Serpent Song has had lots of (and will continue to have even more) crowd scenes. I love filling scenes up with lots and lots of creatures in the background when I can. It’ll usually be just extras in towns or villages, but there will be a LOT of bandits showing up in future chapters too. Since I’m going to be drawing dozens and dozens of extras anyway, I thought it might be cool to let Patreon donors design a few and have them show up in the story.
They won’t be pivotal speaking roles necessarily, (not yet, anyway) but given that many of these bandit gangs and towns may show up multiple times, it won’t be unheard of to have them re-appear in the future.
To help with designs, I’ve made small PDF character kits for 9 of the races seen in the comic so far. The character kits should give you an idea of what the physical options for each race are, as well as cultural info and different archetypes you might wanna use. You aren’t limited to just what’s in the kit, but they’re a decent blueprint to start with. All donors (1 or 5 dollar tiers) can download the character kit PDFs.
One important thing to note: The character kits contain a lot of lore about the world and the races of Serpent Song that IS NOT POSTED ANYWHERE ELSE CURRENTLY. As Patreon donors, you essentially have access to some info that hasn’t been shown in the story yet. Not spoilers really, but you may get to know the “why” of certain things that you see in the world, but aren’t explained by the main characters.
At the moment, my plan is to do casting calls for characters that might fit certain roles, like townsfolk, soldiers, or bandits. Right now, I’m looking for bandit characters who work for one of two bosses. Kuss, a leader who runs a gang of all-female bandits, and Zalaan, a powerful crime boss whose gang will serve as primary antagonists in the next few chapters. Basically I’m letting all patrons contribute a character of their design to be included among the bandit rabble that Chuz and Stheno will encounter.
-PARTICIPATION IN THE CHARACTER CASTING CALL IS TIME SENSITIVE-
The sooner your character is made after the casting call, the better. As I move on to other chapters, I will put out a call for different stuff, so each one is a limited time opportunity.
Though the requirements may be different later, I don’t have a lot of rules for what your bandits should look like. Wild and crazy is A-OK. My goal has always been to make background characters look interesting and unique, so go nuts! On Patreon I’ll also notify when and where I plan on using the character (unless you’d like it to be a surprise). You can also specify if they’re ok to kill, in the case of enemy bandits and such.
I’ve been super psyched about the ones submitted so far. I’ve always wanted to create some kind of peripheral RPG element to Serpent Song, so this’ll be my first tentative attempts at that.
If you wanna join in, while simultaneously supporting the ongoing series, consider becoming a 1$ or 5$ donor on Patreon today.
