Most of my characters start from what few bare facts have to be true about them. For Pip it's the fact that he is Duskwight (with the lore or lack thereof inherent in that choice), must interact with others in and out of cities (in order to actually RP him), and must somehow learn or know magic. From there it's just a game of recursive 'Why?' and following through with logical consequences for the answers.
The biggest boosts along the way came from reading the forever-long Duskwight Discussion thread a few pages back from here and talking a couple things through with one of the mentors in the welcome forum ((Edit: The poster above me, actually! Hi, Eva!)). That got me thinking about his clan as a living entity instead of shady background fluff, which in turn made the rest more or less fall into place like so:
Coincidence plays a huge role. I chose his last name, Dalaine, from a baby name site that said 'Alaine' meant 'little rock' - so I thought his name was a watered down 'from the little rock' in reference to his Dusky-ness. A couple weeks later, after reading that amazing thread, I went to google translate to name his clan and found out that 'alaine' apparently means 'wool'. He already had Weaving started up and I'd chosen Nymeria for a deity at character creation, so I went with it. Suddenly he came from a family of weavers who showed high regard for The Weaver for that reason. And maybe he lived in a clan where each family more or less served a function in the community (clothing, construction, etc)? For a clan name, I figured I'd bastardize some French version of 'manage' or 'coordinate' to be the surname of the leading family who managed the rest. The only one I could smash around into something that sounded good was 'se debrouiller', an apparent idiom for the 'make do/get by' meaning of 'manage'. When I checked the literal meaning of each word it came out to something like 'unravel themselves' - BAM! Nymeria reverence is suddenly very instrumental in the clan and therefore in Pip's life up to now. He even gained a personal curse: "Nymeria's Warp!"
That's a rambling way of saying happy accidents happen, and I try to go with them when I can and play it off like it's all planned.
The biggest boosts along the way came from reading the forever-long Duskwight Discussion thread a few pages back from here and talking a couple things through with one of the mentors in the welcome forum ((Edit: The poster above me, actually! Hi, Eva!)). That got me thinking about his clan as a living entity instead of shady background fluff, which in turn made the rest more or less fall into place like so:
Coincidence plays a huge role. I chose his last name, Dalaine, from a baby name site that said 'Alaine' meant 'little rock' - so I thought his name was a watered down 'from the little rock' in reference to his Dusky-ness. A couple weeks later, after reading that amazing thread, I went to google translate to name his clan and found out that 'alaine' apparently means 'wool'. He already had Weaving started up and I'd chosen Nymeria for a deity at character creation, so I went with it. Suddenly he came from a family of weavers who showed high regard for The Weaver for that reason. And maybe he lived in a clan where each family more or less served a function in the community (clothing, construction, etc)? For a clan name, I figured I'd bastardize some French version of 'manage' or 'coordinate' to be the surname of the leading family who managed the rest. The only one I could smash around into something that sounded good was 'se debrouiller', an apparent idiom for the 'make do/get by' meaning of 'manage'. When I checked the literal meaning of each word it came out to something like 'unravel themselves' - BAM! Nymeria reverence is suddenly very instrumental in the clan and therefore in Pip's life up to now. He even gained a personal curse: "Nymeria's Warp!"
That's a rambling way of saying happy accidents happen, and I try to go with them when I can and play it off like it's all planned.
