6: Friendly Council
I’ve started messing with some things on the back end of the site to set up for the Lore section of the site, but it hasn’t really been agreeing with me. I’ve gotten things so they look about the same with a few subtle differences at least but, I might need to go a different direction than I was planning for the Lore section.
Oooh well dang, there’s not one, but TWO faces we’ve only ever heard in passing. Narron and Sentor Sr…
Also, I can’t tell if I should be reading into the background details there, or if the presence of a variety of familiar hats and symbols is meaningful…guess we’ll find out!
Well I can straight out confirm that as the pictures in the hall were characters with connections to the Scholars as faculty, the objects on the shelves are all from former students.
Though there are a few references there that fall outside the bounds of even the first run of the comic. Narron is another character who has connections to an RP, but a different session than the others, and in a more round about way this time.
Narron was an actual D&D wizard, but I took his name last minute from the yet to be introduced Suppression character… so the two versions influenced each other rather than being purely distinct.
Some of the items in the background are references to that campaign and in particular, my favorite, is a broken off table leg framed on a plaque hanging on the wall to commemorate his biggest moment.
With the end of the world looming, and destruction following them wherever they went, our party settled in to a town where we had been promised free beer for life for doing a quest, and all the towns people had died while we were off doing it. We rebuilt, claimed the remains of the town for ourselves and named it “New Free Beer” as we couldn’t recall the name of the original town.
Things were good for a time, the game had a bit of a genre shift, and instead of adventuring we built up this town, and people and problems came to us rather than us seeking them out. But one day, the doom creeping over the world came to our doorstep. A demonic tree had sprouted in our town, with entire corrupted landscape behind it. We couldn’t stay here.
Narron broke off the leg of a table, lit it as a torch and burned down the tree… he wordlessly began walking away, his back turned to the corruption. Someone commented that this was just going to keep happening… and Narron turned around, grabbed the burning leg from the tree’s remains, and began walking toward the final battle… which involved some clown demon which is what the comedy and tragedy masks on the wall refer to.
But that wasn’t the real final boss anyway… that all happened in the dream of a horse. The real final battle was Tim Curry and Malcolm McDowell pulled from the multiverse with all the powers of every character they had ever portrayed. Which obviously made much more sense.
Did I mention we’ve got a weird DM for D&D?
Ohhh, ok. I’ll admit, my first thought was “Ah, Narron’s a relentless hat thief. Good to know.” But that makes a lot more sense. Sounds like a badass campaign as well! I’m certainly no stranger to odd DnD shenanigans- I usually make weird, gimmicky characters so I have fun even when nothing particularly exciting is happening.
To date, I’ve made an eerie, socially awkward warlock who uses a ventriloquist dummy instead of a staff as her focus and has an obsession with puppets that makes everyone around her VERY uncomfortable, a robot who can’t tell lies and doesn’t have emotions, so she can’t use subjective phrasing but is still aware of the concepts of emotions and social politeness and how they have to be used to get what she wants (which makes writing her dialogue…interesting), and finally I once played in a session where all of the rolls were rigged to be purposefully bad, under the worldbuilding of all of our characters were cursed in some way. My character for that was a cleric who wasn’t aware she was actually a long dead ghost and her god was dead as well; hence why all of her cleric spells were terrible. She wasn’t actually drawing blessings off of a god (though she believed she was), she was really just using ghost powers in a way that ghost powers were never meant to be used. That was an interesting one to play around with, but unfortunately we only got in one session of that.
I’ve also DMed a couple times, but none of my campaigns last long. I think I’m pretty good at it, writing up plots in such a way that allows a lot of breadth for characters to run around while also guiding them in an appropriate direction, but I much prefer BEING a character that’s doing the running around, so to speak.
And this guy (Dante) finally makes an appearance… There’s also more golems in the background, if no one noticed yet.
So, Dante is a character that has only been mentioned in passing (of which has been pointed out) and originally didn’t have a name in any of the documents I made back then. I couldn’t think of one that fit in the end. Degulus named him from a trail leading from Basco ta Jolokia from Gokaiger (a pirate-themed villain from Super Sentai who is seriously entertaining as hell), which eventually lead to Dante Basco.
Weirdly, I had the name for Kevin’s mother always using “Citrine” as a placeholder. It was a little on the nose considering it’s a gem stone name and the Sentors work with minerals of all sorts but I thought it would be fun to have her with a cutesy, bright name. Of course, it probably goes without saying that she is isn’t anything like her name.
And if that wasn’t enough, ironically, I looked up Citrines later on and they’re called the Crystal of Solid Sunshine. I swear it wasn’t intentional. But I suppose it isn’t a stretch that Kevin and his father may have a similar preference in the people they’re interested in, even if it’s surface level at the most. They are father and son, after all.
Yeah!! I love the golems, it’s interesting to see different types of them; it looks like these ones are almost clockwork based!
I’ll admit though, for Dante I was like “Oh that’s fitting, very serious sounding, maybe inspired by Dante’s inferno or something.”. I had to take a minute to process it being based off of Dante BASCO, lmao. Do you think Citrine’s name is gonna stick then, or do you think it’s gonna change later on? :3
Well the reference to Dante Basco was more a running joke when we were watching Gokaiger to refer to that show’s Basco as Dante Basco. With a name like Basco, it’s either that or “dancing bear” as your joke cracking options. But I liked that character, and recommend Gokaiger to anyone who liked old Power Rangers and is curious about Super Sentai.
Since Kevin’s father had an antagonistic role (even if it was a past tense role) in the first run of the comic, and Kevin had a Kamen Rider theme, I wanted to give his father a name that was a reference to a villain from the henshin hero genre. But nothing really stood out to me until I went a degree of separation from Basco to Dante.
It’s a name that works for the guy, without being too obvious of where it comes from or why I picked it, the origin of the name becoming trivia more than foreshadowing.
As for Citrine, yeah, that’s gonna be the name of Kevin’s mom. She might even get screen time at some point. Between our conversations, Yukitty and I have mapped out a pretty good idea of what kind of person she is, and how she would interact with the plot if it crossed her path… it’s just a question of if it does at this point.
Cool. Degulus confirms that Citrine is officially Citrine Sentor. Citrine was the placeholder name till it stuck. It’s hard to think of a different name now. It just works. And it didn’t break the idea of Citrine having a super cute and girly sounding name. It’s still cute and super girly sounding.
Previously, in all this other supplemental and planned side material Citrine actually was the parental figure that all the characters would have probably interacted with more than Dante since Citrine wasn’t the one in jail. If you ever wondered who Kevin “offically” answered to/was his “official boss”, it was most likely his mother and in-directly his father as a result. Of course Kevin’s mother is married and loyal to the guy so of course she worked (works) towards maintaining what she thinks are Dante’s interests unless Dante directly tells her otherwise. But Kevin definitely isn’t the kind of person to just sit still and listen to mommy and be a good boy…
Well, hey welcome to the party, Citrine! Also, I forgot Dante was in jail last time! I guess that’s a big departure from the old canon right out of the gate, lol