The Polcan are officially introduced this week, and while they don’t officially have a kingdom to call their own, they patrol the Western Seas like they own them – which of course serves as a constant element of tension between the Polcan and the water-loving Lutren who live on the western coasts of Sunsgrove.

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This was the first appearance of the Polcan in the old-old version of the comic – they were meant to fill a standard kind of “pirate” or “bandit” role originally, and would cause trouble for the Lutren at regular intervals. However, as we fleshed out the world more, the Polcan backstory started to come together, making them much more interesting than some standard band of murderous brigands.

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While many of the revelations we concocted for the Polcan’s backstory will be saved for the comic’s continuity itself, we felt it was important to establish that the Polcan are not simply attacking the Lutren and patrolling the Western Seas because PIRATES ARR! This is a desperate race that has been displaced from its homeland far across the sea, and is only a recent addition to the races within the Four Kingdoms. They are, for example, the only race in the land to use bronze in any capacity, both for weapons and for decoration. As a matter of fact, as each race has its own culture, we also gave each race a specific set of colors to identify them by. The Polcan are identified primarily by bronze, but also darker shades like purple.

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Before we made the decision to publish the full Beyond the Western Deep story as a webcomic, Rachel and I toyed with the idea of telling a webcomic-exclusive story that was a prequel to this tale. The story, called “War of the Western Deep”, was planned to feature the Polcan quite heavily as a brand new threat to the Four Kingdoms and give us a chance to lay out their backstory. However, this project fell by the wayside when we moved to publish Beyond the Western Deep online – though a lot of work was done on this Polcan-heavy prequel story and we both grew very fond of the characters in it, so there is little doubt we wil return to it someday.

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