A little personal retrospective of a character that has evolved a lot over the years: Myrian/Miryin of the Felcae race.

Yep, the Felcae started as humans with wings over 20 years ago. This was back when I was a big fan of Super Nintendo RPGs. The cast of playable characters from one my stories each had a signature weapon type and a magic alignment. Myrian… or it might have been Marian or Miriam back then… used a bow and wind magic. Around this time I also established the Grepir race, which are birds, so this winged near-Human race came off to me as redundant and a lame concept. Side note: the bird character was a master of earth magic just to mess with assumptions.

At some point I came up with a new design for the Felcae, with inspiration from herbivore mammals.

For a while, I went with an idea to differentiate the Felcae from the other races by having them be a centaur-style being. During this time I also added on horns, which took inspiration from gazelles.

I wound up scrapping the centaur thing. I recall that decision came about when I was playing around with ideas for Sharpheart and decided if all the main races were playable, I would make them all bipedal to simplify game mechanics. The centaur design also just plain lost favor with me.

I wound up porting Myrian to Sharpheart, though I never put much into developing the character. I guess she operated more as an example of a Felcae character existing in that universe. I ported a number of characters experimentally to Sharpheart, now that I think of it.

As I got into 3D modeling, Myrian was one of the early characters I tried out. I didn’t work with this model for a long time after the initial setup, as you can see by the rougher quality.

A few years later I made an update to the character for Sharpheart. I renamed them Miryin, which I did not realize I had done all the way back in 2012 until I looked back on older posts here, so now I’m revising this post to append the timeline! Actually, looking further back in my archives I found out the character was named “Suyeen Myryn” at one point around 2007. Sometimes it’s so surprising to read the fragmented history and realize how far back some things go and wondering how my train of thought went back then.

I altered the tail design to be short and fluffy. Another concept I hit on here is that the Felcae are pseudo-mammals. In other words, the women of this race don’t have boobs.

I finally revisited the 3D Felcae design this year when I started writing my novel, adapting the character into Miryin of the House of the Shield. Despite the universe, gender, and uniform color change, the character is still depicted as an expert archer, calling back across the decades. For the time being I have scrapped the Human-like hair and the horns aren’t so thin and gazelle-like. I don’t know if those are permanent changes yet.

I’m not 100% sure on the spelling of Felcae. I pronounce it “fell-say” but I don’t know if other people will correctly derive that from that spelling.