#Eftgan

[dduane]

In the digital art dep't: So about this face...

I mentioned in a post the other day that the above image had popped up the other day in one of the routine promotional emails from Daz Studio, and it had been niggling at me... making me wonder which of my characters it could be used for.

At least one commenter—it was @rubbahslippah—suggested that it might be the Middle Kingdoms' Queen Eftgan. My first response was "Hmm, naah..." as I already had a figure I was using for her.

But after considering that for a while, it occurred to me that the figure in question had been giving me trouble. Over recent months I've been gradually converting most of the figures I use to the newer and somewhat more flexible Genesis 9 standard. But the earlier Eftgan figure hadn't taken well to the conversion, so that I was having second thoughts about its use and what to do next.

With that realization in mind, I took advantage of a monthly sale coupon and grabbed the figure attached to the face above—which is called KOO Esmee HD, from a maker called Kooki99—and started working with her. And I think she's a good choice for Eftgan. Here she is in daily casuals. (The Darthene royal arms are midnight blue and silver, and the "dress code" for civil service livery has a lot of wiggle room in it. So if you're wearing at least something in dark blue when you're at work, no one's going to make too much of a fuss.)

Anyway, a tip of the hat to @rubbahslippah: that was a good call. Thanks for that! :)

...By the way, for those interested: the blond hair color is natural for many darker-skinned Darthenes. Eftgan's former lover and now-wife Segnbora spends much of Tales of the Five #2: The Landlady staying with a family of whom about a third also feature this look.

In Eftgan's case, the Darthene royal line has a fair amount of Steldene ancestry scattered up and down its history... and those Steldenes possess the same TYRP1 gene that some Melanesian peoples (specifically the Solomon Islanders) on our own Earth have. This gene, on chromosome 9, produces blond hair natively and without the involvement of other ethnic groups whose blond hair is differently derived. (A team of Stanford University researchers and geneticists was responsible for tracking down and identifying this gene: an article about it is here.)

Meanwhile, here are Eftgan and Segnbora having a nightcap in that most famous of Darthis city's dive bars, the Stuck Pig. ...Apologies for not having done a full make-sure-everything-drapes-properly animation run on Eftgan's clothes... this being why her sleeve seems to have sunk into the surface of the bar. I started an animation run, and Segnbora's hair (which is also animation-sensitive) promptly exploded and tried to throttle them both. (eyeroll) Bloody dForce...

[dduane]

30 Days of Pride, Day 9 (yeah, I'm behind, I'll be getting caught up shortly...): Career Darthene civil servant and sorcerer Mevraen stai-Charesti runs into his boss at a local dive bar while grabbing a nightcap on his way home from a long, tough day at work.

Mev is the first Middle Kingdoms character to identify himself in canon as ace—per this post on the subject of a year or so ago, which discusses a very specific aspect of asexuality in the Kingdoms. Mev's story (or as much of it as we know so far) is told in the MK novelette Overdue.

[dduane]

30 days of Pride, day 3: In the Stuck Pig, Darthis: two old friends and lovers, now spouses, pause for a quick one before going about the day's business.

[dduane]

The Bad Armor Drinking Game

In the digital art dep't...

So, having just sorted out the new figure for Queen Eftgan in the Middle Kingdoms books, I spent most of last week (while continuing to recover from the household upper respiratory infection) doing preliminary planning for the visual of a scene from The Door Into Sunset in which all the MCs are out on the battlefield. The big battle (or the final one of a sequence) will be the next day, and last-minute tweaks are being made to strategy and tactics. Which means putting most of the our-side protagonists together in a command tent, bent over a table covered with maps. (The "sketch" for this scene is over here.)

But sweet Goddess in a bucket, the shopping I had to do to make sure I had those guys' armor the way I wanted nearly drove me around the bend. From the digital artist's POV, the main problem with this is realistically arming the female characters. And the reason for this is simple: Almost all of it that's currently available from Daz is crap.

There are a very few notable exceptions. In Eftgan's case, for example: she's wearing the female-fighter version of the male-fighter harness that Herewiss has on. Sickleyield and Moonscape Graphics have done good work here.

But almost all the other female-use armors available at the moment? Argh. It had been ...a few years, I guess? since I last went armor-shopping. Last week I'd hoped there might at least be some new possibilities in the Daz shop. But instead I found so much more useless crap than before that I was tempted to start day drinking. And by evening, there were enough drink-triggers to start my very own drinking game.

I am not going to illustrate the triggers enumerated below, as I don't want to embarrass the artists. But if you look at the items turned up by this search, you'll have little trouble finding the things that would have left me in a drunken stupor within an hour or two.

My baseline: if I'm going to buy digital armor, either for male or female characters, it has to be something that I myself wouldn't be embarrassed to show up wearing at a swordfight. Otherwise, I start hitting the virtual bottle.

So I'd drink when I see:

Armor that fails to cover or at least protect vital vulnerable areas. Not just vital organs, but seriously important places like the insides of thighs and arms, the throat area, etc. (And yeah, I know and enjoy the various webcomics that illustrate, for humor's sake, the idea that the more bare flesh a female warrior displays, the safer they somehow are. But I'm dealing with the "realistic" side of combat here. Yes, some of my characters are magic workers, but the reason they go out and get themselves armor is so they don't have to waste precious magical ability dealing with something that steel will manage perfectly well without them having to think about it.)

Armor that should serve a useful protective purpose but nonetheless doesn't because it's been twisted by the armor maker, for design purposes, into a shape that means it's now essentially useless. Drink, for example, on seeing an example of "Silly Pauldron Syndrome:" i.e., shoulder pieces that will not only not protect you from a shoulder cut, but will direct it toward the space between neck and shoulder. ...Drink again if the pauldron also somehow blocks your view of what's going on around you. Another drink for pauldrons, gorgets or neck pieces that poke your eye out when you turn your head.

Armor covered with decorative doodads that do nothing but get in your way or serve as something for your adversaries' weapons to catch on. The proper purpose of armor is to deflect blows away from vulnerable areas, not to catch and keep them there. No one is going to waste expensive metal (and armourers' labor time) on decorations that are a liability. Anything that would catch a thrusting sword? Drink. Drink twice if spikes are involved.

Poorly thought-out attachments to armor (loincloths, capes, etc), Drink if these would inevitably trip you or otherwise interfere with you if you tried to run in them: or that would make it easier for an attacker—especially from behind—to pull/knock you down and kill you. Two drinks if the attachments are asymmetrical. (Because, what, this is supposed to help somehow?) And drink for loincloths in general, because, FFS, why.

Boob armor. If you're a woman who's fought with the sword at all, you know that unless you're absolutely dead flat in front, you bind up somehow to get the frontage safely restrained before the action begins. Armor that purports to separate your breasts into two different casings is simply idiotic. All that it does do is signal that you're female. (And you're doing this why, exactly? On a this-world battlefield, this strikes me as nothing but a recipe for trouble.) One drink for boob armor. Another drink for conical boob armor that would make even early!Madonna look askance. Two drinks for boob armor that covers only the tops of the boobs. Honestly, WTF!!

And: Armor that just looks silly. Armor that makes you go "Oh FFS, give me a break now" and look away. Two drinks (or more) for armor that covers hardly any of your character, but for which the designer is possibly charging you even more than for an intricately made and well thought-out piece of work with a lot more protective real estate.

...(sigh) So many drinks. And so little armor worth having. ...Anyway, I got away from that series of shopping sessions with my sobriety intact. Small mercies.

But let me show you something hilarious that came up along the way.

Very, very few of the people making and selling armors on Daz betray any sign of a sense of humor in their marketing images. The rig below, though, popped up suddenly and reduced me to gasps of helpless laughter.

This, I kid you not, will come up in that "armor" search above. Let's be charitable and refer to it for the time being as "fighting gear".

I haven't shown you the best of this, though. These two figures weren't alone. There was another.

This guy should be an example to us all. He's thinking, "They're gonna make me go out there wearing some stick-on leather nipple straps and half a rug from IKEA? Fine. I'm gonna make it work." ...And he not only owns it: he rocks it. This is a badass of some kind or another, and he has my sword, or axe, or whatever.

All I can say is: Good on the product designer for doing something genuinely funny for a change: because at that point, I seriously needed it.

(sigh) And now back to work.

ETA: A quick note per various recommendations of others online doing this kind of analysis: Thanks, but I don't need to go outside the household for more of the same. I'll just yell up the stairs to @petermorwood, who probably has some that's way more acerbic than mine. :)

[dduane]

Hi DD! I am rereading the Middle Kingdoms books and I was wondering if there’s a pronunciation guide for the characters’ names kicking around anywhere. Especially for Segnbora’s name and Eftgan’s nickname 😊 thanks in advance, and thank you also for the books. If there was ever a time that those of us living in reality needed fix it fic for the world….. regardless, they’re a comfort.

First of all: you're very welcome. I have to admit that at this particular point in time, there's something to be said for being able to take refuge in a universe where, when the politically or economically powerful misbehave, God is extremely likely to show up on their doorsteps—in one guise or another—to forcefully, and when necessary fatally, kick their butts. (I'm polishing a scene of that kind right now and it is so fecking satisfying.)

And for our joint amusement: here's an image of Segnbora and Queen Eftgan in that fabled Darthis dive bar the Stuck Pig, just after the events in Tales of the Five: The Landlady (and after Eftgan had had time to change out of the clothes she'd earlier been wearing for yardwork).

Meanwhile, about pronunciations in the Middle Kingdoms books: sure, no problem. A little background:

I've mentioned here and there that the groundwork for the series grew out of a period in the late 60s/early 70s when I'd pivoted toward writing Tolkien fanfic (from Trek). One aspect of the LOTR works that particularly stuck with me was the whole "Author Is Merely Translating The Red Book Of Westmarch" thing, with Tolkien claiming (in his appended materials) to be translating character names from the Westron and substituting sympathetic alternatives from Old (and Middle) English.

So early on in my ficcing process—which rapidly turned into a worldbuilding hotbed for the Middle Kingdoms universe as a whole—I scraped together enough cash to send to Blackwell's of Oxford for a copy of J. R. Clark Hall's A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. (Which you can actually now download as an .epub from Project Gutenberg, such are the wonders of the age we live in.) I promptly started mining the book for character names, and as a result Old English-based or -sounding names are scattered all through the series. Sometimes the name signals something about what's going on with the character: but not inevitably.

...Inserting a cut here, as this goes on a bit. Caution: contains inflected vowels, idiosyncratic pronunciations, snarky nicknames, mice, and the secret behind why—when he's not helping save the world—Herewiss usually seems to be in the bathtub.

...Anyway. As far as pronunciations go, probably the simplest hint is to treat these names—and other Old English-derived words in the text— as if they were indeed sort of English... and not to get unduly worried about trying to approximate the proper OE pronunciations. (Because I sure don't.) So that means "Herewiss" is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable, and the "Here-" pronounced exactly like Eng. "here"; "Freelorn", the same way—just "free" and "lorn" run together. His name, like various others in the series, is a construction, and doesn't appear in Hall's. Its structure harks back to etymologies like the one involved in the now pretty-much antiquated word lorn (cf. "lovelorn", "forlorn", etc.). Its use in his name is meant to suggest someone who—when he tries to live a carefree unencumbered life—screws up repeatedly until he realizes he just can’t do that; because, like it or not, he’s destined for different things. ...Herewiss's name, though, is an alteration of an OE word that does appear in Hall's, herewisa: "wise in [the ways of] war", a captain or general. The word often implies a strategist or tactician, which is a good fit for him.

The pronounce-it-like-sort-of-English approach works for both Segnbora and Eftgan. The first part of Segnbora's name comes from the same root as the Eng. "sign", and Segnbora's "g" is also silent: so, senn-BOH-ra, to rhyme with "when MORE uh." It's derived directly from the OE segnbora, "a standard-bearer": which, as the series's plot proceeds, is a name she earns. Eftgan is just EFT-gan, rhyming with "WEFT-ten". Her name, unlike Segnbora's, doesn't appear in Hall's, but those of various of her family and relatives do, featuring the "eft-" prefix (OE "again")* that suggests repetition; or sometimes just "ef-". (Darthene royal names during the main series's century tend to start with "E" or “B”, as Arlene ones at the moment start with "F".)

The nickname situation (or "calling-name" as it's described in both the Arlene and Darthene languages) is slightly more involved. People coming up with nicknames for friends or family may chop off a congenial segment of a name and use that (as "Lorn" for Freelorn). Or they may verb-ize or adjectivize part of a name, so that the nickname sometimes acts as a pointer to something going on with that person—perhaps a character trait. Eftgan does this with Segnbora, calling her "'Berend" (as the others in the found family eventually start doing as well). This very purposeful twist of a possessive form of her name (Segnbéreind) into a pun on Dar. (e)h'bereindh, "hurried, speeding", implies a tendency to rush into things or to take sudden action that may look precipitate to the casual viewer.

Tegánë (teh-GAAH-nay), Segnbora's nickname for her onetime lover and current wife, is something similar. It first breaks the Queen's name in an archaic and atypical way (and one that would, for a fellow lore-student of the Silent Precincts, evoke some usages in previous centuries' verse forms). Then the extraneous, inflected vowels hooked onto it turn the nickname into a teasing near-opposite of Segnbora's own, a cognate to Dar. tegáneit: "methodical, calm, thorough"—with the affectionate implication that maybe the person it's applied to could occasionally speed things the Dark up a little. The two nicknames together could be taken by Darthene speakers (and there are a couple more of those in the family) as a microcosm of Segnbora's and Eftgan's relationship.

...And then there are the nicknames that have no damn thing whatsoever to do with the "right-name" of the person associated with them: like "Dusty" for Herewiss. In the dialect of Darthene commonly spoken in the Brightwood principality, the actual nickname "translated" here is Dar. Eárret(h), "[habitually] dirtied, besmirched": a word often used in frustrated affection for the kind of person who all through their childhood will inevitably find a mud puddle to jump into mere seconds after you’ve managed to wrestle clean clothes onto them. For someone who in adulthood canonically prefers to dress way down, in traditional/vernacular Brightwood leathers, for city life—the better to bamboozle clueless courtiers into dismissing him as an unsophisticated hick—but who's also been revealed to enjoy being a bit of a clothes-horse when he has an excuse, the conjoined fondness and irony underlying Herewiss's family nickname make it choice. Yet (as the best nicknames are) it's still apropos. This is a man who, whether digging in the garden or taking on a difficult piece of political work, is not afraid to get right down into it and get his hands dirty… and who won't waste time washing up until matters are fully sorted out.

...Anyway: hope this has helped a bit! The only other piece of advice: when you run into dipthongs (Héalhra, Éarn, Béorgan, etc etc), you can split them if you like (HAY-ul-hra) or run them together (YARN): exactly as you please. No one in this universe is going to care. And in the other one—bearing in mind the Realms-wide mandate for showing proper hospitality to strangers—on hearing how you sound they'll probably just buy you a drink and ask you for the news from foreign parts. (As unexpectedly happened to me, one time, here. Hit the "backstory" tab for the details.). :)

*Burns’s poem "To A Mouse" invokes this word, dialect-changed to old Scots: "...gang aft agley."

[dduane]

So in the digital art dep't...

This is a concept sketch for a scene from The Door Into Sunset. Outside the tent, the first of a number of crucial battles. is about to take place. Inside, talking strategy and tactics: Queen Eftgan of Darthen, Freelorn, Segnbora and Herewiss.

Sketches like this are about stuffing all the characters who need to be there into the same space, and shuffling them around until they seem to be in more or less the right places. They're also about testing out sets (like the Commander's Tent set they're in at the moment) and materials, and seeing how they have to be lit and so forth.

At the moment this sketch was mostly about getting the MCs together in their battle gear and seeing how it behaves in the current lighting. But some funny things happened accidentally in terms of poses. In particular: I have no idea what Lorn's trying to sell Eftgan in this shot, or what she thinks of it. 'Berend appears oblivious. But poor Dusty seems to have acquired the kind of expression you expect to see on somebody who cannot belieeeeeve his boyfriend just suggested whatever the Dark dingbat idea it was that just came out of his mouth, ohgoddesswtfnonono! ...No idea where that expression came from. But it made me laugh.

Meanwhile, the reason the Queen's armor is so much more striking than everybody else's is, well, she's a queen (and they're a second-string prince, a long-outlawed king-to-be-if-he-survives, and an impoverished minor noblewoman)... but also, I'm prepping to do some advanced design work on it. I direct everybody's attention to this fabulous episode of Nova, in which medieval armor history and technology are tackled in detail. Take a look at the video from about 43:15, which details the process of bonding intricate gold designs to metal that turns vividly blue in the process, and you can see what I'm heading for.

[dduane]

Out now at Ebooks Direct: TALES OF THE FIVE #2: THE LANDLADY

In this 75,000-word novel set in the main character through-line of the Door Into... series, sorceress and swordswoman Segnbora tai-Enraesi -- last scion of one of the Forty Noble Houses of Darthen and hero of the great War against the Shadow -- is forced to come to grips with the one part of her life she's successfully avoided for more than a decade: her day job. Segnbora's been preoccupied with the demands of motherhood and the continuing business of supporting her husbands King Freelorn of Arlen and Herewiss Hearn's son in consolidating Freelorn's hold on the Arlene throne. But now her liege-lady and lover Eftgan of Darthen calls on Segnbora to take up her rightful role as Head of House tai-Enraesi and begin restoring her diminished Household to its proper position among the Forty. Reviving the fortunes of a House sunk into decline over two lifetimes will be difficult work, Segnbora knows. But she doesn't suspect how difficult until, while visiting her lands in Darthen's rural north, she discovers that one Holding of House tai-Enraesi conceals a danger unexpected enough to challenge even a companion of Dragons and a wielder of the blue Fire of Power... The Landlady is the second of five novelettes and short novels being published during 2018-2019, spanning the years between Book 3 of the Tale of the Five, The Door Into Sunset, and the forthcoming The Door Into Starlight.

http://bit.ly/TOTF2-LANDLADY

[dduane]

I've already bought, read, and finished The Landlady and enjoyed it very much! It got me thinking once again--perhaps you could speak about how you decided group marriage was pretty much the norm in the Middle Kingdoms?

First of all, I’m delighted you liked Tales of the Five: The Landlady! The length of it kind of caught me by surprise while I was working, but the response has been very positive. (I thought when I started that I was writing a 20K novella. Oh well…)

The “how did you make this up…” of group marriages in the Middle Kingdoms is always going to be a dicey issue, this far along in time. Certainly they start appearing offstage as early as “Parting Gifts” in 1981, only a couple of years after The Door Into Fire was published. I’m tempted to blame Robert Heinlein, as group marriages of various kinds turn up here and there in his work – probably the one that would have made the biggest impression was Mannie’s “line marriage” in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

Anyway, at this end of time it seems likely to me that the Goddess’s general sense of “There’s hardly enough love in the world as it is, why would this be excluded?” is in play – and if it’s okay for a prince to fall in love with and rescue another prince, then one might safely assume there might be wiggle room in other associated areas as well. In particular, in the Middle Kingdoms (or the parts we know about so far), marriage is seen as a way to make life as secure as possible for children: so the more adults are involved in a marriage, the less likely it is for children to be left orphaned or otherwise at risk. Group marriages therefore seem like a logical way of handling this in a world that, though it may in some ways seem idyllic, is hardly safe.

Certainly this issue would have been on the main characters’ minds in the Tale of the Five, as by the time the marriage happens at the end of The Door Into Sunset, there are already a fair number of children in the equation: Herewiss’s two sons with his old flame back in the Brightwood, Freelorn’s daughter with his old flame downcountry in Arlen, and his second daughter-to-be with Segnbora. And Segnbora’s (eventual) child with Hasai, whatever that situation is going to look like. (And then there are Eftgan’s and Wyn’s crowd of kids as well…) The T5 principals will obviously have been concerned for one anothers’ offspring… and one way to make sure they’re all taken care of in the long term is for Everybody To Get Married. :)

(BTW, while looking for something else I suddenly stumbled across this lengthy Tumblr post that deals with some of the logistical challenges of group marriage in the Middle Kingdoms.)

HTH!