I’ve been waiting on this moment for about a year now. I’ve been featuring them on several tiers of my Patreon page since January of 2023. Those of you who’ve been supporting the Patreon at the Epilogue tier already know who Cresca’s mother is, and what her connection to Dominic was. This has been an idea-in-the-making for a long time and the moment has finally come.
The dwarves of Kadaz are here! Or rather, Cresca is on her way to them!
The dwarves of this world have not been featured much at all. In fact, they were little more than a sight gag way back during the Around The World storyline, where Dominic and Luna spent most of their time on the halfling side of Olde Tucklebruck Island. The dwarves showed up for one scene, punched Dominic in the crotch, and Luna tricked them with an illusion. And then we never saw them again.
I admit I didn’t have the story of the dwarves written down anywhere when I made those comics. I wasn’t into dwarves way back then, so I didn’t give them much thought beyond what was put into the comics. But what I didn’t realize I was doing at the time was planting a seed for future self. I had established that dwarves existed, but said little else about them. Years later, finding myself drawn to dwarves as an older nerd, I realized I had a fertile ground for new stories just waiting to be nurtured.
But I didn’t do this alone. Many of the characters that will be spotlighted in these coming stories are the result of cooperative stories written between myself and a friend of mine. We were going back-and-forth just for fun, but my brain couldn’t just leave it at that. My versions of these characters will be very different from the ones we wrote together, but I’d be a bad friend if I didn’t acknowledge her importance to the development of Kadaz. She’s very excited to see these “new versions” of some of our characters, adapted to fit into Dominic’s world. (Our dwarf women didn’t have beards, for example.)
I always need to be doing something new. Something different. Something that stimulates my mind instead of stagnating it. The chance to keep exploring new things in a setting I’ve been with for many years is thrilling. I hope you folks remain as excited as I am about this.