Letting Go
The Reboot proceeds apace. But one of the things that it has to include is letting go of some of the old stuff I liked, as well as the old stuff I'd gotten tired of. In particular, the jump of 50 years in the world's timeline, and the inclusion of a major world-spanning war in the intervening time means that a few of the characters I liked had to go.
In particular among these was Arnol of Secarda. Arnol was a sort of wandering archmage, of a human subculture that had long life, unconventional family arrangements, tattoos and long hair. And was something of an outcast from even that culture for being upsettingly non-traditional. Way back when I first started writing stuff down for Spellbound, the first campaign in Davon, Arnol was the first person whose name went down in the Encyclopedia. He was supposed to be my 'voice' character, for when I needed input into player conversations. RPGs being what they are, of course, he was rapidly superseded in that by other characters, but he stayed in there, causing chaos in various ways, and acting as a conduit to get kinds of other interesting characters into the plot. He had romantic or familial involvements all over the place. He had a house where even more bizarre characters took refuge. I even worked out a costume appearance for myself as him, for a Hallowe'en party about a million years ago.
But he'd started to drift out of the plots in recent years, and if there was one person most likely to get himself killed in the front lines of war against a cosmic force, well, he was probably it.
There's nothing remotely therapeutic about killing off a character you like, mind. There's a reason so many writers in fantasy and SF find ways to bring their protagonists back from the dead, and indeed, Arnol had managed that trick before. However, he'll get something very few dead characters will be getting - a line in the new setting document saying who he was and when he died, and, once I decide what various people will have done, where the monuments stand.
Posted by Drew Shiel at January 7, 2014 3:35 PM
