All right, welcome to the post-story bonus features! Up first we’ve got… THINGS WE ALMOST DID, BUT DIDN’T!

DID YOU KNOW… That although Frigg, Byron, Gravedust, Best and even Bandit were basically conceived altogether in one piece into who they are today, that Syr’Nj almost didn’t exist??

It’s no secret to those that know me personally, but my contempt for elves is extremely fucking high. Which I think is kind of the point, because in most fantasy fiction they’re always positioned to be King Dickbags on Shit Mountain. But even moreso, my contempt for all things “Wood Elf” was the highest among all of my elven contempt, partially BECAUSE of how they’ve been historically in the primary source material Guilded Age is inspired by (Malfurion bores me straight into the Emerald Fucking Dream).

To that end, the Wood Elves of Guilded Age were, at the onset, going to be almost entirely a punchline as a race in this fiction. And the Druids were going to be these comically useless, moony-eyed dopes that, while they had heals, were otherwise laughably incompetent in society and stuck out like a sore fish (think Starfire cranked up to 11,000). And so, the Elf that preceded Syr’Nj as a concept was going to be the group’s gag character, even over Frigg (if such a thing were even possible).

However, I shied away from going this hard on the group’s healer as well as Wood Elves on a whole because I ultimately felt like it’s a dead horse that would’ve been beaten to smithereens all too soon, and severely limited the potential in such a character and nation in the overall story.

As I was originally conceiving of the party makeup for this story from kind of a top-down “game mechanics” sort of way, specifically deciding what classes would be in Kingdoms of Arkerra altogether, the Field Medic was one that my eyes kept wandering back to. Literally the entire concept behind the Field Medic on its inception was “What would a Healer be like if they didn’t have a mana bar?” because honestly: Since when is a healer not mana-based?

Anyway, once the class of Field Medic was chosen, a science and tech-based hero who used potions and tools to heal instead of magick and mana, I decided it would be deeply interesting if I stuck with the Wood Elf for this class, and Syr’Nj as we know her today immediately sprang forth from my noggin like so many Titans of yore. I knew then that it was a far, FAR better idea, and that this whole direction I almost took an entire race in this fiction was the wrong way to go.

This Field Medic concept also borrowed heavily from another character that was almost in the main party that got the axe early on. Yes, the party was almost SIX (seven depending on how you’re counting) deep! Who was this mysterious non-member? Find out Wednesday~