Hello! first off I love your art <3 I wanted to ask you about the homebrew campaign you're playing in, the sundered kingdom. what an interesting concept! did gildedruin mod the dnd classes/races to the victorian settings themselves or is there some kind of pre-existing framework they took inspiration or resources from to shape the world? thank you for satiating my curiosity, all the characters and npcs seem extremely cool and novel!
Hey, thanks so much for asking!! It’s such a cool campaign and I really love having an excuse to talk more about it, especially when it means I get to heap praise onto Jax as a dm!!
They have done a TON of the homebrew in the game themself, including the setting and pantheon, but also mechanics like our subclasses and special items. Valentin’s surgeon subclass, for instance, was something she created because I wanted to be able to heal without needing to rely on divine magic. Because of the regency setting, I wanted to fill the archetype of the enlightenment-era doctor, plus I was really obsessed with Pathologic while making him (and still am LOL) and wanted to incorporate the conflict of tradition vs progress into his character. I know Jax also pulled a lot of inspiration from Elden Ring, The Witcher, and Wheel of Time among other things to build the setting and story!!
can i ask how valentin and landry met? i love your art of them, i'm so interested in their lore!
Oh of course!! Thank you for giving me an excuse to talk more about them!!
In the world of this campaign, people born with magical ability carry that magic in an organ called a “source”, and the gods of the world siphon magic for themselves by “sundering” mages, removing their sources and consuming them. The gods are then able to control the magic in their regions directly.
Valentin grew up in a region where one of those gods had gone mad and been locked away, and without her magic the land became diseased and barren. He managed to invent a sort of magical sieve which could collect traces of magical run-off in the river and return it to the land. This was a big enough deal to catch the attention of the god Pollux, whose region, Iversol, is known for innovation. Pollux sent a group of his soldiers to collect Val and his invention to be brought back to Iversol, and sunder the few mages left in Val’s village. Landry was a part of that group.
Landry is one of seven “perfect” soldiers hard-sculpted by Pollux and brought to life by a divine spark; their whole purpose is to serve the crown, with no emotion or personal connections of their own. After returning to Iversol, they were assigned to Val to make sure he didn’t attempt to escape. Val resented them at first, but soon began to see Landry as someone as lonely as he was, and their secret friendship grew from there!