It’s been a hell of a year with ups and downs, but throughout it all we somehow managed to make our way through a fourth installment in the Hesitant Hero series. With this, we enter a new era in the story, where many more questions have appeared compared to the early volumes. Where did the cultists go during our party’s stint on the southern coast? Who is Abu and what is he planning? Will Diana and Cobal be happy together? Who is this Sorda’Thun character? And let’s not forget, where the hell are Mirgia and Kimi’Thania? Many of those questions will not be answered in the next volume, but that last one is one I want to focus on. I’ll be perfectly honest with you, when I first sent Mirgia and the others away during the assault on the cultist island, I had absolutely no plans for what they would be doing during their absence. I still don’t know the details, but I have some ideas now and instead of having them return without much to it, I want to instead take a look at the adventure they took while they were gone.
This does mean that I will end up retconning some of the letters that Cobal and Eliana received from the missing people. I wrote those before really knowing the details and kept them vague as a way of leaving myself some room. I want to revisit those letters and make them more concrete, but to properly do so I will first need to write out their adventure. So that is what volume 5 will be. Look forward to its arrival at the start of next year.
Then the main focus of volume 4, the ghost pirates and the adventures on Shark Tooth Island. I designed this arc with two things in mind.
One, I needed a way to connect Abu – who I had thought up to an extent already – to the party, and give them an excuse to come find him in Severanti. There’s tons of culture and history there that I want to develop. One of the challenges I’m setting for myself is that Severanti should be culturally much more interesting than some of the other places in the world. I am quite happy with how Marsolin turned out, as a hidden city in the forest with massive libraries and much art and history to it. But a lot of Blueyerd feels very boring. Part of this is by design, as it is a relatively young nation built by a bunch of colonizers. Why they came here is something that we’ll start diving into in volume 6, but that will still be a little while from now. Volume 5 will take place where Mirgia is and will partially take place in Severanti. We’ll be looking at the story from his perspective and I can also promise that both Kimi and Captain Ferla will make an appearance in this volume.
The second thing I wanted to do in volume 4 was quite simple. Ghost pirates. That’s it. When I first started this story I planned for the gang to return to Ravadier to deal with a kraken of sorts, but that didn’t feel like it would fit with the pacing of the story. So I needed something else, and then I thought of something cool. What if there are ghost pirates? That turned into the kidnapping idea which made for the perfect connection to Abu and his tower. And although there are parts of the story I want to rewrite, I am quite happy with the general plot of this volume. As we make our way through volume 5, I will continue to work behind the scenes on the edited version of the first four volumes. I think I’ll leave things at this for now. There will be more updates in the future before the new year starts, but once again I really appreciate that you all followed along on this journey. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 