Tag: A Jagged Road
23_Hondo
20_Handumas, 21_Nameless Child, and 22_Mowah
These are the characters of a potential short story Fool’s Tales set in the A Jagged Road world. It’s about a handumas (a title, not a name, meaning Caretaker) who is telling stories to a young child (left nameless, and also the plan is to leave him/her genderly ambiguous). The story in question is about Mowah, the First Merchant, who travelled the world, exploring strange lands, learning and trading goods, meeting strange people and supernatural creatures. Mowah was a real historical figure, but her legend has mixed with the facts, becoming a truly larger than life character.
15_Isotora
Just got a tickle to draw a Scandinavian Troll. Humon likes to talk about Scandinavian trolls a lot but I can’t actually find anything on the common encyclopedia sites that lines up with what she calls a troll. The art is heavily influenced by John Bauer’s image – as this was my first experiment with the creature I guess I didn’t have too much innovation on hand.
Anywhoo, this is Isotora. As the overseas land of Avori is based loosely on Scandinavia she’s a potential character I might use in future A Jagged Road stories. Trolls in scandinavian literature are much more magical in nature than more recent western versions of trolls, so Isotora can turn invisible and also move on the wind. Trolls, like most mythological creatures that occur frequently in myths, appear in a wide body of stories each with slightly different properties. I took some liberties here and made Isotora ugly like most male trolls are supposed to be – trolls frequently have reputations as shape-shifters and there’s no reason for males to be ugly but females to be extremely human-like unless they are using magic to transform themselves. In the future I’ll probably make a few ‘human form’ versions of her.
Isotora is not human and therefore doesn’t have human motivations – she’s more an incarnation of nature, and her actions are arbitrary. She may do benevolent things one day and malicious things the next. Trolls are also known for replacing human children with their own in Scandinavian lore, so I might integrate something like that in.
14_Nubia
Nubia is another character from A Jagged Road (my graphic novel that has yet to get off the ground). Like Ralyanna, Akoko and Reth, she was taken in from the streets and raise under the tutelage of the suave and cunning Lipho, who uses his network of street urchins to earn him money. Lacking Ralyanna’s merchant talents, Nubia gets by in the world’s oldest profession. Nubia is quite jealous of Ralyanna both for her natural talents and for the disproportionate affection that Lipho has for the fence compared to her. Not that Nubia has no wiles of her own – she has a large base of influential and connected clients and she’s quite adept at prying information from them one way or another.
Besides Lipho, Nubia has a close relationship with another urchin boy, Isoba. She takes the large but dim boy with her when moving through more dangerous areas, or meeting new clients.
09_Dendara
Another character in A Jagged Road, although she won’t be relevant for a long time – until the main protagonists of Beginnings have grown up and started messing about with the politics of Pes Riami. Dendara is a powerful member of the Merchant’s Guild – a political organization on Marus Grand, the wealthy sector of the city. The Merchant Guild represents a capitalistic element of the world of AJR that didn’t exist in historical Egypt. The nobles of the city didn’t try to stick their hands into the lucrative trade market until well after a new class of laborers had cornered the market and amassed a great deal of wealth. The Merchant Guild exists to continue to keep the power and wealth the merchants of the city have accumulated over the generations separate from the hands of the nobles and the government that they control.
The Merchant Guild is by no means out to help the common man however. While social mobility is at least possible as a merchant, they are still much more equatable to a noble nouveau, and they lord their opulence and status over day laborers just as much as the blooded nobles do. Dendara is a dead ringer for the wealthy merchant upper-class, personally controlling a dozen merchant ships that sail up and down the Riami and even across the ocean to distant Avori. She’s dismissive and rude to anyone who can’t give her something that she wants, fortunately there is very little Dendara doesn’t want. Her ambition is tempered only by her patience and cold calculating intelligence.
07_Oletha
I spent a lot more time (a lot more time) today defining the culture, general dressing habits, researching grooming habits, etc for the Avorans who hail from the land overseas. They are based loosely on Northern Europeans, taking bits and pieces from Bronze Age and Medieval periods as I like to suit my preferences. With that in mind, many of the things that I’ve applied to Oletha (above) apply to Birgir that I posted yesterday. Birger and Oletha (among others) are the body guards of the Blessed of Alansea, and serve as both mercenaries for the local barons and also missionaries for the local people, teaching them the ways of the Church of the Fold. Their function is as much diplomatic as it is proselytizing – and the folders find themselves learning far more about the rich local customs, traditions, beliefs and practices than they wind up teaching.
Oletha is shown dressed in local linen fabrics and jewelry both to fit better in with the local culture but also because the heavy woolen cloaks and tunics that are appropriate in her homeland would be unbearable in the unforgiving sun of Yeanir. Her heavy woolen cloak is still kept with her for the equally unforgiving desert nights, and it matches both the color and trim of her cap.
The spear-head is Bronze, and in hindsight I should have spent more time decorating it – both wood and bronze are expensive materials in Yeanir, and such a valuable item would be heavily decorated to reflect it’s value.
#30Characters Chatter…