appearing out of the story, otherwise it can feel like folks need to do homework before settling into the world. We have some material in the bonus sections of books that kind of fill this gap, but I suppose someday we could port this information to the website somehow!