Annotated 1-10
The script for the last panel reads, “His face has grizzled into a mischievous rage and his eyes have tinted ever-so-slightly red with blood.” If that seems out of place to you, well, it is: in all other instances, Byron would be cool as a cucumber in combat, except of course for the times when he really, really wasn’t.
But we had not actually figured out the Berserker Curse at this point, so our thought was that Byron would have this off-putting, five-percent-berserk aspect to him in combat, just a little crazy in his eyes beneath the self-control.
Not sure we could’ve maintained that even if we’d tried harder. To build on what I said earlier, in the Morbundi scene, he seems to be more or less a meathead, both because of how he behaves (“Hitting fire is stupid and I hate it”) and how others see him. We had a set of notes for each “class” our characters might belong to, and a lot of the notes for “field medic,” “musical warrior” and “mystic” got imported directly into our main cast. The notes for “fighter” read, in their entirety, “He’s a fighter.”
Frigg was pretty much all the “fighter’s fighter” we needed, though, and the more time we spent on Byron’s musings about the freelance life, the less inclined we were to make him just a simple-minded blade-swinger. He would see himself that way for a long time, though, so our early ideas about who he was weren’t entirely wasted.
S’alright. It’s only a couple of questions he wants to…
…
ask you. He wants to ask you them.
…
Because he’s a gentlemen.
Nice of the kobolds to wait for so long until Byron got his bearings and finished his soliloquy.
Kobolds are rarely depicted as being competent, in battle or anything else. It would be a little more funny if there was some Kobold dialog in the background that Byron straight up ignores:
“This is a stick up! Now hand us you loot! That’s right, had us those… wait, why are you smiling like that!?”
Well, yes and no. It would lend credence to the belief that Kobolds are sentient, and make tomorrow’s page a lot less funny.
well They feel the need to cover themselves, I guess thats as sentient as it gets
Something wrong with being naked, now?
The loincloths could be mimicry. Kobolds wearing loincloths get attacked less (or more slowly) than naked kobolds, so it gets selected for.
Landsharks are more or less sapient themselves, and their cannibalism of each other is still played for laughs.
“No take CANDLE!”
Looks like Brock Samson in final panel
It’s too bad, because that face is really cool, but I can see how you would need a firmer distinction between berzerk and not.
No, what’s really striking is the lighthearted use of “bayen” and “brayen”. Shouldn’t he be moping every time he thinks of those names?
This was the simple days, when we thought ‘Bayen’ and ‘Brayen’ were simply axe names, before we learned they had other significance.
I do love me some sinister eyebrows.