Wizard School Mysteries: Book 1 Side Characters
Ok I'm 90% sure I've shared all of these sketches before but for funsies, let's look at some of the minor characters from book 1 of Wizard School Mysteries.
We'll start with the four elemental experts of the AAAM's teaching staff. While I generally use the four humors theory as, like, a surface level detail for my students, I tried to make the four teachers who specialize in the elements really live up to it, witch each teacher sporting the personality traits associated with the humor that corresponds to their elements. Lymf Splenik is a sadsack melancholic, Sulfrous Bladgal is cantankerous as befitting a choleric, Arturiel Haemoglobe is free-spirited and sanguine, and Mewcosa Glycocet is sweet but extremely emotional, as a phlegmatic should be.
Their names, of course, play on this too. Mewcosa is a play on Mucus, Sulfrous's last name, Bladgal, is a corruption of "Gall bladder," which makes yellow bile, Artery = Arturiel and Hemoglobin = Haemoglobe, and Lymf = lymph nodes while spenik is a corruption of "spleen," which makes black bile.
Professor Alys Evelina, teacher of Sorcery Studies, ends up serving as a secondary antagonist for books 1 and 2. Given how wild I went with making a lot of these side wizards explicitly monstrous, I decided to make Alys look excessively normal, even attractive, to not play into the "ugly = evil" trope. Don't read too much into the Alice in Wonderland motiff - while Alys and Alice both share a general disdain for things that are don't make sense to them, Alice Liddel is a much more likable character.
We don't get to see much of Alys's rival, Broomhilda Siegfried, but I still wanted to put some effort into her design anyway. She's meant to visually contrast Alys in the ways that Conjuration contrasts to Sorcery - notably, she's a lot shorter and hides her face, to go with the fact that Conjurers are kind of looked down upon by sorcerers. She's not keen on how her magic is viewed as the "lesser" of the two main ways to be a wizard.
They might not all get named, but we do see a lot of the non-educator staff in the first two books as well. Astrae Bygonn, the bugbear who runs the AAAM's Lost and Found, plays a pretty important role for how little screen time he gets. Esmer the gargoyle is named, while Quasi and Modo go uncredited in their roles as the two gargoyles working the school dance that starts the climax of Book 1. I think Ralda might only have showed up in book 2, but what the hell let's include her here anyway. And of course the janitorial homunculi are always on the fringers, being gloppy, helpful little guys maintaining all the school's functions.
Though they don't feature heavily in the story, both Ambrosio Medina (the alchemy professor) and Curdletongue (the prophecy professor) have named cameos in book 1, and they'll have slightly more important roles later on. Ambrosio is specifically meant to resemble Vincent Price, as I wanted him to have that charming yet slimy quality to him that Price so often brought to his roles.
I wanted the school to feel full, so I had my friends in the writers workshop discord I'm in pitch loose concepts for wizard students so I could have, like, a few dozen to pick from whenever I needed a background extra. Eventually we sorted them all loosely into the minor arcana of Tarot, and then expanded it to include some of the arcana from Minchiate, a card game very similar to Tarot that might be a parody of it? We were having fun making wizard students, what can I say.
Mugre Repellus was pitched by @bugcthulhu while Bartholomew Crawson was pitched by @dragonzzilla, and both of them went the extra mile to do some concept art too, which I adapted into these designs. They were two of the earliest spare wizard students we made, and we grew a bit attached to them - and since they both had claws on their arms, they were unofficially named "the claw gang" despite only having two members. Then, because it was fun, I made Shere Statchell to be their third member, the Jessie to their Team Rocket, and the Claw Gang became a sort of quirky trio who we kept making fun side stories for while working on the rest of the Spare Wizard Kids.
The joke was fun enough to keep going, to the point where I've made them recurring background extras and cameo characters in the series. What can I say, I love the Claw Gang.
Of course, another reason I needed a big ol' bucket of Spare Wizard students is that this is a mystery series, and mysteries need victims. I warned all my friends sending me pitches not to get too attached, because some of these kids were gonna die.
I'm a firm believer that a character's death should serve a purpose, though. You can kill a random one-off character for a gag, but if a character actually has, like, stuff going on, their death should have some weight to it. And book 2 needed at least one death that we felt - a side character who we liked enough to be sad to see go.
I picked Gabriev because his concept pitch - a wizard who also wants to be a chivalric knight - felt easy to make likable very quickly. Possibly a bit of personal bias - I'm a suck for knights in shining armor - but all you really need to do is make him nice and profess his desire to be a hero who goes out and does good, and suddenly that untimely death he's facing seems tragic.
Buuuut, if you do that too hurriedly, it'll be obvious he's set up to die - akin to having an old character say "I'm two days away from retirement" in a monster movie. Gabriev had to be seeded subtly, so audiences think he might have a future ahead of him.
So I put him in book 1, as a nice but not terribly prominent background extra in one of the main classes the kids attend in it, so readers might remember him and assume he's just a recurring extra like the Claw Gang. Ain't I devious?
Gabriev Zelgad's design and name is another Slayers reference. His armor is based on Gourry Gabriev (who is also obviously the source of his first name), and his last name is just another Slayers character, Zelgadis, without the "is." Like Gourry, he's a beautiful blond young man who's a bit of a ditz, and like Zelgadis, he suffers horribly tragedy.
Before I started the Spare Wizard Student project, I made a handful of supporting cast wizard students based on alternative names for various Major Arcana cards. Liam O'Sullivan here is based on The Lust, which is what Aleister Crowley renamed The Strength to in his Tarot deck, because of course he would, the horny old bastard. I initially didn't want to use that as a prompt because, like, what the fuck would that character end up being, WSM's take on Mineta? But then one of my friends joked I could just make him another take of the running gag I have in my TTRPG campaigns of introducing side characters who are deeply unflattering caricatures of myself that inexplicably end up in relationships with hot, terrifying goth women, and I smiled wickedly and said, "Oh you dumb bastard, that's canon now."
...which ended up being a godsend, because it gave me a way to introduce The Queen of Night, a minor character who's nonetheless important to book 1's mystery, as romancing her is the goal of the true antagonist. Sometimes torturing a specific part of your audience accidentally leads to a useful story beat.
Mr. Mackers is another minor fairy character who I wanted to use to show that Midgaheim does not work on the "Seelies = good fairies and Unseelies = bad fairies" trope, and also that it doesn't follow the "all fairies are explicitly evil eldritch horrors" trope that's becoming increasingly common as a "more true to the myths" approach. The mythic Nuckelavee is explicitly evil, to be fair, but not all fairies are, and I figured taking a fairy that's popular in internet culture for being so damn creepy and monstrous and having it be a relatively nice guy was a good way to subvert the modern expectations of what fairies should be - and try and stay true to the general mythological approach to fairies, which is that fairies are complex, not just good or evil.
Finally, we have good ol' Lornwig Kayjay, no relation to any children's book authors who decided to be figureheads for hategroups that specifically bully trans people. My rough concept for Lornwig was "that kid you get in at least one college class a semester who deliberately antagonizes the professor and every other student in class," because dear god you always get at least one class with a That Kid in it. The worst I ever endured was my class on Environmental Studies, because we had THREE That Kids in there. My second worst was the graduate class I took on Medieval Literature About Hell, because despite my best efforts, I was the That Kid of that class. It's a weird phenomenon.
As pre-writing chugged along and a certain children's book author became more prominently deranged, I decided Lornwig could get some theming outside of her role as a That Kid. And, you know, she's not the only That Kid I have planned. There's different flavors of That Kid, you know.
While Lornwig's role as a minor antagonist doesn't leave a lot of room for depth, I tried to give her a consistent philosophy behind her douchebaggery. She likes order and categorization, and things fitting into neat and tidy groups that you can sort into "Good" and "Bad" categories. That's a very human mindset - not a good one, but a very human one nonetheless. And she lives in a world of dangerous magical monsters, she does have some reasons to be scared and paranoid.
But mostly, she's That Kid.
Next time: minor characters of book 2!
Several more of our friends threw in student pitches of their own, but by the time TT deemed the roster was big enough I think DZ and me had provided like half of the prompts
What can I say, the fun of brainstorming and hyperfixation are a dangerous combo (and it provided a wonderful distraction from Pandemic Hell)
