Inspirations
Hello my lovely darlings, this is going to be my first video loaded first to Patreon and then to Youtube so I have no idea how this is going to land. I also have no editing software so every stutter, stumble and blooper is going to be recorded. At least there is one good thing from that – my lovely darlings will know that this is human made and not A.I. I wouldn’t mind A.I. if it was doing the dishes and the ironing; I object to it doing my writing and my art. As to why I don’t have editing software? It starts with m, ends with y and has one in the middle. In short, lolly, dough, bread, specky, call it what you will it all amounts to the same thing – cold, hard cash. So to those of my lovely darlings that are watching this on Patreon, thank you ever so much for flipping a coin to your writer. For those watching on Youtube or reading on the blog, if you can flip a coin to your writer you will get early access to any video I manage to do, including the full author readings when I have a chance to do them, exclusive 4 x 6 sighed copies of the chapter art to collect and the potential of a shout out on my random ‘Patreon of the week’ shout outs over on facebook.
Now to the meat of this video.
It seemed to me the best introduction I could do into the world of Hestia and therefore my writing as a whole would be to run down some of my inspirations. From reading other writers interviews, that does seem to me to be the question most commonly asked – ‘where do you get your inspirations from?’ In my case? Absolutely every where. Every book I’ve read, every film, every TV series and real life because, let’s face it, we live in a world where death by molasses flood at your Uncle’s funeral is a possibility and has happened. As much as it is kind of hypercritical of me as I am publishing this on the Internet, it would be pretty cool if everyone put down their phones for a moment and had a look around. The world is insane and I bet your grandparents could tell you some absolutely insane stories. I know mine did, including fleeing to Manchester to escape the blitz of London only for the Manchester blitz to start that very night. As I said, the world is insane and no matter how crazy the co-incidences sound they will have happened in the real world.
Circling back round to my writing, it depends on the character as to where I pull my inspiration. Some of them only need one or two prompts to exist, others can have half a dozen or more. In fact, let’s take it from the top – Draconic Shenanigans itself. Where did I get the idea for Draconic Shenanigans as a whole story?
Well that would be thanks to Dungeon Dad, who back in 2023, did a whole video about the D and D creature known as the Purple Dragon. The offspring of a red dragon and a blue dragon, the sum is most definitely greater than its parts but what really caught my imagination and jump started the whole thing was the detail about a Purple Dragon’s horde. Purple Dragons collect people or to be more accurate they collect societies. One particular family is the Mr Big for a country’s organised crime? Most likely Purple Dragons wearing their human faces. A ruler that balances conservative and progress to a nicety, engaging not in a reign of tyranny but rather a slow, quiet drizzle that means people are actually grateful for the stability he cultivates? Definitely a Purple Dragon wearing a mortal face.
So that was where the idea of Draconic Shenanigans first took root. It started not with the main characters but with the side character of King Tatsuya. After that it was the very simple germ of a quest to give to the main characters– go to a frontier town, discover why it had stopped sending its taxes and sort the problem out. This is where I need to admit something – Draconic Shenanigans was not written solely by me. I had four co-writers who will be acknowledged and named on the front cover of the book. These wonderful people were my player characters. I ran Draconic Shenanigans as Table Top Roleplay Game, writing up each game session as if they were the chapters of a book and publishing them on my blog. It was when they proved so popular that I decided that I would compile them all into a proper book, with chapter art and publish the story as a series. It was a good job I decided to make it a series because the manuscript for the first draft of the first story arc topped out at one thousand, one hundred and ninety nine pages so instead of a single volume I’m going to publish as two halves, hopefully in July and November.
After all Charles Dickens did not write books, he wrote stories in a magazine, releasing two to four chapters a month and taking several years to complete a story. It was only because his stories proved so popular with all classes of society and rich people came to the publishers saying ‘we like his work but magazines are rather low brow, do you think that you could do them as proper books?’ that his work was complied into said books. It is amazing what can happen when publishers smell money.
So that was the inspiration behind the genesis of Draconic Shenanigans and how it developed into a fully fledged book project. As for the characters they were a little more complex and in some cases extra inspirations were added in as the story progressed and they grew.
I suppose the best example of a non-main character that was started by only a few inspirations would be Hartseer. Also known as the King’s Blade, Hartseer is what you could call the probation officer for the main characters. He is there to try and teach them to curb their worst behaviours and to also drag them back if they try and bunk off the job. I have to admit I did expect the four player or main characters to take off for the hills the first chance they got and it surprised me when they didn’t. What was even more surprising was that it was Thorian, the orc child, who worked out that King Tatsuya wasn’t going to give them total freedom, that the King was going to send someone after them to make sure the job was done and that they didn’t try to run away without doing their duty as the King’s Special.
As for what inspired Hartseer, besides the need to have a probation officer who the more murderous of the team couldn’t just kill the first time they decided he was inconvenient? Well let’s just say that there is a some what large and rather famous film franchise that in 2003 introduced a character who not only rocked in his first animated appearance, his back story was amazing, calling into question just how good the good guys were as it exposed the institutional rot ruling their lives. And then, for some reason I certainly don’t understand, they nerfed the character. For some reason the creators totally over wrote the original backstory and turned him into a 2D moustache twirler of a rather badly done cartoon villain. A lot of us fans… were not impressed. The thing is my Gug, my grandfather, always used to say ‘can you do better? If you can’t. Don’t criticize.’ Well, I’d like to think that I had a fair stab at doing better. The other inspiration for Hartseer at the beginning was a clip of a horror movie I saw on Youtube. I’m not usually into horror, for the most part I find it turns my stomach, but this clip became the inspiration for Hartseer’s warrior’s cheque. The warrior’s cheque was a hair style equivalent to a braid and in Hartseer’s case you do not want to see him angry enough to let his hair down. Every single wire strand of Hartseer’s ‘hair’ is a living entity under his control and they seem to be able to alter their length depending on his need. If you get entangled in that rattling, whipping briar patch, it will tightening like cheese wire. The more you struggle the more it will tighten and thicken and start growing metal thorns. In short, if you don’t have the sense to give up and hold still it will step up from cheese wire to barbed wire to finally razor wire and it will be tightening down the entire time. I originally imagined it as his way of mostly non-lethally detaining King’s Specials who tried to run out on their duties but as my players didn’t go that route I had to wait quite a long time to reveal the King’s Blade in his full and terrifying glory.
Those two were the initial spark for Hartseer, the later inspirations that added themselves to him and deepened the colours of the character was that I changed his original race from human to Shulmi elf. The Shulmi elves are inspired by both the original peoples of the New World and of the higher elevations of Central Asia. Unfortunately I am no Tolkien. I will admit that now. I haven’t even been able to learn a second verbal language to run beside English so there was no way that I could create a new language out of thin air for the different races. Therefore I relied on already existing languages to give voices to the different tongues of Hestia. Unfortunately, at the time, I could not find a translator I trusted to tell me a respectful translation of the language of the original peoples of the New World. Therefore I chose Irish Gaelic as the language of the Shulmi.
The reasons for this were meant with the highest respect for our shared kindred of manufactured suffering; the god forsaken boarding houses and residential schools where the authorities tried to destroy the inheritance of the original peoples of the New World were pioneered in Ireland. The only reason Irish Gaelic survives as a language is because some teachers were willing to risk their lives to teach it in the hedgerows schools when teaching the Gaelic was considered an act of treason, punishable by hanging unto death under British Law. Residential schools were pioneered in Ireland, refined in the New World into eugenics and then exported back to Europe in the 1920’s. That went well, didn’t it just?
As for why I say our shared kindred? It is because although I was born in Britain of British parents, my maternal bloodline runs unbroken back to Ireland. The Great Hunger is etched into my very DNA, as is the dreadful algebra of survival. So I suppose I probably should put a content warning in here as I do not shy away from themes my audience may find uncomfortable or challenging, tackling as I do subjects of high demand religions, stagnated societies and distorted family systems.
The other thread that connects the Irish to the original peoples of the New World is the gift of the Choctaw to Midleton in County Cork during the Great Hunger. Having only just survived the Trail of Tears the Choctaw gave generously to save others who were starving. It was a moment of pride for me when Ireland ‘paid it forward’, sending aid to the Navajo and Hopi during Covid-19 so I say again, the decision to make the Irish Gaelic the language of the Shulmi Elves was made with the greatest respect for our two peoples.
Now as to the characters that had multiple inspirations, I’m going to go with my favourite characters - Estella and Valodrael.
Estella Blackstar is a very young woman from the Kingdom, one could say Empire, of Tiansin. Valodrael is her Void Dragon companion come passenger come possessor but it is not a malignant possession as they do seem to have a very healthy working agreement.
The inspirations behind these two started with one of the very first Web comics ever published back before the term Web Comic was conceived and one that I haven’t been able to find since because I can’t remember the title of it. However, the story was the important part and that started with a very young girl walking through what is obviously the red light district late at night… and she is being followed. When she turns down the side alley they follow her in and think they have her cornered when it proves to be a dead end. One of the ones following her says something along the lines of ‘hello sweetie’, at which point she turns round and reveals a demented smile beneath eyes that are totally black from corner to corner and from lid to lid. Her reply is ‘this is going to hurt… a lot!’ where upon something else boils out of her, out of her shadow, out of the shadow around them. It is honestly hard to say but it definitely did hurt them, a lot. The next frame is her looking up with a regular smile, asking ‘do you feel better for that?’ The artist never did a reveal with the full creature, it was just an extreme close up of it picking what appeared to be a rolex watch out from between its fangs with a foot long claw and the type set they used for its speech made it look like the words were about to drip off the bottom of the page as it said ‘you always take me to the nicest places’. That little gem sat in my head for about fifteen years and then started meeting up with other little moments.
Estella grew from the question, what could convince a girl to make a bargain with some sort of eldritch abomination? That lead me to high demand purity culture and what happens to young women when they agreement is neither sort nor wanted nor necessary for what happens to them. In short, Estella was on a time limit. She had about five months before her own family ended her for the dishonour she had brought on them. For some reason it is never the man who is punished in these events.
The other major inspirations that came in later were a couple that slotted in behind Estella, not directly for her character but rather tying her family line in with the bloodline of another set of characters. Those songs were ‘Distance’ by Oh Geez Not Again and ‘Left Behind’ Caleb Hyles.
‘Distance’ starts with:
“You and me, we’ve been thick as thieves, all our lives,
Picked me up when we had lost it all, been left behind.
Spent our days in the wilds of our own minds come sun or rain.
Til the night you got home late and I knew something had changed.
Now I’m begging for scraps of your attention
Where, oh where did I go wrong?
I could say its nothing, I could give you space,
I could cover for you when the question’s raised,
I’m pacing patient but I don’t think that will fix this,
This distance, between us, it’s driving me mad.”
‘Left Behind’ leads with:
“Why did you leave me behind?
Or has she warped your mind?
I still have no clue.
Trapped. Yes you must be trapped!
But how can I find you when you left me no…
Map?”
The end punches with:
“I hope you’re safe and I hope I’ll see you again,
I wish you could say why you had to run away,
Was I the burden I always thought I was.
Please forgave me, I am human to.
I’m sorry. Please, come home.”
That lead to a deep dive into themes of abandonment, generational trauma, indoctrination and the healing that leads to going no contact on a relationship you recognise as toxic. It also lead into discussions around purpose and responsibility. There are no ‘chosen ones’ in my stories, just people, people doing what they can when they can, people making the choice to build up or tear down, people being people with all their messy, human contradictions and consistencies, their victories and regrets. And I suppose that is the difference between good and evil – evil can’t regret. Hartseer had regret and has spent nearly five hundred years trying to earn redemption through service to a better cause. The one who turned Hartseer into what he now is has no regret and has spent nigh on five hundred years seething that he did not get what he thinks is rightfully his.
Back on track, Valodrael obviously started with the eldritch thing in that proto Web comic and then I added to the mix the Umbral Dragon from the Savage Worlds Pathfinder Bestiary Book Two (try saying that ten times faster), a dash of alien parasite from another film franchise and even just a touch of Emperor Belos from The Owl House when he goes all gloop monster form. I have to admit I absolutely loved writing the scene where Valodrael pulls himself together and whispers in Jeremiah’s ear ‘Excuse me, but do you know where around here I might find a completely soulless husk?’ love more the fact that Jeremiah pretty much turns round and says ‘try the lobby’.
It was certainly more than enough that I have to be careful that Valodrael doesn’t steal every scene he’s in. I would call Valodrael an anti-villain. He’s a bad guy who will do good stuff for… reasons. This dragon has the old school villain swagger. He knows exactly what he is and he is totally unashamed of it. So much so that about four months after I first introduced Estella and Valodrael I discovered the existence of the film Osmosis Jones. A certain virus instantly matched Valodrael’s energy so much so that he joined the inspirations behind Valodrael. In fact about the only thing that puts any sort of leash on Valodrael’s behaviour is the fact that he doesn’t want to disappoint Estella. He has the intelligence to recognise that abusing his host is just folly and then there’s the fact that Estella is the only one to ever call him friend. He’s intrigued by thing called friendship and wishes to explore it furhter. Quite a bit further if he can regain his own flesh and blood and if she says yes.
Lastly I have to thank my co-writers for all the high jinx they get up to when we are working on this story. I will say they totally threw a spanner in the works of what I planned but it came out ten times better for it. The most major example of this was who was supposed to be the Big Bad Evil of this story arc. Originally it was supposed to be the Ash Elves with the werewolves as their lower status allies but then, in one of the fights, one of my players absolutely aced it to get past the squad leader’s body guards and played the love interest card on the squad leader, meaning she promptly adored him. It utterly railroaded my original plot but also made it ten times better as I was forced to do a rethink leading to the creation of the clan structure of the Ash Elf society, the rules governing their version of matriarchy and creating the questions of what happens when a highly isolationist, highly elitist socety faces a change they can’t ignore. In the case of the Ash Elves their werewolf allies turned on them and now the Ash Elves are looking down the gun barrel of extinction. They can no longer stand alone, believing that they are the one true people, they have to have allies and to have allies means they have to climb down off their high horse and start seeing other people as people. It is not a smooth transition.
So there you have it my lovely darlings, some of the inspirations behind Draconic Shenanigans. If you watched this over on Patreon, thank you so much for tossing a coin to your writer, to everyone who watched on Youtube or read the transcript on my blog, thank you just for watching. If you want to follow the project check out the blog, facebook, instagram etc. I also have my own brand of artwork separate from Draconic Shenanigans called Gothic Dragons. I post about them as well. Links down below. See you all in the future my lovely darlings, be safe and be kind.
