Beyond the Western Deep

It’s callbacks on top of callbacks here in chapter 4! Sure, she’s slightly paraphrasing her quote from Chapter 3, but the sentiment remains: in vulpin politics, the distance one goes to keep their Great House of employ great is often measured with a body count. We’ve made jokes in the past about “ermehn diplomacy” being served at the point of a dagger, but in the vulpin kingdom of Navran, if you’ve gotten on the wrong side of one of the Great Houses, you often don’t even see the dagger coming.

Trade Consulares in Navrani Great Houses are an interesting sort–you could liken them somewhat to the Sentinels of the Spire up in Kishar, in that their job is to ensure certain things come to pass, with force if necessary. For Sentinels, their focus is ensuring key events recorded by the Spire play out a very specific way. In Navran, the focus is almost exclusively on the Great Houses and their business. These are trade agreements, business deals, partnerships, and the like.

Can you possibly imagine the chaos that would ensue if the Sentinels and the Trade Consulares had mutually exclusive goals? The very thought sends shivers down my spine…

…because that would be a very fun story to tell :)

This week for guest art, I wanted to share this wonderful artwork featuring an original canid soldier character by reader SnailNoodle!

I really love the color pattern on the character’s fur here, SnailNoodle! It reminds me a lot of red merle Australian Shepherds, which represents one of my favorite dog breeds out there! We love seeing readers create unique and interesting new characters in the world of Western Deep, so this was a really fun piece for us to find, and we’re so happy we get to share it with the readership.

Thanks so much for the wonderful artwork, SnailNoodle!

And remember, if you have any Western Deep artwork you’d like to share with the community, feel free to send it to us at hello(at)westerndeep.net or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TheWesternDeep

See you next time!