Mirian Raas and her faithful crew make their living salvaging lost treasures from sunken ships along the coast of tropical Sargava. While retrieving riches from the bottom of Desperation Bay, Mirian and her friend Jekka, one of the last of his lizardfolk tribe, unexpectedly run across the wreck of an ancient magical ship. The discovery leads them on a quest for an arcane artifact called a dragon's tear, which may be the key to locating Jekka's vanished people. But a vengeful sorcerer and a zealous agent of the Child-God Walkena also seek the dragon's tear—and they'll stop at nothing to get it. Can Mirian and her crew pass through the legendary gate in the sea and find the tear before it's too late?

As we close out 2014, I wanted to end on a high note and give you one last year-end blog. I went to our Managing Art Director Sarah Robinson and Senior Art Director Andrew Vallas to get some help rounding up some favorite illustrations from the past year. Seeing how great their selections were, I also asked various members of our editorial team to pick a few of their own favorites to add. So here are some of our best illustrations from 2014!

Many years ago, back in the days of the Advanced Player's Guide, there were plans to open up the paladin class to characters of any alignment. Unfortunately, the constraints of the class and its many alignment-based abilities made it too much of a challenge to fit in the pages of that book. Fortunately, the Advanced Class Guide gave us the opportunity to revisit the idea in the form of the Warpriest.

Funny story. While brainstorming the Advanced Class Guide, and determining which classes were to appear in it, the investigator almost didn't make the cut.

As a kid, I spent a good chunk of my weekend hours watching just about anything that had swashbuckler goodness. Pirates, musketeers, and masked avengers were among the first sparks that ignited my fledgling imagination. When we set out to design the swashbuckler class our chief goal was to create a class that was fun in that Errol Flynn sort of way, while creating enough room for the many fine swashbuckler variants that have appeared in the many decades after Captain Blood.