Our very lovable Druid has her origins from one of my very best friends Madison.

Madi and I were part of a D&D group back in college with some friends, and we played through the Elemental Evil Campaign book. Through out college, I desperately wanted to be an artist/character concept artist, and I would draw pictures of all of our characters.

Of course, this was before I had ever worked with clients, and I just went off the base description Madi had given me of “A short, copper haired, half elf Druid”

I didn’t understand the importance of asking more questions, working with her to fully understand how Madi wanted Enna to look. So my first drawings were not quite accurate to how she had imagined her.

Enna is way too white. She is a sailor, she should have been much more tanned, Madi wanted her to have freckles, and she is wearing this weird corset thing, that I don’t even know where that idea came from.

In my original sketch (left) You can see she’s even wearing heels, which I don’t know why, other than at the time, I kind of expected all cool, sexy, hot elf ladies in media to wear heels because that’s what you see on TV.

Overall the design was not ideal, didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and frankly, I wanted to do better.

I still kept drawing the little scenes from our D&D adventures, and eventually I wanted to draw a big group scene. This is where Madi finally told me, “Hey, um, do you think maybe you could, I dunno, not make Enna white??”

So I drew her a lot tanner, but I stuck with the same outfit I already had, mostly because I was not creative enough to think of anything else. I think this is an accurate representation of a middle ground, because I was listening to my “client’s” wishes, and trying to be more accurate to what she wanted, but I was still learning at that point in time.

(I was also learning to get over biases and not draw everyone white, but lets not talk about that….)

What resulted next was I wanted to redo Enna for a birthday present for Madison, and this was also around the time I was really getting into Tarot Cards, and rediscovering Cardcaptor Sakura. So I created a tarot version of Enna.

To date, this is the most accurate version of Enna I had drawn. Madison was totally in love with this version, from the outfit to a more accurate skin tone. I still had a way to go, the face for starters, but that had more to do with my technical skill. In terms of character design, Madi and I agreed that this was the best version of Enna. This is what I based the most current version of Enna on.

The world in which Bardic Inspiration takes place is one of my own imagination. I believe I previously explained that these characters started as the characters played by my friends and myself in our first ever d&d campaign. I used to draw little illustrations from the campaign, and it was only May of 2019 when I decided, “screw it, let’s make a comic”

The original party, from left to right (Mira, Delsys, Ki, Arthurian, Vradnick, Lyra, Enna)

The problem is, I decided instead of setting it in the typical d&d setting of Faerun, and to avoid maybe being sued??? I decided to make up my own countries and world for these characters to live in. However I got really into it and made this giant ass map, when in all probability I don’t need the entire thing.

But I thought it could be fun to talk about this elaborate world I have created.

Currently the characters are on the island of Alend. It’s part of Torene, but the people of Torene consider it to be a collection colonies, rather than a unified nation. The people of Alend, derived from the native people of Halla, consider themselves to be their own kingdom, just under the rule of the people of Torene.

They have no unified leader, instead most cities have a mayor, or a law-master who is in charge of governing the city.

Together, the leaders of these towns and cities will vote to select a representative for Alend on the Torene Royal Council.

Torene is a collection of City States, but they all swear allegiance to the Queen. The Queen herself lives in Queenstown usually, which is the largest city in Torene, full of historical museums, artists, libraries, Bardic Colleges, and even a branch of the Eclipse Academy, the end all be all for mage towers and education.

Torene functions as city states, each city having a Lord, or a Viscount, maybe even a Queen or Duke of their own. But they all swear fealty to the Queen of Torene, and they all compete for a spot on the council. There are 12 seats on the council. One is reserved for the representative of Alend, and One is the Queen’s spot. The other ten are up for the Queen to decide who will be on her council. How she decides is up to her, sometimes it is through a tourney, sometimes she just picks who she likes.

Overall Torene is very large, and it has many cities, all or most of which I really hope we get to explore, because I have some plot lines for each of them. But the most important city is probably Windacker, where Lyra is from.

It’s largely a merchant and Fishing town, it along with Oceanspire is where most trade goes out through Alend and along the northern part of the coast. I don’t want to get too in depth into the history of the area, mostly because that will be shown in the comic, so for now, I will just say there is some political turmoil in Windacker.

For now though, this is the world that I have created. There is much more, and I didn’t even begin to go into talking about Nisia (One of my favorite places to come up with ideas for) I want to go through this whole world eventually, because it took a lot of time to make this map, and I think it’s fun to do world building!

( Does that make me weird? It probably makes me weird)

Anywho, I hope you all have enjoyed my brief explanation of the world of Bardic Inspiration