I love that dog Erica rendered in the corner there, he’s a great representative of Henry and Emory’s personalities: simple-minded, usually slow-moving, reactive. There’s also a fun circularity to this page: Byron just sort of appears next to them like a sneaky sneak, and then the kobolds do the same to him.

Glad we didn’t go with the idea to have Henry and Emory have little golden speech bubbles over their heads. We had a few impulses to “video-game-ize” the reality of Arkerra more in its early days, which we mostly resisted, thank God.

I sometimes wonder if we should have run this scene before Frigg’s. It is the simplest of the five establishing scenes, and therefore the easiest to understand. There is no life-changing moment or huge subversion of narrative tropes as in Best’s story, no complex backstory or taxonomy as in Syr’Nj’s and Frigg’s, no mystery as in Gravedust’s, and no special narrative tricks as in Gravedust’s and Frigg’s… except maybe for a subtle one we’ll get into later. This is pretty much just the story of a guy’s day on the job, which is of course the point.

On the other hand, trying too hard to sell this as “just another RPG transcript” after the fairly typical bit of adventuring against Moribundi might’ve backfired and kept away some of the readers we really wanted, who were looking for something a hair more challenging.