This page is released much later than I wanted, mostly because of my procrastinating. However, I had a bit of trouble working on this page, especially with the background. The characters were no problem. I had them completed within a few days after I started on the page. I really don’t understand why I had so much trouble, but I did. I was having to work extra hard to get the detail I wanted on the background with less than encouraging results. I would just get aggrovated and go play some more Suikoden V or World of Warcraft. Eventually I realized playing those games wouldn’t get the page done.

So, I thought about it a bit and came to the conclusion that I needed to make the image larger so I did, about 9000 pixels tall to be exact. I absolutely LOVE working at this large of a filesize because I can draw all the detail I want easily and effortlessly. I’m able to use bigger brush sizes than regular, so I’d spend less time to get the same amount of detail I was striving for before I increased the resolution. After I upped the resolution it took me less than a week to get this background completed.

I’m really happy with it. It’s not perfect (nothing ever is), but I still like it. I was going for a Victorian countryside style office front, but not quite. It would have some ornamentation that you’d normally find in a Victorian storefront, but be made mostly out of stone instead of wood, perhaps there’s a lot of stone quarries around to easily build buildings out of. I’m not given the chance to show much of Caperow, so I want it to look as if it is prosperous in any way I can.

Needless to say, I rather like this page. Visually the earthy tones of all the man-made trappings of the office-front complement each other nicely, and the text—especially in the captions—is wonderfully verbose. Offhand “The Hill Times” is the name of a real newspaper; hats off to anyone who knows which I refer to without looking it up on the Web first.

This page was born out of a necessity to speed things along a little. Though we both enjoyed Jahn’s journey across the Empire very much, we quickly concluded after the last page that we really needed to get on with the story and introduce some more faces. Thus, this page is meant as a kind of interlude narration to put in evidence the passage of time. We rather liked the concept as we were ironing it out, and we may use it again from time to time.

As for the newspaper, what you see is (hopefully) the final evolution of our representation of Low Rathic. It is a reasonably straightforward phonetic alphabet with facilities to accomodate English sounds and most French sounds as well, the latter of which we may use at some point. It can also be seen on the coin in the last page, though obviously not in as much detail or volume. As mentioned previously Low Rathic is the official language of the Holy Augslyn Empire, but certainly not the only language in the world, so we may yet see other scripts, too.