#I'm also definitely not a fashion or military historian - I have cursory knowledge at best

[thunderboltfire]

Random info about Daen!

Design:

This one may be on the more obvious side, but Daen's clothing is one of the least original among my main Isaldian cast. Daen's somewhere between 180 and 300 years older than the rest of them, and if the general inspiration for most of Isaldi is roughly mid-to-high medieval, his clothes are also 200 years off, but in the wrong direction. He wears what is essentially a standard 17th century Polish-Lithuanian nobleman garb (it could be Hungarian too), only less ostentatiously decorative than some real-life examples of it.

In fact, the only thing in his looks that is notably different from the fashion of the times is his hairstyle and the fact that he's clean shaven (or an approximation of it). That, and the fact he doesn't wear a hat. If I was to give him an undercut, a mustache and a fox fur cap, bam! Polish-Lithuanian jumpscare.

And the thing is even more evident if I'd give him a fur-lined coat with sleeves cut open.

The reason why I've chosen this look for him was because it looks just a bit different than the rest, and where the action takes place he is a foreigner, though it's not really clear where he hails from. The second reason is that I really like this style and I think it's unterutilised in fantasy. The unintended result of sticking to it, however, is that I've loosened the white-knuckled grip I've had on keeping Isaldi in a strictly typical medieval high-fantasy aestetics.

It helped a lot when for a pretty long time I couldn't quite fit Argo to a specific role on the battlefield, because he slipped through most of the usual RPG archer archetypes. That's why Argo also ended up wielding a sabre, and why he has a much subtler, but still somewhat early modern influences in the way he is both armed for melee combat and for mounted archery.

Lore trivia:

Daen's native language is Moer, but he speaks Illiraian (language of the territory in which most of the action is going on) without a discernible accent. He is fluent in Andaran (neighboring country's language), and communicative in at least one dialect of elvish. He knows, or at least understands a pretty terrifying number of languages - a feature he picked up throughout his unnaturally long life. He has a rather pleasant, low voice, he's probably a bass, but it isn't easy to get him to sing.

The first thing people usually notice when looking at him is his unusual pallor. He's got permanent dark circles under his eyes, almost looking like bruises. He looks at best unslept, and at worst like he's anemic or straight-up dead (and the fact that he's able to just sit unmoving for a very long time and not sleep for days at end doesn't help the unnerving impression). One way or another it's pretty clear at a glance that something's not right with him. And that's before someone sees him eating.

The Bloodless have an in-born magical affliction - similarly to the shapeshifters, they are descended from humans, but the generational exposure to ambient magic resulted in them having many aspects of their physiology vastly different from regular humans. In their case, they are able to absorb live magic from living (or maybe, recently living) sentient creatures to perform impressive magical feats, but such opportunity comes at a cost of an inevitable, and irreversible corruption. The side effect however, is that they live incredibly long and heal extraordinarily fast.