Afterword - Book 2 - Chapter 27 (Patreon)

Chapter 27: Defining Herself II

(Original Chapter Title: Defining Herself II)

In which Ranthia has a good think.

And discovers that she's a monster.

In the OG draft I've mentioned before that I botched her third class's stats hard for the 128 class up—I probably undersold it. It was a 768 tier class stat range. In my defense, this was before I was working with a character sheet derived from Selkie's; I was having to reverse engineer everything and Elaine's third class options were all but useless to me at this point.

But this meant Ranthia sat on a LOT more free stats in the OG draft (over 4x as many). This chapter originally was about Ranthia and Sentinel Scorch heading out to practice after she dumped the entire lot into dexterity. Which kind of ends up with Scorch ill-temperedly watching her dance through dense woodlands at high speeds.

It was somewhere between fun and a bit mean-spirited, but there was no sense in having a scene like that over 3863 stat points. I purged it and moved events around a bit so she had her "wait, revenge is actually a huge deal to me—shit" revelation here ahead of the 'great' stat dump.

One thing I was somewhat impressed by from the OG draft, is that Ranthia's vengeful moments already existed. I didn't plan the whole revenge realization either back then, it was an organic thing that grew from the fact that when Ranthia was forced to confront herself after she did a bad thing—she found a thread that just went deeper and deeper.

Personal growth doesn't have to be awkwardly scripted, sometimes letting the character express themselves and learn what they're doing wrong can be the way to do it. (No, not all authors have as... limited of control as I do, but it's not as atypical as you might think!)

But, like Ranthia herself admits, saying you want to be a better person doesn't instantly make you a better person. It's just the first step on a long road. What else will she find as the travels it?