Welcome to the annotated edition of Guilded Age, running seven days a week from now until it’s done. (Yes, there have been some annotations in Guilded Age Plus as well, but these are new and with the added benefit of hindsight.)

I’m your primary host, T Campbell, ’cause annotations are kind of more my thing and Phil’s got a lot going on right now. Phil or others may chime in at some point and we’ll use some type trick like boldface to set our comments apart, but we’ll worry about that when or if it happens.

So.

If you didn’t just join us today, you know that this cover ended up being a little bit of a fib, as these six characters will never all appear together in the same place. Five of them, and then another five of them, but never all six at once. We did have some early ideas, though, that they might all stand united when it came time for the final battle against their final opponent, whose nature we didn’t even want to hint at here, so he/she/it/they are just facing them off to the right somewhere.

So this image may have been foreshadowing that never came to pass, but when we adjusted our plans, we were happy to treat it as a kind of broad symbolism that never quite became reality.

The use of the tree as a symbolic counterpoint next to Syr’Nj and a way to keep Bandit from getting her face lost in the chapter heading was one of many sound choices by Erica. There’s a lot more to unpack here, but I’d rather give the characters’ early concepts and designs more attention when we get to their solo segments, and this chapter is full of those!