This was originally a supporter-only post, posted March 2020.
So this week I got to spend time developing one of the new characters in THE BEAUTIFUL DECAY: the paladin, Persephone.
This was interesting to do because their worldbuilding is a very different process than with most of Tombtown, where I tend to go with traditional tropes but look at them from a new angle so that they are funny, friendly, or sad.
The paladins are the most powerful of what the denizens of Tombtown refer to as ‘witchkillers’. They’re the holy warriors sent to drive out evil, which very often means necromancers.
I’ve already written a lot about them from the perspective of Tombtown characters. But now I’ve been writing about them in the words of one of the paladins herself.
What I had before I started, beyond what a paladin IS and what the individual characters were like, was where they are from and what that place is like. Paladins are trained in Paladur on the island of Paladur-Ez (which you might remember from the Map of Ard). Paladur is an ancient country that is largely in ruins now, but their holy rites and paladin training continue.
Persephone’s story let me delve into what those rites and that training looked like and meant to her. I got to envision what was beautiful about her training, and what made it different as a Paladin of the Vengeful Tide and not the Rootfather or some other god. I got to think about her friends, and how she views her work. I got to tell a story about an unlikely companion who shaped how she feels about her duty as paladin.
And I don’t want to spoil any of that right now but I simply want to say: it’s wonderful to get to write from opposing perspectives and tell disparate but still very human stories. And I’m very much looking forward to sharing this one.
[Image by Frank Winkler from Pixabay.]