Yes. Another character was precisely what I was missing. I had a particularly boring day at work today; hardly anything for me to do, so I had time to sit down and do some thinking; who else from my manuscript for The Tyrant's Festival should I include in Goldric's Luck?

Initially my thought was to create a new character, a contact for Goldric. I could send him off through Éaganabora, give him errands to run and get the reader used to the city. I may still do that, but I also wanted to use characters I'd already created.

I decided to make use of Eda, a medium I created very recently. She was originally there to make Festival more horrific, but figured she deserved a bit more of an outing. Her visions and contact with the arch-villain helped the RPG module, and can serve a similar purpose in the short story prequel. She's now tied quite securely into the back-story, and her part has expanded from a brief meeting with Goldric to a separate story-thread, and has put a bit of horror back into a story that was becoming quite comic.

As before, I do worry if this'll make the story too long to submit to a magazine, but if nothing else it'll (hopefully) bring the quality up a bit. Because we're not following a protagonist to the exclusion of all others, chasing him like he was the adventuring party in a D&D game, it'll help me get out of the RPG rut somewhat. Old habits are the hardest to break.