Heyo! We’re back from our much needed break that gave us a huge opportunity to really sit and think about how we wanted to do things moving forward. This includes (but is not limited to) updating our Website, apprehensively returning to BlueSky with the caveat that we are 100% deactivating the moment that psycho decides that harassing me is better than getting an actual job or paid hobby, and… honestly getting a better idea of what we want to do with everything? Which is probably the biggest take away since we’re definitely running a business and can’t afford to be silly!
One of the things that ended up happening during the break was us realizing how much the NPCs have changed since their inception which sparked a bit of musing when it comes to how we wanted to handle Ash and Flowers of Azraeém and the idea of it being a transformative adventure for the characters (and hopefully those who are playing!).
To be up front – this was always something that we had in the back of our mind when developing the overall adventure. Especially since a lot of the drive for this came from just wanting to actually play through a fully conceptualized story line, one of the biggest things we wanted was for the PCs to really have the opportunity to be able to look back at what they’ve been through and reflect on how they’ve changed as a result of those experiences. How important that was didn’t became obvious until we actually happened to pull up Harold and Bula as well as Savari’s original designs vs. how they stand now (which is close to where they’ll be by the time you start playing the game and meet them in the story) and saw just how much they actually changed. … As we were writing.
Savari
I mean we might as well just start with the most obvious one. When I first drew her it was before I even started properly Playing her in any TTRPG. I just knew I wanted her to be the plucky Bard type and boy did I lean into that with her first drawing:
As I both played her and started developing her as an NPC, I started finding myself being more drawn towards the direction of what it means to be A Bard in the face of chaos, death and destruction. Bards by design exist to inspire those around them in a way that provides them not only with support but encouragement to overcome whatever obstacles they come across but what happens as a result of constantly being faced with the ugliness that comes with confronting reality? How much pep can you really keep in your step to provide that kind of enthusiasm to those around you? Is it even a possibility?
It was pretty inevitable that she’d become a bit more on the cynical side but I really wasn’t satisfied over ending it there. By the time I did these designs, it was just at the start of me moving her towards being an NPC in Ash and Flowers and placing her within the role of Representative of The Vivid Aurora Circus. Unless I was going to change her class completely or change what it meant to be a Bard, the only thing that could happen from here is really push the idea of what it means to be someone whose role is defined by your ability to encourage people to push past the darkness towards the light.
This is also where being a Bard started to become a bit more defined (though admittedly now as I’m writing this, we both just looked at each other with a very big “OH………………” Moment of realization) because the truth is… how the fuck can you really inspire anyone if you haven’t gone through the path of lacking inspiration and finding it all over again?
Looking at this now, it’s interesting to see the vivacity that existed in her original design back just in a way that’s a bit more lethal. This is something that we dive into more in the game (specifically in the Play Test Adventure), but at some point in time, she just stops looking. The more she seeks it, the more she just finds the ugly that gives her every reason to stop believing in the beauty that she can share with the Circus to inspire them to keep going. Instead, she retreats back to the root of what inspired her to be a Bard in the first place – her people – and never really stops believing.
Also! She got her bangs back! Didn’t even notice that!
As a side note! Even though it wasn’t intentional, she definitely helped us figure out the Legends Bard in the game:
We’re still tightening everything up but I am Excited Especially for when we’ll be doing Solo/Duet RPGs using her and other NPCs to see how everything ends up playing.
Harold & Bula
Technically this whole stream of thought started off because I was working on Bula’s latest design over the break and had to pull up her original design and we both nearly lost it because we forgot what she even used to look like.
We were both just thrown over how fucking young she looks (which gets referenced loosely in Isteen’s first short story here), but weren’t really able to quantify just how young she looked until we started tackling her latest design as we were developing the Witch Pursuit. When I first did this design back in early 2024, even though she was always supposed to be loosely related to Azraeém, I hadn’t really figured out what a Witch was even supposed to be in the game.
As we were working on the break, we decided to use her as an example of what a Witch would even look like and haha.
Looking at this final design was when it really clicked how much both Bula and Harold went through from the beginning of their role in the story to where you’ll end up meeting them.
Similar to Savari, Harold and Bula both are continually forced to confront the ugliness of the world – it’s just very clear that they absorb their experiences (quite literally) differently. We’re still working on finalizing the copy for the Witch, but we concluded that she’s definitely a Spite Witch which has shit like this:
Neither of us thinks that the original version of Harold and Bula are wrong, but we definitely agree that their original designs reflect how they started in their journey: Very naive in terms of the expectations that their positions and pursuit would be requiring to succeed.
Also Harold got a sense of humor which is a true sign of growth in and of itself. And Bula got mean, but she’s an Orc so that was pretty much inevitable.
We hope that by having our own characters/NPCs go through these kinds of journeys that we end up encouraging everyone who plays the game to really think and consider what impact the journey of the Adventure will have on their PCs. While we doubt we’ll have a ton of people playing, we still hope that those who do will be open to sharing their character’s progress, what they go through and the decisions they make that transform them into the likely bright eyed and bushy tailed adventurer into the fierce Vanguards they’ll be by the end of the story.
Hopefully.
Assuming they live through the journey.
~Dre