Scipio is definitely the token good teammate on the Alliance side. I mean, they’re mostly varying shades of grey (except the unambiguously evil Akasame), but they tend to be on the darker side of the spectrum. I liked the idea of giving the Alliance a “conscience”, though his advice isn’t always followed. How much of a difference he made, it’s hard to say, but it’s more than what he would’ve accomplished if he stayed in that tower.

It was a newer development to have him infiltrate the mage conscripts. In an older version, he avoided conscription by casting a spell on the mages in question. In retrospect, even if this worked as well as I originally wrote it, there were bound to be problems later. Also, for his part in the capture of Castle Notos, it would be a lot more effective from the inside. Since we already had the precedent of Rowland infiltrating the militia, it fit with the MO of an Alliance operative. A much better solution if you ask me (probably why it’s the version I went with).

Scipio is pretty much the only person in the Alliance with an eye on the greater scope of things. Rowland’s only really interested in Notos, Simona only cares about what Rowland wants, Carpos is using the Alliance as a stepping stone for his own ambitions, Garm thinks of nothing but getting his people home, and though we haven’t gotten to them yet, Urgill has her own mission, Mab is simply biding her time until she can be free, and Akasame like Carpos is using the Alliance for the sake of his own ambition (and for the opportunity to kill people). He’s the only one to gives credence to the threat of the Darklands (except for Urgill, of course, given that she’s from there–Simona doesn’t count because due to her three hundred-year absence, she wasn’t quite up to date on current events over there), though he is somewhat skeptical. Had Rowland launched further attacks after the Battle of Kalonis, it’s likely that Aristides would’ve pushed for stomping the Alliance. Oh, the Alliance might have survived and carried on guerrilla attacks until the Zephyrians withdrew, but they wouldn’t be in any shape to form a government as quickly as they did and waylaying the Zephyrians may well have resulted in the Dominion being that much better positioned to receive them. Considering all this and factoring in the seal on the Darklands, it wouldn’t be incorrect to characterize Scipio as having saved the world. Things definitely would’ve been much worse without his hand in world events. Not a bad bit of work for a former hermit.

There’s an order of mages that’s founded after his death calling itself the Scions of Scipio that serves Notos for nearly six hundred years. It goes a long way toward keeping his name alive. It actually outlives the republic Rowland founded, though not by too much. That’s a story for another day, however.

And that does it for Old Scipio. Next time we’ll be discussing poor Urgill, who has the uncanny Goblin knack for getting the short end of the stick. Stay tuned.

The problem with writing Dwarves, at least for me, is that it seems very easy–far more so than with Elves–to fall into the stock character tropes and never really write the characters as individuals. I tried to avert this somewhat with Garm. In many ways, he is the stereotypical Dwarf warrior, but I made some effort to play with the formula a bit. Garm realizes that being nothing more than dumb muscle brimming with valor and bloodlust isn’t enough to win wars, at least not against an opponent that not only has numerical superiority but also uses its dang head to win battles.

One of the key elements of Garm’s character is his struggle with his upbringing with all its focus on pride and personal honor versus the necessarily underhanded approach he needs to take if he wants his people to actually succeed. I drew a lot of inspiration from Viking culture, where victory by craft is supposedly as valued as victory by might. How true this was in practice is up for grabs, but I used it as a starting point for Garm. The Dwarves lack the might to beat the humans outright, so he had to start using his noodle.

His arrangement with the Church of Holy Light is a relatively recent development. I started thinking about how the Army of Light could actually beat Xorgoth’s flight and I knew that just throwing meat into the grinder wasn’t going to do it. As I’d developed the repeating ballista to neutralize the advantage Corona provided at Kalonis, I had my answer. And by making this arrangement, I also gave a justification for why the notoriously anti-nonhuman Church would allow the Dwarves to return to their mountains. After all, even diminished from the Darklands campaign and dealing with an insurgency by loyalists to Daphne, the Army of Light would’ve had no problem mopping the floor with Garm’s forces.

I’m sure the attentive readers are left to wonder what the Dwarves’ reaction will be when they find that their cities have been plundered in their absence. That does take some of the joy out of their homecoming. There will be consequences, naturally.

It wasn’t until the latest version of the story that I developed any supporting characters for him. I particularly like contrasting the younger, more idealistic Burkur with Garm just to show how bitter and jaded he has become. He’s a man (or Dwerkh, I suppose) who’s lost everything and the only thing that keeps him going is the drive to get his people home and see them flourish once more. Anything that doesn’t directly contribute to this goal goes to the wayside, as seen with his callous treatment of the Dwerkhar who fell during the purge of Urgill’s forces.

Well, I guess that does it for him. We’ll be back in several weeks to tackle Scipio (not literally, mind, as he’s an old man and terribly fragile). Stay tuned.

In his original conception, Carpos was named Clement, which was supposed to be a joke because his personality was the exact opposite of his name. However, as I started to develop the backstory further, I decided that Solon would name his firstborn after his late brother, the one who was supposed to inherit the throne in his place. He was actually a fairly flat character until more recent iterations. Assigning him a “pawn” (remember that the characters are loosely based on chess pieces) in the form of Patrocles helped a little. And, yes, I’m consciously invoking the the subtext between the literary Achilles and Patrocles when I chose the name. I’ll leave the extent of their relationship to your imagination.

It’s helpful to compare and contrast Carpos with his sister Daphne. Whereas Daphne tried to find balance and harmony with her human and Elven halves, Carpos always hated his Elven side for setting him apart. He knew he could never be truly accepted by either community and reconciling with the Church to improve his political standing was a non-starter, being an ungodly abomination and all. While his powers were weaker than Daphne’s, he never made an effort to cultivate them either. He could have become a decent magic user and a slightly below average psychic, but as you see in his epilogue, it’s only at the end of his life that he realizes what he’s been missing out on. I would wager if he was at his full potential, he’d be an inferior magic user to Simona but a more powerful psychic. It probably wouldn’t have saved him, but he would’ve been much more formidable.

Before I started serializing his section, I half-jokingly compared him to Viserys Targaryen. His character was pretty well set long before I first saw Game of Thrones or read the book, but the similarities are rather interesting. Two petulant pretenders to the throne who abuse their sisters as a matter of course. Related to the Targaryens is the whole incest angle. In Carpos’ case, it’s less a matter of any actual attraction to Daphne as it is a realization that his prospects for a mate are rather limited. He would much rather secure a political marriage to strengthen his standing, but pretty much no noble house would be willing to give one of their daughters over to him. Besides personal prejudice against him as a Half Elf, there’s also the matter of the Church’s disapproval. Squicky though it is, his decision to focus on Daphne makes some measure of sense. Also, until she started to assert herself as Princess Regent, Carpos was fairly confident in his ability to control her, which was another big plus in his book.

From a certain point of view, Carpos’ treason almost appears justified. If you discount the legitimate threat posed by the Darklands (which he and many others did), then Solon’s call to war was a ridiculous expenditure of blood and treasure. Even taking into account the validity of the Darklands campaign, it crippled the kingdom economically and militarily. If Daphne hadn’t raided the Dwarven cities in the mountains, Zephyr would never have been able to afford the grain it needed to feed the people in light of the famine that struck while the expeditionary forces were away. Even if the Monarch Lich launched his assault westward, it’s likely that his body would’ve failed him early in the campaign. (Trueborn Liches in my canon ultimately destroy their physical bodies with their ever-growing power, even after a considerable share of that power gets passed on to the new generation.) The Spider Lich (the Monarch Lich and Arachne’s offspring) had been transported halfway around the world for safekeeping and wouldn’t be mature enough to lead the Chaos Dominion for years. Ultimately, it would’ve amounted to little more than postponing the fight for a generation (and a human generation is a little thing for someone with even a half measure of Elven blood), but it would’ve made Carpos look good in the short term. However, more than likely, even without the Darklands campaign to raise its name and martial standing, the Church probably would’ve still tried to overthrow Carpos as it did with Daphne, so it all becomes a moot point.

The original plan was to give Carpos a suitably pathetic end for such a big scumbag, but as I was writing the epilogue, his little turnabout took shape. I already had him scheduled to die about a week after his capture, but I knew Simona wouldn’t want him to die so quickly. (Think along the lines of what the King of Midland had in mind for Griffith in Berserk, then stretch that over the centuries.) As I had him realizing just how long the torture could last, the only answer was to provoke Simona into killing him. It lets him go out on something of a victorious note, which he really doesn’t deserve, but one of the running themes of the series is that, good or bad, you don’t always get what you deserve.

And I think that’ll do it for know. We’ll be back in several weeks to cover the far less scummy Dwarven warlord Garm. Until then. Stay tuned.

I’m rather fond of Simona and not just for the fanservice factor she provides. Her basic concept was inspired heavily by Pirotess from Record of Lodoss War (and you can draw parallels between Simona’s relationship with Rowland and Pirotess’ with Ashram). She was originally a comfort woman brought over to service the upper echelons of King Zanil’s forces during the Chaos Dominion’s invasion of Notos. When the Darklander advance was turned back by the Zephyrian legions, she was captured by Clovin the Knight Champion of Notos, who led the Notian remnant. It’s hard to say why he spared her, but she agreed to serving Clovin’s bloodline in exchange for her life. As mentioned in the story proper, the generations to come varied in quality, but Rowland was the first to truly earn a full measure of her devotion.

It’s rather obvious that Simona is madly in love with Rowland. She had shades of infatuation with a few of her prior masters, but it never amounted to anything. Of course, even if she had lived, the best she could’ve hoped for was to be some sort of mistress on the side. Maybe that would’ve been enough for her. Maybe not. It wasn’t until after she died that Rowland was willing to admit any mutual feeling, so it’s not certain if he would’ve stopped holding her at arm’s length. Ah, tragic romance…

If you compare and contrast the human-nonhuman pairings in the series, Simona doesn’t have the same leverage over her partner as you see with Solon and Xanthe or Ionathas and Corona. Maybe it has something to do with her being raised as a servant and spending her entire life in that capacity. It certainly doesn’t look good for her own will to be subjugated to that of her master, but she’s never known anything else and she’s too strictly bound to her own code of honor to go back on her oath no matter how bad things get.

It might have been fun to tell the story of Rowland’s trade negotiations with Daphne from her perspective. Needless to say, his flirting with a half-Alari Zephyrian hits just about every sore spot she has. Hard to say who was more jealous, Simona or Uriel. ^o^

I guess that’ll do for now. In seven weeks I’ll be back to cover Carpos. What a piece of work that guy is. Stay tuned.

We’ve wrapped things up with our first lead of TTWC3 and now it’s time to take a deeper look. While Rowland is placed in the “king” role opposite to Solon and the Monarch Lich, he actually has greater affinity to the “knight” characters Ionathas and Caligo. Whereas Solon is the idealistic wise old king and the Monarch Lich is an archetypical evil overlord, Rowland is a very different sort of leader, bold and brash yet not without a good share of cunning. He takes a force of a few hundred and and manages to defeat one of the greatest strategists of that time backed by a military superpower. Now, admittedly, if the full strength of either the Zephyrian army or the Army of Light had been brought to bear against him, he probably would’ve been defeated. Similarly, he wouldn’t have been able to emerge victorious if the Dominion dispatched the sort of forces the Zephyrians contended with in the Darklands. However, success is as much a matter of skill as it is luck.

Rowland was a more interesting character to write than either Solon or the Monarch Lich because he was morally grey. Both Solon and the Monarch Lich have complexity to them, but they’re situated close to poles of the white-black spectrum. Rowland, however, is listed as a chaotic neutral in that he does whatever he pleases to benefit himself (and to the degree that he thinks outside of himself, his cause). You might be forgiven for doubting his sincerity when he speaks of working for Notos’ benefit. I do believe he’s a patriot, but not to the point that he’d serve the motherland to his own disadvantage. He refused the crown, but he still rules as a king in all but name. That being said, he didn’t go for hereditary rule because he cares enough about the country to not entrust it to anything so unreliable as his own progeny. If this all sounds somewhat contradictory, this blend of the selfish and the selfless, it’s because Rowland himself is riddled by such contradictions. It might be a problem for him if he stopped to fret about it rather than just charging on ahead.

I’ll save a discussion of his relationship with Simona for her section. I will say, though, that he uses people so cynically that he has little notion of true affection for anyone else. You could blame losing his mother at a young age, having a father obsessed with the cause above all else, and being raised primarily by a fanatically loyal and deeply infatuated servant. That’s not to say he lacks any redeeming qualities in his interpersonal relationships. He generally gives as much loyalty as he gets and while he may have his share of unsavory deeds, he’s far removed from the list of my greatest monsters.

Loss is a common theme throughout the Trident War series. Victory comes at a price and that’s for the lucky ones. However, of the entire cast, Rowland is perhaps the lead who gains the most and loses the least. That might make him something of a Karma Houdini in the eyes of some, but it’s something interesting to note.

Well, that should do it for Rowland for now. We’ll be back in seven weeks to discuss Simona. Stay tuned.

Medusa is a character that hails back from my now lost original concept for what would become The Trident War Chronicles. I’ve been a big fan of Greek mythology ever since I was a child, so it’s little surprise that I’ve woven it in so tightly with my own mythos. Much as Arachne originally had little more going for her besides being a menacing monster, so too was Medusa until I spent some time to give her more character development. I’ve already talked about her relationship with Arachne in an earlier post and there’s not much to add there. I’d probably say Medusa is a little more emotionally dependent on Arachne than Arachne is on her, but that might be because her background is a fair bit more traumatic.

Something I wasn’t expecting in her character until I really got into writing her section was the aspect of her as a tired bureaucrat. She doesn’t serve the Monarch Lich out of any great fear or loyalty, but more because it’s just a job. Basically, when Arachne submitted to him, she had no reason to put up a fight and was given her job as an inspector of the realm. You might think there was a punitive aspect to the Monarch Lich sending her to Notos, but it was simply a matter of him putting her powers and experience to use. As someone who made the rounds all throughout the Darklands multiple times during the Lich’s reign, who better to survey the land of the enemy?

As an interesting side note, there are three degrees of petrification that get covered in more detail in TTWC3, where the characters are on the receiving end and it seemed appropriate to talk about their origin here. Total petrification is fairly familiar and what most people associate with Medusa. Petrification of the flesh, where only a victim’s body is turned to stone, is actually inspired by the Medusa Transducer in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In my universe at least, I make the rationale that living tissue and dead matter react differently to the spell. This also make a convenient way to loot the victims. The way the Ancients were turned into bronze statues in Everyday Magic follows the same principle. Surface petrification was inspired by the Metroidvania Castlevania games like Symphony of the Night where it looks like total petrification but is ultimately just a shell that you can break free of. This form of petrification has previously been seen in KoG3 when Brenok petrifies Adrienne.

That does it for now. I’ll be back again in a couple months to start our treatment of the leads of TTWC3 with Rowland. Stay tuned.

I’ve stated before that I have trouble clicking with most of the leads of TTWC2, which is a terrible thing for the author to say, but Xargos is one of my favorites. While Orguz is the most sympathetic and Caligo the most interesting (particularly with regard to his backstory), Xargos is one of the most fun as a total dirtbag villain. Vain, greedy, cruel and cowardly, there’s almost nothing redeemable to him and he’s so blatant that he’s pretty fun to write. Now, perhaps the most fun villain to write was Brenok from the KoG series because you take all the above vices and add diabolical cunning. Speaking of which, the fact that Xargos veers into being stupid evil is another part of his charm.

As despicable as he is, I actually feel a bit sorry for Xargos. He’s so arrogant and he’s so much dumber than he thinks he is that he just blindly charges down the path to his own destruction. Compare him with Ophis Python, who was just kinda pathetic. For Python, circumstances were largely out of his control, but Xargos is almost entirely the author of his own ruin. It’s a bit sad, but you have a hard shedding any tears genocidal psychopath.

Well, that’s it for now. We’ve just got one more to go and that’ll be it for TTWC2. Stay tuned.

My head’s been so full of Star Wars that I very nearly forgot to give Ophis Python his due now that he’s left the stage. If I’m not mistaken, he dated back to the lost prototype of the story. If you’ve seen the cover of Life Force (Salamander in Japan) for the NES, you can see the image that was the inspiration for what Python is supposed to look like. My love of classical mythology factors in heavily with Python’s backstory, which also provides a connection to Arachne.

I’ve commented before about the challenge of writing nonhuman characters, particularly ones that aren’t humanoid. The further you distance yourself from the character, the greatly the challenge to portray them. Python mourning the loss of his family and the decline of his tribe are relatable enough, but there isn’t that much else to his character. I’ll admit that he’s pretty weak as a lead and if I had to do it again, I might consider replacing him with the Herakles Queen Basilissa.

It doesn’t feel like I’m giving him much of a fair shake and if I as the author don’t have much investment in him, that doesn’t bode well for the reader’s reception. Well, so it goes. I’ll have more to say when Xorgoth’s turn comes up, so look forward to that. Stay tuned.

It isn’t apparent now, but Dox is a rather special character in that he appears in many stories in the Tellus Arc. In fact, he happens to guide a lot of the events on the Planet from the date of his genesis on. He wasn’t originally in the Trident War Chronicles but was added in when the story was revived and I was working to better integrate the nascent Tellus Arc.

Much of Dox’s story gets filled in elsewhere, but I’ll go ahead and give you the basic background here. Dox was once a human archmage obsessed with the then-extinct Dark Race. Through his agents, he was able to uncover the Tome of the Black Lich, a spellbook sealed with the power of titular Black Lich, the last of the Dark Race. Through the power of the Tome, Dox became the Dark Eternal, a sort of noncorporeal entity of overwhelming dark power. This bypasses the key weakness of the Liches themselves, that their physical bodies become unable to contain the vast power they develop. Ironically, Dox continues his quest to perfect the Dark Race without realizing that he’s already achieved the nearest approximation to perfection that’s possible.

Dox powers himself by absorbing the souls of living things. In my canon at least, just as with the laws of conservation of mass and energy, a soul can neither be created nor destroyed, so each time Dox consumes a soul, he adds a perpetual energy generator, though the law of diminishing returns applies, hence his need to continually claim new souls for the multitude within.

In Dox’s epilogue, there are oblique mentions of a “her” interfering. I’m not going to go into the details here. You’ll learn more about her eventually, but I will say that in all the multitude, there is one soul that continues to defy him, not quite to the degree of parity but strong enough that any slackening of control can be exploited. That’s why his projection in the Darklands was destroyed. Otherwise Xanthe wouldn’t have stood a chance. Rest assured that this mystery benefactress will appear again.

It was interesting juxtaposing the dual nature of the Monarch Lich, who still retained much of his humanity, with the more inscrutable Dark Eternal. As I said before, the irony is that Dox already represents the perfection of the Dark Race but is completely unable to see beyond his goal of achieving that through new generations of Liches. The Liches themselves are an untenable species. That’s why they went extinct with Black Lich thousands of years earlier and that’s why they’ll go extinct again. All Dox has is his mission, but his view is so blinkered (contrary to his conceit that his vision extends far and wide) that he’ll never truly achieve it. That’s all the better for the world.

As a fun tidbit, it was actually Dox who was behind Shadowblight’s betrayal of the Shadow Clan and all his efforts to unify the Southern Continent. I think you only get an oblique reference or two from Brenok of “my master’s master”, but that’s who it is. Expect to see a lot of more of this guy. He plays a direct role in seven more books slated thus far and has some influence in several others. Next time we’ll be visiting that most tragic of serpents, Ophis Python. Stay tuned.

I would have to say that Orguz is probably one of the characters who benefitted most from the Version 3 expansion of TTWC3. At very least, I had planned for him to be a sympathetic character ever since Version 2, but his story was given a lot more breadth and depth recently. Originally he was Urgill’s father, who was aggrieved by her defection to the Promethean Alliance and reluctant to see his people used as the Monarch Lich’s cannon fodder, but that was about it. For Version 3, I instead made him Urgill’s grandfather and drew up his family tree. I made him into a reluctant king compelled to wear the crown as a puppet ruler who had seen the folly of defying the Monarch Lich when his people were conquered. Everything he does as king is meant to limit the suffering as his people, a vain effort though it may be.

Goblins are often portrayed as always chaotic evil, but there are some people who try to avert that. Basically, my take is that they’re a largely primitive, violent race but many are more neutral and there are stand-outs like Orguz who are actually among the more moral and decent characters I’ve crafted. He’s definitely an oddity among his kind, something he himself rarely fails to make note of. You can also see his more broad-minded ways in his treatment of the scout Orgdith, valuing ability over appearance.

Despite his advanced age and a nature that was out of step with his people’s culture, Orguz was actually one of the longest reigning kings of Shade’s Forest, partially due to the Monarch Lich’s patronage. There wouldn’t have been another who could’ve led his people so long under the circumstances, but I don’t imagine most people respect a successful collaborateur.

I guess this’ll do it for him. I may do a supplemental post on Goblin society someday. We’ll be back here again in seven weeks once the next section is complete. Stay tuned.