The main characters and the magic runes with circular designs in Errant are scraps of another idea I had but abandoned because it was bad. I had this comic idea where two girls get sucked into a fantasy world and have to travel with a spoiled prince and his two bodyguards who are knights. I quickly found that the characters were a bit boring, and the "ordinary girls sucked into a fantasy world" felt really played out, so I scrapped the idea, but kept elements I liked for later, these elements were:
- Knights with magic powers.
- The King's bodyguard knight characters, Rekki and Subo (Rekki became the main character).
- A story with female friends as a central element (but instead of the two normal girls, one of the girls was replaced with Rekki and I created a friend character for her, which if you've read Errant, it's obviously Sarin).
I also brought in other scraps of ideas I'd had and written down. These included:
- I thought the way that in Iaido the drawing of the sword is an attack in itself, and sometimes the draw is the decisive strike. So I came up with a system based around sword draw magic.
- I hate how in a lot of fantasy stories "changeling" is used to mean "shape-shifter" when in the actual old British mythology it means a child who has been swapped for a fairy. I incorporated changelings who are more like the latter into my setting.
- Magic treated as a type of energy with coloured wavelengths and a spectrum visible to humans, based on the electromagnetic spectrum which fascinated me when I learned it in high school physics.
- A character who looks like Belldandy from Oh My Goddess but is secretly evil! This concept evolved a lot and ended up as the character of Juliet (named for Juliet Cesario, the VA for that character in the dub of the old OVA of that anime) who moved a really long way from that concept through development.
- A modern British setting with magic where the weather is almost always rainy or overcast.
- Arthurian legends and a twist on the Sword in the Stone mythology.
- Alternate Universe where the Anglo-Saxons never conquered Britain and it remained more of a Romano-Celtic nation in cultural terms with Paganism as the dominant religion and worship of deities like Brigantia, Mercury and Sulis-Minerva. I find Roman Britain fascinating and wanted to incorporate some of that.
- Colour palette based on the print colours in pre-digital American comic books because I love the vibe of 80s X-men.
Basically, anything that isn't out of place and that I can work in, I'll see if I can work it in. Otherwise, I'll save it for another project.