Tales of Alethrion: Season 3

Autumn News and Orders Locked!
7 days ago – Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 08:39:40 AM

Greetings heroes!

Fall is upon us and the dark days are coming (in the north), but thanks to your heroic support the light will continue to shine on Tales of Alethrion! We have now locked the orders and will begin sending the digital items asap when we have a complete overview of all the orders. For the physical items, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. 

Bardic tunes for your fall break

Since our last update, we’ve released the Mik and Ken song I Don’t Wanna Be a Hero, but also the full soundtrack album from Daughter’s Revenge, including the hit single Mother’s Heart featuring amazing Maisy Kay that was already released as a single!

You can find both releases on our Spotify.

But as any other major hit, I Don't Wanna Be a Hero of course needs an epic music video. So we are super excited to finally share the brand new music video with you here! We hope you like it! 

But, but, but, there’s more! As mentioned in our last update, we’re working on a new intro for the series and we want to share an early version of the new intro song with you here. It might not end up sounding like this, but we thought you might be interested in hearing some of the first drafts: 

Ballad of Halima

We are happy to share with you that we’ve finally finished animation and are moving into the final phase of compositing with the coming episode, Ballad of Halima! It’s looking pretty good already, we must say, and we can’t wait to share the final episode with you next year! 

Here is a sneak peek of the episode:

Power of Resurrection - Part 2

The storyboard is ready, and we’ll soon begin the animation process. In this episode, we’ll introduce a new character as mentioned in a previous update, so say hello to Urracca! Her design is FINAL_DONE_REALLY_v003_FORREAL_FINSHED. We'll feature her in a future update.

Urracca lives very isolated and only in the company of her beloved birds. She's afraid of the possible threads outside the rustic tower where she lives and has set up countless traps to keep out any kind of intruders, including Mik... 

Figurines

We are starting the production of the miniature figurines of Young Wilhelm, Young Vito and Amerath and expect to receive the prototypes this fall. 

Alethrion November Challenge #AlethrionChallenge

For those of you who want to participate in the annual Alethrion November Challenge, we will post an update about how to participate and what amazing gift you can win!!!

The Studio

Besides Tales of Alethrion we’ve been working on our animated children’s series Høj and have now completed the final episodes of the first season! We are so excited and are already exploring a second season.

Also...

We noticed an error with the last post, so some of you might not have been able to see some of the attached photos. We don’t want anyone to miss out on anything, so we’ve uploaded the photos once more:

Sneak peaks of the new locations we’ll be visiting in ‘Ballad of Halima’:

Mikkel and background artist Petra:

Concept art for ‘Power of Ressurrection - Part 2’:

Mikkel in action:

Mikkel looked through his old sketchbook and found a bunch of plans for 'Choose Their Path', concept art and other ToA related sketches. Here is one of the first Vito, Gaya and their kids sketches:

And Nick Marinello, who did the digital video game ‘Dungeons of Alethrion’ was visiting from the states!

That’s all for now, and thank you again for all your support and for being on this journey with us! High five!

Mikkel Mainz & Alethrion Team.

Riders of the realm! What News from the Mark?
about 2 months ago – Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 02:00:23 AM

The Great Backerkit and Summer Update!
3 months ago – Fri, Jul 05, 2024 at 09:16:25 AM

Greetings fellow travelers!

Thank you again for your loyal support of Tales of Alethrion and our mission to expand the universe and unfold more epic stories together with you! Thanks to you we have set off on our quest to produce the third season, and we would like to bring you some updates on how far we’ve come. 

Here is the updated Thank You Drawing, which you can also download in high resolution on the pledge manager once we start unlocking the digital rewards. As you can see in the bottom part of the illustration, we have been inspired by Van Gogh's way of coloring.

Backerkit

This Spring we’ve set up the Backerkit and sent out surveys for you to pledge your reward(s) and add additional rewards to your treasure chest. 89% of you have already completed the survey step, and we have locked these first orders, but you can still complete your pledge survey. So if you haven't filled it out yet - don't hesitate to do so soon.

You can also share the pre-order page with your fellowship and encourage them to support our mission – or pledge some extra rewards of your own. Among other rewards that were not available during the campaign, we've added an Alethrion miniature, a Tira figurine and individual rewards that were bundled during the campaign. 

The page will be open until we start shipping out which will be this Christmas at the earliest. This could be later if we don’t receive figurines from the manufacturer or something else delays us. But we'll keep you posted. 

You should already have access to the pledge manager page on backerkit, but here is a link to the pre-order page available for the ones who missed the Kickstarter campaign as well. 

Dungeons of Alethrion

Right now there is a Summer Sale for the computer game “Dungeons of Alethrion” running until the 11th of July. Many of you will receive your steam key very soon when we are locking the first wave of orders today, but if you have friends who like retro Dungeon Crawl games, then this is a great time to share it. I'll also be releasing a playthrough video soon where I am playing the game with the game designer Nick Marinello. You can find the game on Steam right here.

Sneak Peeks

Here are some BTS production steps from concept art to background done by Anna Fischer-Larsen, Mikkel Mainz, James Cavanaugh, Petra Svennevig and Eva Aubry. We'll put a spotlight on some animation scenes in our next update!

The first quest

As you know we’re already producing the next episode of the season: “Ballad of Halima”. Since our last update, we’ve finished preproduction and production with animation and now background design is at full force. The plan is to finish the episode this fall. 

Here we see the VERY FIRST LOOK AT HUMUN! The deity who created the humans in Tales of Alethrion. The other deities really didn't like him much...

The second quest

With “Ballad of Halima” in production we’ve moved on to the next episode “Power of Resurrection - Part 2”. Right now, we are developing the story, designing characters, and we would like to share an excerpt from the storyboard with you — we really hope you like it! 

The third quest

The last quest consists of creating an intro for the season. Now we have the storyboard and intro song ready and can move on with animation. We plan to have all the episodes and the intro ready next year.

Speaking of new songs...

Creating a new season not only consists of storyboarding and animation, but also creating a suitable soundtrack with banger songs and soothing music. Besides the intro song, our composer, Mathias Valliant, is working on five new songs. Yes, we have a band on Spotify called Tales of Alethrion. It is official. And one of them will be released already this summer! Our beloved backers will receive a downloadable link for this year's epic summer hit "I Don't Wanna Be a Hero" once it is released.

Follow our Spotify-channel for all the updates or put the Tales of Alethrion soundtrack on repeat! 

Other quests and next step

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, we’re looking into potential manufacturers of the three new mini figurines, Young Wilhelm, Young Vito, and Amerath. It’s a slow process with sample approvals and creating different molds for the figurines, but we hope to have them ready for shipment by December. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to make the figurines as big as we’d hoped simply because it’s way too expensive. Instead, we’ve reached out to one of the world’s greatest miniature manufacturers that can make 8-10 cm high quality figurines.  

Besides Tales of Alethrion, our great team is also part of our Copenhagen based studio Skjaldborn, where we are about to finish part 2 of the first season of another animated show called “Høj”. I am director of the show, and many from the Tales of Alethrion team have also been part of the project. “Høj '' part 1 has been airing on the Danish national broadcasting company, DR, in the beginning of the year, and we look very much forward to releasing the second part of the show this fall. We hope that the show will be available for an international audience at some point, but that is up to the broadcaster. 

Once again, THANK YOU SO MUCH for making Tales of Alethrion possible – we can’t wait to show you the new episodes! Stay tuned for more updates!  

High Five!

Mikkel Mainz & Tales of Alethrion Team! (⋆‿⋆)

A HUGE THANKS !! We made it to the finish line ⚔️
6 months ago – Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 03:03:30 PM

Travelers,

I cannot say it enough: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. We’ve done it again - fought an epic battle against time (and life) and won. Not 1 ! Not 2 !! BUT 3 goals were achieved during this campaign.

The first goal is “Ballad of Halima” and the two stretch goals are a new intro for the season and “Power of Resurrection - part 2”.

YOU are the very reason we can keep expanding this crazy universe and tell the tales, and I wouldn’t want any other heroes to have our 2D animated fantasy backs.

Here’s a little bit on what will happen now:

Practical stuff 

We are once again setting up a Backerkit - so if you’ve had a failed payment or the like, there will be an extra chance there to make the pledge successful and get your reward(s). Surveys for your addresses and such will also be through that platform.

Production stuff 

As you know we’re already producing the next episode of the season: “Ballad of Halima”. Our hope and plan is to be done with this episode which is roughly the length of The Reward in the Fall. In May and June we’ll be planning and setting up for the intro and next episode, as well as getting an overview of the rewards, planning the shipment and more.

We're passionate about the universe and characters in the team and we are moving from development to pre-production in July/August (script/beats to storyboards, new designs, technical tests, concept art, color script, and the like) for the next episodes and a bigger animation team will begin production in the Fall here at Skjaldborn.

We’re looking forward to keeping you updated along the way and showing you the progress me make. Again - thank you for the overwhelming positive feedback and reaction to this month's releases and campaign. You rock!

If your hand isn't to sore from all the high fives I’ve given you during this campaign - then I’ll send you one more:

High Five *hear the perfect gathering of two hands into one epic clap*,
Mikkel Mainz and the rest of the Tales of Alethrion team

Talesofalethrion.com

YouTube.com/talesofalethrion 

🔥 Second stretch goal reached + ONLY 8 HOURS LEFT + Spotlight: Urraca 🔥
6 months ago – Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 06:56:18 AM

Greetings mighty travelers of Alethrion!

Thank you all so much for being a part of this (crazy) adventure! 

We've reached stretch goal 2: "Power of Resurrection - part 2" (!🔥!) and we're so grateful that we get to show you what will happen to our odd couple, Mik and Greed. 

There are only a couple of hours left of the campaign and now it's all about getting everyone to share the campaign and get fellow adventurers to subscribe to Tales of Alethrion on YouTube - the more the merrier 🫶

Bard recap

This month has brought so many new and fond memories. Just to name a few: 

We launched this Kickstarter and released the very first episode of the season, "Power of Resurrection - part 1", on the same day.

We showed you the storyboard to animation video of the battle between Greed and Amerath + *SPOILER ALERT* the ghost of Alethrion 👻

And for the first time in Alethrion's history we gathered the entirety of the series with every type of episode into The Tales of Alethrion Marathon ↓

In order to do so, we had to make new music for "Outcast's Journey". It was the only episode not composed by Mathias Valiant. We hope you like it!

A great team of friends and regulars of the channel and series created the “Dungeons of Alethrion” video game on STEAM, led by Nick Marinello.

And last but not least, we finally brought you the Tales fo Alethrion Board game - Tutorial that shows you how to play the game 🎲 (See if you can count how many times I (Mikkel) blink 👀)

Spotlight: Urraca 

In the spotlight, we find Urraca, a daring opportunist with a penchant for adventure and risk. A completely new character introduced to the series. She thrives on danger, often throwing herself into risky situations for the promise of great rewards. Skilled in flying, acrobatics, and thievery, she hails from the Losia Forest as a lycanthropic werebird cursed by the magpie animal skin. 

While Mik wrestles with his decisions regarding Greed, Urraca sees potential in its abilities. Despite Mik's skepticism, Urraca's influence fosters a complex dynamic where Greed's power becomes intertwined with their adventures. 

Now the real work begins 💪 Stay tuned in the updates, where this very bard will keep you posted on all the exciting news. 

A myraid of High Fives,
Mikkel Mainz and the rest of the Tales of Alethrion team