Ferrin and Rainbow Drake

Another set of character designs! I've decided to make this post public, so that folks who aren't patrons can see the kinds of things I'm posting and decide if they want to see more.

Again, I don't want to share too much of the story when I post this concept art. I would like it to be mostly a surprise for you all. However, you may notice that the "human" characters (who in the story are, for all intents and purposes, normal humans) have horns and other fantasy characteristics. This is because this story is set in the world of my 2016 visual novel, Rose of Winter. Specifically, it's set in the island nation of Moonforest, where Prince Kuya (the beastly prince who is one of the romance options in the game) hails from. You don't need to have played Rose of Winter, or know anything about Kuya or Moonforest, to understand this comic. But I always wanted a sprawling fantasy world to set stories in, and I always like when an author's seemingly unconnected works seem to take place in a shared world.

I love Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle books. The stories set in the world of the Hainish Cycle aren't REALLY a series in a true sense- they're all independent works with no set order or serious continuity. However, they do share a loose overall history and world, and sometimes cross over each other. One of the plot devices she invented for those books, the ansible, became a widely-used science fiction staple (most notably, IIRC, in Ender's Game) so it's almost as if her worlds have even extended past her own writing. That's an ideal situation for an author- you get to draw from this great narrative well that you're building up, but you're also not beholden to any particular plot, set of characters, or theme. The Dispossessed is a serious novel that explores materialism, capitalism, anarchy, and what it means to have a truly free society. "Coming of Age in Karhide" is a short story that gleefully details how an alien race fucks. Both exist in the same narrative and together build a richer and more complicated world for the reader to take as seriously or not-seriously as they like. 

So that's kind of what I want for the world of Rose of Winter and this new story. If I want to tell a fantasy story, I have a world that's open and ready for it. And readers can jump in wherever they like.