Annotated 28-4
Harky’s political skills are again shown to be as formidable as his battle prowess. It takes a healthy mix of firmness, humility, and just knowing the right words to defuse a conflict as adroitly as he does in panel 1. I don’t think this dialogue entirely excuses why we haven’t seen Arfa before this, but it probably does so as well as it can without wrecking the flow.
So, Karmakat. His creator had been a big donor to our Kickstarter campaign and, as such, was entitled to have his original character appear in our series in a speaking role of some weight. (He also used “Karmakat” as his screen name and avatar, but I’ll use “Karmakat” for the character and “the donor” for him to minimize confusion.) But the character was not so easy to integrate as most donor creations would’ve been. His off-the-charts power levels would’ve made it tough to fit him into the present-day plot without bending that plot around him.
More vexing than that, to Phil at least, was his race. It didn’t conform to any of the “playable” Arkerran races, and developers of a game with an existing player base can’t just auto-generate a new playable race whenever they want. Eventually, we hit on the idea to make him a member of an extinct race, one whose end would cast some shadows on the blank slate of gnoll history. Interesting story idea, crunchy cameo role, moves the main plot forward… good idea, right? Phil proposed it and I agreed.
The donor didn’t.
(To be continued.)
I’m guessing that the donor wanted an ego trip that directly conflicted with all the storytelling concerns you just mentioned. What’s the point of having an overpowered furry self-insert OC if the comic doesn’t start revolving around them?
This is one of the reasons that “put your character in our thing” Kickstarter rewards can be a bad idea. Most of the time, folks are just happy to be included, but occasionally you get people like this.
I won’t deny that this scenario entered our minds, and in a general sense, you’re right: there’s no guarantee that a donor is going to be someone you can work with. So you have to be prepared to issue a refund if that happens, and at this point in my retelling, that was a serious possibility.
True. And I’d say Karmakat gets a good story here, but on the other hand if your character gets killed by Taro then I could see why the donor might be upset.
Ouch. If he’d have thought to not being a dique, he should have gotten off his ass and created his own webcomic for his masturbatofantasy to Godzilla-stomp through.
This is why you add the ‘within preexisting setting-established races, cultures and demonstrated technological and magical abilities’ clause to bringing in cameos into a setting. You’d offered a cameo of A character, if the one that they submitted wouldn’t fit in the grounds of the established setting you’d established, you would have been perfectly in your rights to request they create another original character if they wanted that cameo.
Did you consider other alternatives at any point to resolve the situation? Such as a sepia-world expansion to Arkerra falling (Gastonian players get access to mysterious and elemental CATFOLK, ancient rivals of the Gnolls; and the World’s Rebellion are joined by the mystics of the WINTER ELVES to stop help Gastonian encroachment in their snowlands?)
I was willing to entertain such an “expansion,” and I didn’t think it was entirely out of character for our quasi-World of Warcraft to introduce its answer to the worgen. You can’t just throw in a new race whenever you want, but you can introduce one or two with months of planning and a special storyline. But that would’ve made Karmakat a bit more central to the story than our plans allowed, and Phil was pretty invested in further exploring the racial balance we had, as should be pretty clear by the end of this chapter. (A seventh Champion, of Karmakat’s race or Karmakat himself, would’ve been awkward to juggle.)
(I believe we did provide the Kickstarter winners with a set of races to which their characters could belong, but that wasn’t my area so I don’t know how clearly it was communicated. I do know the other winners fit our race-map a lot more comfortably.)
Honestly, the implementation of race in MMOs is not that insanely well tailored. Like FFXIV introduced a whole new race (Au’Ra) and didn’t care to give any reason for them to pop up until two years later in the next expansion where they were more central.
And by central I mean the continent was full of them and they had a story to them, but not really any explanation to them just showing up two years ago. “We” were just acting like a few of them were always around, no problem. lol
Good to know!
“Body seeded with a creature not of this world” – is that a reference to Harky being a PC/having an intertwingled human? And were you at this point no longer thinking Harky was played by HR, with the homonculus now being a thing?
No, she’s talking about the Fireseye, and the source of Karmakat’s magicks (which we’re not gonna get into any further).
At this point, we’d long since given up the idea that Harky was HR’s alt. The things he does in this chapter don’t really further HR’s goals, and if Arfa could detect which beings had corresponding players, she’d know that such a thing was a lot more common than one remarkable being at a time.
I think she means Tectonicus for Harky.
I had no idea this was what was going on. I just thought you were doing a bizarre nostalgia tangent of Lion-o from Thundercats. Really, that’s what I thought.