Who is this mysterious girl on fire?

Let’s find out!

On pre-order later today, Zovena Vela is a brand new Gifted character! She’s our 2021 show exclusive miniature, but considering the state of the world, we’re releasing her early for sale on the webstore.

The Concept

To chat about the development of the character, I’ll pass you over to artist extraordinaire, Rei!

Zovena Vela (or as we called her during development: Pyro Elsa) is my first Gifted!

Up until now we haven’t done many new named characters, it’s mostly filling in gaps in the Carnevale range and adding some new character types, so I was excited!

Whenever we design a new character it starts off from a place of necessity. What does this faction need in-game? What works with the faction style? But with Zovena is was all about the story. Her storyline is tied into Blood on the Water, so we knew we wanted someone who could control fire. But from there we wrote a full character. That part is always interesting. We have a big team discussion of ideas before narrowing down on the one we want to use.

This time it was a teenage girl who had run away from her family because she struggled to control her powers. The look of the character grew from there. She came from a wealthy family, so we gave her a carnival dress (which has been burned up a lot). She ran away from her family, so there came the idea that she grabbed a City Guard coat on her way out into the night. It doesn’t fit her particularly well since it was made for a fully grown person!

I wanted it to be obvious that she wasn’t in complete control, so she’s got lots of burned areas of her skin, and her hair is completely burned off.

We actually went through about a dozen different colour schemes before settling on orange and green. I’m often quite limited on my colours because each faction has it’s scheme, but the Gifted get to be whatever colour they like, which was a welcome challenge!

Thanks Rei!

The Rules

As Rei mentioned, we like the make sure that models fit within their factions and add something new. Zovena Vela is very much a glass cannon, which is pretty new for the Gifted. Burattino is closest to that, but with all the Vampiric Attacking it does, that puppet never stays down for long!

So here we have it! Vela has low Protection and pretty low Life Points. Generally speaking her main statline isn’t anything to write home about at all! Dexterity 5 gives her a little protection and makes her a decent mover too.

She’s got some crazy good weapons though! The Fireball is a great ranged attack, potentially dealing 5 Damage with -2 Penetration. Two-handed means she’s not so great on the charge though. Alternatively she can swap out the Penetration for a Template attack on her Fire Stream. This is great if she gets mobbed by weaker Henchmen, as a couple of these blasts will burn up a lot of enemies!

For special rules she has Brave (she’s got a fiery temperament to match her powers) and also Pickpocket and Slippery (3). This makes her an excellent thief! Although the real benefit is if she gets caught in combat she’ll be able to break away easily and take a little something on her way out. For a fragile character, that’s invaluable.

Of course, we have to talk about Self-Immolate. Zovena Vela isn’t in great control of her powers, and sometimes they get a bit much. She can choose to place the Blast marker on herself and do loads of damage to anyone underneath – including herself! This move rockets the Fireball’s Penetration value up to -7 which is fantastic at taking out the toughest foes!

My preferred tactic is to use her to annoy enemy Heroes and Leaders. Once your opponent charges in, hit them with a Self-Immolate (and put 2 Will Points into it of course – potential 7 Damage with -7 Pen!). Then use the second action to run away, gaining movement thanks to Slippery and stealing back one of those Will Points on the way too!

So that’s Zovena Vela! We’re going to be posting an ongoing short story series with her in the coming weeks, right here on TTCommunity.

She’s going on pre-order today, alongside all our regular exclusives (including one of the last changes to get the Plague Doctress), around 3pm in the TTCombat webstore (although we’ll also post about it here so you don’t have to keep refreshing).