From the world of the Hesitant Hero: Redsan Village

In my effort to accomplish three different things at once, I’ll be talking about the world of the Hesitant Hero from time to time. The three things I want to accomplish with this are simple. I want to give myself some breathing room between chapters, which hopefully results in a better thought out story. Writing a chapter can take quite a lot of time and effort, especially at points where I feel a bit stuck. Writing about the world itself is much easier. The second thing I want to accomplish with this is that I can put my thoughts about why the world and its people are the way it is onto paper, which helps make things more concrete for me and hopefully allow me to write a more grounded story. Lastly, if I fill in some of my breaks with extra content, I feel less bad about taking said breaks and the volume itself will take up a larger part of the year, creating a less long break. This and 99 other things I tell myself so I can sleep well at night.

Jokes aside, let’s dive into the lovely village of Redsan, which we’ll explore much more intensively over the next few months, but let me paint you a picture. The Severanti Empire, which has been successfully led by a strange mage from another world, is the epitome of a meritocracy. At least that’s what the top brass likes to say. Being a hotspot for trouble as their border with the Feral Wildlands is much less clear cut and makes for lots of expeditions into the unexplored as well as problems wandering out into the civilized world. The emperor has decreed that anyone is free to take on whatever challenges they wish, and the bounty will be theirs to keep. No thievery from the government. Of course, that mostly means no direct thievery, as the emperor’s private army of Sahilid are often quick on the draw when it comes to finding valuable and interesting places. In an empire like this, a sleepy village that lies very close to the edge of the Wildlands is bound to see some peculiar traffic from time to time.

Despite its odd location, the village of Redsan has been thriving. Finding itself in a region that’s part savanna, part desert, the village takes its name from the peculiar red sand that fills the desert part of the region. Deeper in the desert, less civilization lives and somewhere there the empire bleeds into the wilderness. It is due to this ambiguity that some people have claimed that the sands are red due to the blood of those who came before them, striving to civilize said desert, but dying in their attempts. Another theory is that the bloodred sand is simply this color due to a god bleeding over the region, killing all crops and plantlife, leaving behind the reddish sand. What the real explanation for this red sand is, I’ll leave to you dear reader. Sometimes it’s better to not have an explanation for everything you write, it gets a bit too nerdy if you do.

The smallfolk have lived in this region for generations and although Redsan isn’t the only village where you’ll find them, it is where most of them are from. There are other tribes of smallfolk in different parts of the continent, but they tend to be the type of people that stay close to their birthplace. You can’t create a halfling kind of people and not let Tolkien influence you at all, after all. The reason I wanted to create these smallfolk was to make the situation for Mirgia feel even more alien. Humans in many works of fiction – including mine – can be driven by greed and all the other fun sins we know about. Mirgia has been on guard around his human peers throughout the early parts of volume 2, and I wanted to put him in a place where the people of that place are inherently kind. That’s not to say smallfolk are perfect beings that can do no wrong, but when Rainn Wilson talks about the next step of evolution in his book Soul Boom he talks about a people that loses their greed and looks more at the self, reflecting on things more and becoming a kinder people. When we can all uplift everyone, we’ll be better for it. That’s the kind of society I wanted to create with Redsan. If you’re waiting for the ball to drop and them to turn into an evil cult or something, I have bad news. These are good people who do good things because it makes them happy to do good things. 

Embodying this more than anyone else in the village is Teddy. My big inspiration for the people as a whole was looking at some of my childhood books, including one named Pinkeltje by Dutch author Dick Laan. Pinkeltje is a tiny guy the size of a pink, and he has all sorts of adventures. I loved those books as a kid and although the smallfolk in Palaria are definitely much larger, it was looking at those books that made me want to write about smaller folk. As for Teddy, I took some of his personality from a very fun character with the same name. One of my favorite game series of all time – despite its many, many flaws – is the Borderlands series. I still think Borderlands 1 and 2 are incredible and hold up perfectly to this day. In Borderlands 1 we’re introduced to the blind redneck T.K. Baha, who is funny, friendly and just seems like an all around nice dude despite some very obvious flaws. We learn later on in the Borderlands franchise that he was a pretty prolific weapons maker but didn’t want those weapons to end up with the wrong people, which ultimately cost him everything. I wanted Teddy – which the T in T.K. Baha stands for – to be a similarly fun and kind character. A bit of a hick with a heart of gold but also someone who can be very capable if you put him in the right place.

As I was writing the first chapters of this story, I was originally going to make Mirgia stay with Teddy, but considering the people in Redsan reach to around Mirgia’s thigh, that wouldn’t make very much sense. He wouldn’t fit anywhere in their homes after all. And if Redsan is indeed this close to the well coveted desert where adventurers and mercenaries tend to travel to all the time, it also wouldn’t make any sense if they didn’t have a place for people who are taller than the average villager to stay. So that’s how I got to writing in the Big Green House for Tallfolk. It’s simply an inn tailored for larger folk to stay while they travel through Redsan, and it also makes for a great way for any travelers to interact with each other due to all coming through the same place.

Mirgia will be spending quite a lot of time in Redsan and the surrounding region, and I really want some of the people in this village to come to life. I’ll be completely frank with you, my dear reader, I don’t quite know the details yet of what Mirgia is going to encounter on his little side quest. I want the reader to feel that he is a different personality from Cobal, which I’ll admit I find quite difficult to do. Mirgia is much more calm and collected, which comes from his longer life. I want him to be reasonable in most situations, and that is exactly why he isn’t panicking and running back to the rest of the party, as he knows how futile that is. They’ll be fine without him (which he thinks, and we already know for a fact as we’ve read volumes 2 through 4) and even if they’re not fine without him, there is no way he can get to them in time. So he will end up helping the kind villagers of Redsan. I hope you all enjoyed the first couple of chapters from Mirgia’s perspective, and will continue to read and enjoy this fifth entry into the series. I’m having a blast writing it, at least. Thanks for reading!

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