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rynlingMelchior is of course named after Melchior in Chrono Trigger, who is the Master Roshi of the game. Both characters love swords and drinking and traveling and having a good time.
Melchior’s real name is Octavius Marlowe. “Octavius” comes from the idea that there are eight schools of magic, and that the parents wish for the child to be a master of them all; and it’s also tied to the vaguely Roman Empire feel of the Northern Kingdoms in the story. Marlowe comes from Christopher Marlowe, who wrote some very clever plays, including the famous one about the wizard who is bffs with a demon.
Melchior’s backstory is that he’s a talented scholar who got fed up with academia and decided to do something worthwhile with his life. Despite having turned his back on academia, he maintains a good-natured feud (that’s half dialectic and half bitchy catfight) with a famous senior professor from Ceres’s kingdom, who incidentally happens to be writing the series of trashy romance novels that Balthazar is obsessed with.
The Northern Kingdoms are super fucked up in a lot of ways, and Melchior is fully aware of this. Following the convention in Dungeons & Dragons, “wizards” get their magic from arcane knowledge of esoteric rituals, while “mages” get their magic from demons. Given that demons are just regular people with horns, mage magic relies on a demon being soul-bonded against their will to a mage, usually at a very young age. This type of soul-bond is called a “gaesh,” (pronounced “gaysh,” like a cross between a “leash” and a “gash”).
In Balthazar’s preapocalyptic world, gaeshing was common practice for people who used magic professionally, and it was completely consensual and usually temporary. The way Balthazar would explain it is that it’s like letting someone borrow your USB drive so you could share a file with them, or getting out of your own car to help someone else push their car out of a snowdrift. Forcing someone into a gaesh against their will is obviously disgusting and unethical, but it’s allowed to happen because most elves – a genetic mutation caused by the apocalypse that has become dominant – consider demons to be subhuman. Permanently gaeshed demons tend not to live for very long, and this is part of the reason why Balthazar wants to prevent the apocalypse instead of just rolling with it.
Gaeshing is 100% illegal in Ceres’s kingdom, but only because the kingdom has a history of killing any demon who comes into its borders due to plot-related reasons (that have to do with stupid decisions Balthazar made earlier in the timeline). Technically an elf could gaesh another elf, but part of the genetic mutation that created elves has resulted in them not having the same sort of raw magical power as demons, so there would be no benefit from doing so. The only real difference between elves and orcs is cosmetic, but orcs tend to practice magic differently for cultural reasons. (They’re Canadian.)
(A note about this – “Orcs are Canadian” is a long-running joke between me and a group of people I played D&D with in grad school, and it’s a parody of the cultural theory we were all tits-deep in at the time, as well as a parody of certain practices in Canadian academia during the mid-2010s. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what “the apocalypse” in Balthazar’s world was and what it did, but I’m leaning toward the original magical catalyst having created a chain reaction that affected different regions differently. There are thus all sorts of “fantasy races” in the postapocalyptic world, but they didn’t exist prior to the apocalypse. Except dragons. Dragons have always been around, because I fucking love dragons okay.)
As an elf, Melchior comes from a position of privilege, and he was also born into the sort of wealthy family that would name a kid “Octavius.” Still, he sees mage magic as the human rights violation that it is, which is why he left magic academia. He applied to the military as an orc hunter (because, again, the Northern Kingdoms are all sorts of fucked up), and then promptly took the money and resources he was given and abandoned his assignment. Melchior’s interest in who Balthazar is and what sort of magic he’s using is academic, but it’s also based on his sense of wanting to prove that his homeland’s view of elves and orcs and demons and so on is not only unjust but wildly factually inaccurate. He also appreciates that Balthazar doesn’t give a shit about politics and has no scholarly understanding of magic, which gives him a license to be silly and make stupid jokes.
I watched a lot of Key and Peele when I was in grad school in the early 2010s, and Melchior is based pretty strongly on Jordan Peele. I think Jordan Peele is now primarily known as the director of Get Out, and his comedy sketches on race (like The Black Ranger) get a lot of views on YouTube, but most of what he was doing were parodies of the sort of horror tropes I was studying (like the Cursed Make-A-Wish Kid) and the sort of geeky subcultures I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with (like in the Steampunk and Power Fantasy Music Video pieces). I like Peele’s dynamic with Michael Key as the goofball to the Key’s straight man, and I also like his tongue-in-cheek and genre-savvy approach to fantasy and horror tropes.
But also, I appreciate Peele’s interviews about where he comes from and what it’s like to live between cultures. Like, he’s half Black but also half Jewish, and he comes from wealth and married into wealth and is currently extremely wealthy. He grew up in a fancy neighborhood and went to a fancy school and then went to a fancy college, which he dropped out of because wealthy people can do that. I’ve never been wealthy, but I’ve been to some fancy-ass schools with extremely wealthy people, and I appreciate the way Peele talks about having to navigate different systems of privilege and discrimination.
So to take someone like Jordan Peele and say, essentially, that he is nothing more and nothing less than the person who directed Get Out in 2017, is just… Like, that’s boring. There’s no story there. I’m actually super not into the genre of podcasts about people playing D&D, but I think it would be interesting to ask what sort of D&D character someone like Jordan Peele would play.
Idk, I’d say the main theme of The Demon King is that, no matter the circumstances, most people are “normal,” by which I mean that people are far more strange and interesting and complicated than you’d think they would be from a one-paragraph bio. People are individuals, and not stereotypes or statistics or easily consumable sound bites, and everyone has their own story.
In any case, Melchior is super fun to write. He’s going to be Balthazar’s main companion during the second story arc, and I’m looking forward to playing with their goofball/straight man dynamic.
Melchior’s real name is Octavius Marlowe. “Octavius” comes from the idea that there are eight schools of magic, and that the parents wish for the child to be a master of them all; and it’s also tied to the vaguely Roman Empire feel of the Northern Kingdoms in the story. Marlowe comes from Christopher Marlowe, who wrote some very clever plays, including the famous one about the wizard who is bffs with a demon.
Melchior’s backstory is that he’s a talented scholar who got fed up with academia and decided to do something worthwhile with his life. Despite having turned his back on academia, he maintains a good-natured feud (that’s half dialectic and half bitchy catfight) with a famous senior professor from Ceres’s kingdom, who incidentally happens to be writing the series of trashy romance novels that Balthazar is obsessed with.
The Northern Kingdoms are super fucked up in a lot of ways, and Melchior is fully aware of this. Following the convention in Dungeons & Dragons, “wizards” get their magic from arcane knowledge of esoteric rituals, while “mages” get their magic from demons. Given that demons are just regular people with horns, mage magic relies on a demon being soul-bonded against their will to a mage, usually at a very young age. This type of soul-bond is called a “gaesh,” (pronounced “gaysh,” like a cross between a “leash” and a “gash”).
In Balthazar’s preapocalyptic world, gaeshing was common practice for people who used magic professionally, and it was completely consensual and usually temporary. The way Balthazar would explain it is that it’s like letting someone borrow your USB drive so you could share a file with them, or getting out of your own car to help someone else push their car out of a snowdrift. Forcing someone into a gaesh against their will is obviously disgusting and unethical, but it’s allowed to happen because most elves – a genetic mutation caused by the apocalypse that has become dominant – consider demons to be subhuman. Permanently gaeshed demons tend not to live for very long, and this is part of the reason why Balthazar wants to prevent the apocalypse instead of just rolling with it.
Gaeshing is 100% illegal in Ceres’s kingdom, but only because the kingdom has a history of killing any demon who comes into its borders due to plot-related reasons (that have to do with stupid decisions Balthazar made earlier in the timeline). Technically an elf could gaesh another elf, but part of the genetic mutation that created elves has resulted in them not having the same sort of raw magical power as demons, so there would be no benefit from doing so. The only real difference between elves and orcs is cosmetic, but orcs tend to practice magic differently for cultural reasons. (They’re Canadian.)
(A note about this – “Orcs are Canadian” is a long-running joke between me and a group of people I played D&D with in grad school, and it’s a parody of the cultural theory we were all tits-deep in at the time, as well as a parody of certain practices in Canadian academia during the mid-2010s. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what “the apocalypse” in Balthazar’s world was and what it did, but I’m leaning toward the original magical catalyst having created a chain reaction that affected different regions differently. There are thus all sorts of “fantasy races” in the postapocalyptic world, but they didn’t exist prior to the apocalypse. Except dragons. Dragons have always been around, because I fucking love dragons okay.)
As an elf, Melchior comes from a position of privilege, and he was also born into the sort of wealthy family that would name a kid “Octavius.” Still, he sees mage magic as the human rights violation that it is, which is why he left magic academia. He applied to the military as an orc hunter (because, again, the Northern Kingdoms are all sorts of fucked up), and then promptly took the money and resources he was given and abandoned his assignment. Melchior’s interest in who Balthazar is and what sort of magic he’s using is academic, but it’s also based on his sense of wanting to prove that his homeland’s view of elves and orcs and demons and so on is not only unjust but wildly factually inaccurate. He also appreciates that Balthazar doesn’t give a shit about politics and has no scholarly understanding of magic, which gives him a license to be silly and make stupid jokes.
I watched a lot of Key and Peele when I was in grad school in the early 2010s, and Melchior is based pretty strongly on Jordan Peele. I think Jordan Peele is now primarily known as the director of Get Out, and his comedy sketches on race (like The Black Ranger) get a lot of views on YouTube, but most of what he was doing were parodies of the sort of horror tropes I was studying (like the Cursed Make-A-Wish Kid) and the sort of geeky subcultures I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with (like in the Steampunk and Power Fantasy Music Video pieces). I like Peele’s dynamic with Michael Key as the goofball to the Key’s straight man, and I also like his tongue-in-cheek and genre-savvy approach to fantasy and horror tropes.
But also, I appreciate Peele’s interviews about where he comes from and what it’s like to live between cultures. Like, he’s half Black but also half Jewish, and he comes from wealth and married into wealth and is currently extremely wealthy. He grew up in a fancy neighborhood and went to a fancy school and then went to a fancy college, which he dropped out of because wealthy people can do that. I’ve never been wealthy, but I’ve been to some fancy-ass schools with extremely wealthy people, and I appreciate the way Peele talks about having to navigate different systems of privilege and discrimination.
So to take someone like Jordan Peele and say, essentially, that he is nothing more and nothing less than the person who directed Get Out in 2017, is just… Like, that’s boring. There’s no story there. I’m actually super not into the genre of podcasts about people playing D&D, but I think it would be interesting to ask what sort of D&D character someone like Jordan Peele would play.
Idk, I’d say the main theme of The Demon King is that, no matter the circumstances, most people are “normal,” by which I mean that people are far more strange and interesting and complicated than you’d think they would be from a one-paragraph bio. People are individuals, and not stereotypes or statistics or easily consumable sound bites, and everyone has their own story.
In any case, Melchior is super fun to write. He’s going to be Balthazar’s main companion during the second story arc, and I’m looking forward to playing with their goofball/straight man dynamic.
