Character Dive: Kuzimiyel

In this short series, I'm going to be looking at not only how my art has changed and improved over the course of each featured character's (or group of characters) existence, but also how their personalities and my conceptions of them have changed and grown.

Kuzimiyel Bloodsun started life as an NPC in one of my adventure series for the long-running D&D campaign that has recently ended. They were the Divine Emissary of Gorthimaur, demon-god of War and Fate, one of a trinity of demon-gods that ruled Phen-Gazzat (the others being Aachxigul, god of Fire and Passion, and Meneglet, goddess of Magic and Death). They ended up joining the Invictus Alliance and becoming a PC, but the setting I was using for those adventures also went through a lot of changes over the years.

Kuzimiyel wasn't the first character from that setting that the group encountered: their youngest sibling, Xakiviyel Bloodsun (a priest of Aachxigul) and Venfior Frostblade, a warrior from a Meneglet-worshipping house, joined first.

The drawing of Venfior above, part of a larger series where I drew all of my D&D characters at the time in appropriate backgrounds, shows something of the character of Phen-Gazzat: dark carved stone architecture, towering cliffs, perpetual snow and ice, and a planet with a red giant for a sun. Not pictured the lake of lava just outside the city.

Kuzimiyel (right) with their sister Narakasiya (left). This is the first drawing I can find of them, and I believe it is also actually the first one. It's lacking context, because I only scanned this part of the page, but I think there were one or two other elves from Phen-Gazzat on the page as well originally; this was one of the places where I was working out the culture of the place. There were two other cities on the planet that the PCs visited, including An-Corazar, which they went to first, and originally Phen-Gazzat was set up to be 'the evil city', An-Corazar the 'neutral city', and the third city, Zir-Kasha, the 'good city'. That went away quite quickly, luckily. It was never a reasonable basis for any sort of world-building. In the end, all three cities (remnants of three older empires) had their good and bad points.

What remained was that Phen-Gazzat worshipped their triad of demon-gods and were somewhat demon-blooded, An-Corazar worshipped an ascended white dragon (although briefly a rival snake-god took over) and the ruling families were dragon-blooded, and Zir-Kasha worshipped a lizard god I'd used for a cleric before in a long-ago first edition game, Khanhu, and were the kind of 'original flavor' elves that had spread out in the past and formed the two rival empires. A lot of this was forgotten in An-Corazar, and covered up in Phen-Gazzat, which served as my excuse for the party's original contacts (including Jirel, above) not knowing it once I started refining the setting.

Asriel, Jirel, and Sijara Schen were the original points of contact for the party, when they stumbled through a portal into a blizzard and then into An-Corazar (Jirel was the first one they met). Their father, King Svastus, was assassinated early into the plotline, leaving Asriel as the new ruler trying to consolidate his power and fight back against the snake cultists (awkward and difficult, since his sister Sijara was the current leader of that cult). As An-Corazar at that time saw Phen-Gazzat purely as enemies, that colored the initial impression of the party.

Sijara ended up turning back to the original dragon god of An-Corazar, Sviaroxastonar the Blood Fang, so she hung on in the plot. When An-Corazar attempted to re-open relations with the rest of the world after the snake cult was defeated, throwing a great tournament at the Feast of Eyes, that was when Phen-Gazzat came into the picture (and Zir-Kasha, although that plotline was quiet for a long time).

The drawing of Xakariyan, above, shows Phen-Gazzat in the background with some attempt at the crevice that contains the lake of fire at the bottom.

Among the largest changes to Phen-Gazzat was that it started out with a very strong two-gender system that was heavily enforced (although despite that, in the above drawing from 2011 when I hadn't quite gotten rid of that yet, Kuzimiyel is still wearing armor and a hairstyle that was in between what I'd established for the two). However, that didn't make sense with the rest of their three-god system or that Gorthimaur was a genderless entity already and Aachxigul was known to shapeshift between male and female already, so that all got thrown out. (I don't remember why this system was in place originally. I think it was originally part of my 'make Phen-Gazzat seem bad' attempt?)

Anyway, what it turned into was a four-gender system that was based fairly heavily on their gods. Elves from that city already had gendered name endings, so I expanded that system instead of trying to remove it retroactively (which would've been awkward with existing NPCs): elves were at birth given a name without an ending (using the Bloodsun family as examples, they would've been Gavax, Kuzim, Narakas, Varkav, and Xakiv), and the ending was chosen and added once they were fifty years old and considered culturally on the threshold of adulthood. Male names (Gavaxiyan) ended with 'iyan', female names (Narakasiya, Varkaviya) with 'iya', and the ending for no-gender (Kuzimiyel) and both-gender (Xakiviyel) was 'iyel'.

There was a lot of backstory to the setting that I only ended up using some of, although a lot of the War of Blood – the thousand-year conflict between An-Corazar and Phen-Gazzat – did make it into adventures, at least in the background. Above is a duel between the Divine Emissary of Gorthimuar at the end of the war, which was several centuries before campaign time, and the Blood Fang's champion, Xurghaaz'jak (who would show up again later).

The emperor of An-Corazar at that time had become a lich and hidden himself away in the wastes, but only after preserving the mind and soul of Xurghaaz'jak in the body of a contrust that was hidden deep in An-Corazar. When the lich and the contrust-Xurghaaz'jak were found, they attempted to restart the war, but were stopped by the PCs (by being all recruited into the cause of saving the multiverse, which was by then the primary campaign focus, although the adventures I was running didn't touch on it much).

Narakasiya and Kuzimiyel ended up joining the Invictus Alliance (then HIT) along with Kuzimiyel's friend Virenziyan Burningeye. The above was from a series of drawings showing characters in their home environment, without armor. Phen-Gazzian clothing tended to be wool or hide and lined with fur, given the extreme cold experienced in the city.

Virenziyan was a fighter-thief, from one of the traditionally Aachxigul-aligned houses (which Bloodsun also was, causing some political trouble off and on for Kuzimiyel, who was Gorthimaur's chosen Divine Emissary). Enjalayin Burningeye, the high priest of Aachxigul and head of the house, also briefly featured.

Kuzimiyel and Virenziyan had been best friends before Kuzimiyel left to live in the temple of Gorthimuar as the Divine Emissary in training, and before Virenziyan went adventuring. The above drawing was also supposed to show a typical Phen-Gazzian house, but it doesn't do that well at all; fireplace and rugs and to some extent decor, I suppose, but I have no idea what's going on in the corner of the wall there.

There were a fair number of other people from Phen-Gazzat who featured as NPCs or PCs. In the above drawing, Kuzimiyel is playing a strategy game with Xivenriya Burningeye, commander of Phen-Gazzat's armies (in a direct way: the Divine Emissary of Gorthimaur was considered the overall commander, so the two worked closely together).

Around this time I was starting to go away from the earlier overly complicated and fancy hairstyles I had for Phen-Gazzian elves, because it didn't make a lot of sense in their environment.

The drawing above is the first example I have of the much more sensible (and in-character) hairstyle I settled on for Kuzimiyel, with a braid pinned up on the back of their head. This is also showing an attempt at the house-specific cloaks they had, but it didn't read well in pencil. It should have black and gold stripes with a sun and sword pattern in gold above the stripes for Gorthimaur, because Kuzimiyel didn't wear their house cloak (which would have been black and red stripes with red flame symbols for Aachxigul) due to being Gorthimaur's Divine Emissary. Meneglet's pattern was black and green stripes with skulls and knives alternating above.

Another look at the different hairstyle, this time done on the scratchy pad of paper I took with me to college classes, thus the rough quality.

The drawing above is my first attempt at a scene I tried several times, Kuzimiyel praying before a shrine of Gorthimaur. This one is small, probably the house-shrine, which did exist in House Bloodsun because Gavaxiyan was also a cleric of Gorthimaur (but it was side-lined still, with the main house-shrine being to Aachxigul). The helmet is one of Gorthimaur's symbols.

Phen-Gazzat was led by a council upon which sat three representatives each from great houses allied with Aachxigul, Gorthimaur, and Meneglet. Three other positions also had a role, although not pictured in the above image in all cases: the archmage of the city (associated to Meneglet), the high priest of Aachxigul, and the divine emissary of Gorthimaur.

Xurghaaz'jak in contrust-encased form. He served in the Invictus Alliance (then HIT) for a time, and also ended up ruling An-Corazar from behind the throne before the lich-emperor came back, because Asriel (recent Asriel) was really not much for the job.

Xurghaaj'jak and Kuzimiyel did not get along, although they respected each other.

This top-down map of Phen-Gazzat, which I drew for one of the last adventures taking place there, shows how the city was divided into three sections: the center is neutral ground, the left contains the great houses and temples of the more closely aligned of the demon-gods, Aachxigul and Gorthimaur, and the right contains the great houses and temple of the Meneglet aligned houses. The lake of fire, Aachxigul's Blessing, is far below, and the Veil of Meneglet is the name of the mountains that Phen-Gazzat is set into. There is another mountain range, Gorthimaur's Blade, but it is not near Phen-Gazzat.

Done when I was considering trying to actually write up the setting, this map of Nerza – the world overall – shows more or less the relation between cities. It would also become important in the final adventure I used the setting for, when the border fortresses of Phen-Gazzat were taken over.

The reason only 'ruins of Zir-Kasha' is listed is due to an unfortunate incident where the party decided that they liked Phen-Gazzat and An-Corazar better, so rather than trying to achieve some sort of peace, they just went all in and destroyed Zir-Kasha along with the new alliance between the two eastern cities. So that was gone.

Elves weren't the only intelligent creatures on the planet, as pointed out by 'lizardman tribes' here, but the lizardfolk and dragons were the only other known intelligent inhabitants. (On the inset map there is a callout of 'humans' but I never actually set anything in the wider world, so who knows what would've been there if I had? Probably humans.)

Another attempt at Narakasiya with her home city in the background, now with the more refined attire typical of Phen-Gazzians. The border at the hem of her tunic would've been black and red for House Bloodsun.

Enjalayin Burningeye and Sijara Schen were both resurrected during the conquering of the Tower of Kron, being brought back on the seventh level, but neither made it out of the tower in the end...

Once I got into watercolor, I began a series highlighting the demon-gods of Phen-Gazzat. This is the temple of Meneglet, with her high priestess reading from a tome, showing Meneglet's symbol (a veiled skull with glowing green eyes). The Meneglet faction of elves in Phen-Gazzat was somewhat distinct from the other two in that they had intermarried with the Corazaians at one point, which is shown in the high priestess' white hair, lighter skin and (difficult to discern) slight fangs here.

The second in that series, showing the temple of Gorthimaur, with Kuzimiyel kneeling before it. The stained glass windows show a depiction of Gorthimaur as they were typically depicted: a forbidding suit of black armor with glowing red eyes holding a great black sword. Kuzimiyel's sword and armor, which once belonged to Gorthimaur's first Divine Emissary, are modeled after the demon-god's own.

This also shows Kuzimiyel with the hairstyle they ended up with, a coiled braid secured with a gold clasp at the back of their head. It's slightly difficult to tell here also, but Phen-Gazzian elves had red eyes and claws from the demonic heritage, which includes Kuzimiyel here. (The Meneglet faction elves had the claws, too.)

I never finished the third painting showing the temple of Aachxigul with their high priest. I don't remember why, and I'm not sure there was any particular reason for it; I just never got around to it.

While I was playing around with markers a lot I tried a redo of the above image, which... has a more reasonable architecture, but otherwise I feel it just ended up worse. But, Kuzimiyel again.

The painting that shows this is further down, but Kuzimiyel was brought back to life as Gorthimaur's Divine Champion after being killed in the Tower of Kron (spending some time partially incorporeal as well), and after that they ended up as one of the Heroes of Light. They appear here in the right of the image. You can see their red eyes much more easily in this one.

I had enough D&D characters for a while in the HIT/Invictus Alliance campaign that I ran tournaments amongst them, and Kuzimiyel won two of those, equalling Vexielzethix's tally. This is their tournament champion portrait. It's also the most detailed depiction I managed of their armor.

This was in the same style I was doing for my dragon characters, showing Gorthimaur behind Kuzimiyel as they – as Gorthimaur's Divine Champion – were at the time asking a lot of internal questions about their identity, as in, were they still who they had been? (It turns out, yes, mostly.)

The armor detail here is incorrect. The previous portrait is more accurate.

I used to do a lot of group portraits of characters, and in late 2020 I briefly got back to that, and drew this group shot of all the Heroes of Light at the time. Only three of these are my characters (Vivikyr is second from left, Vex is second from right in the second row), Kuzimiyel being found second from right in the front row.

As mentioned, the painting showing Kuzimiyel as Champion of Gorthimaur, standing in front of the gates of Phen-Gazzat after having been brought back. The lake of fire is behind them, and Gorthimaur's eyes glare out from the clouds. This was the first painting I attempted once I got Corel Painter and a new tablet, and it still holds up as far as looking properly like Kuzimiyel goes.

A recent portrait. I didn't get the armor details quite right, but this one looks the most like them.

Kuzimiyel was one of the people who lived through the final battle for the multiverse and went into the Artifact at the end of the current multiverse, so as such they also will exist in the new multiverse for the next campaign, so this may not be the end of artwork I do of them. (Ithenrael did too, but that campaign wasn't over yet when I wrote his Character Dive.)

But that's it for Kuzimiyel (for now)! Next and last in this series will be Narsinyo.