(Tavern) The Making Of - "Healing Leaves Something Behind That Still Wants to Come Home." — Myhrielle Salvewyn

🌿🍄 The Making of Myhrielle Salvewyn Myhrielle is a bit different from most of my characters because, from the very beginning, she wasn't really my character. She was something Filo and I created together.

It started with us bouncing ideas off each other. One idea led to another, we'd poke holes in something, change it, add a consequence and suddenly realize we'd accidentally created another chunk of lore. 😅 A dryad healer carrying a fungal parasite became much more complicated once we started asking what actually living with that would mean.

While Filo worked on her visual design, I disappeared into my usual rabbit hole of story mechanics. What does healing cost? Where does that energy come from? What happens to the fungus when she heals, or when she doesn't? Where do the fungal creatures come from? Can she be cured? What happens if another healer helps?

Basically, Filo was growing the dryad while I was underneath the floorboards installing an unnecessarily complicated fungal plumbing system. 🍄😂

But we never really worked separately. We constantly showed each other our progress and bounced new ideas back and forth. Sometimes his design inspired something in the lore, while a new mechanic changed how we thought about her character. It never felt like we made two halves and glued them together afterward.

We also dragged some friends into our little fungal laboratory. We wanted the rules to make sense and didn't want every question to eventually be answered with "Well... fantasy magic." Their questions helped us catch things that were unclear, too convenient or simply needed consequences.

That mattered especially for her healing. Myhrielle can't simply create healing energy. She borrows vitality from the surrounding ecosystem, damaging it while feeding the colony inside her. Each magical healing also creates a fungal creature carrying part of that vitality. Refusing to heal isn't a solution either, because then the colony begins consuming her instead.

There isn't supposed to be a perfect answer. That's the point.

And somewhere during all this careful worldbuilding, we discovered an even greater threat than the fungal colony: We had been spelling her name differently. Myrhielle. Myhrielle.

Somehow both survived in our work without either of us noticing. 😂 Once we finally caught it, we compared them, settled on Myhrielle, and began the glamorous job of hunting down every surviving typo in prompts, posts and character information.

Even when we thought the mechanics were finished, we'd regularly discover another loophole. We'd proudly fix one thing and then one of us would suddenly go, "Wait... couldn't someone just do THIS?" Other healers, alternative vitality sources, creature spawning, ways someone might bypass her curse... back into the rules we went. 😅 Trying to break our own creation became part of creating her.

That's also why I'm very grateful to everyone who tested her and helped us sanity-check everything. Testers don't necessarily approach situations the way the creators expect, and seeing what they tried helped us find weak spots and discover how the mechanics actually felt as part of a story. And those stories can get surprisingly dark.

Myhrielle herself is warm, compassionate and hopeful, but her world doesn't guarantee that kindness will be rewarded. Saving someone can damage an ecosystem. Refusing to save them can hurt her instead. A life saved today may create something she'll have to hunt tomorrow. Some testing sessions became much heavier than we expected, and I think that contrast made her stronger. The darkness matters precisely because Myhrielle hasn't surrendered her hope to it. So thank you, Filo, for creating our strange, gentle mushroom healer with me.

💜 Thank you to our friends and testers who questioned our increasingly elaborate fungal logic, and thank you to everyone who has already given her a chance.

Seeing Myhrielle already reach 30+ interactions and 30+ likes means a lot to us. She's only taken her first few steps into the world, and I hope we'll get to watch her grow and see many more people create their own stories with her.

We started with an idea. Somewhere along the way, we grew Myhrielle Salvewyn. 🌿🍄 And her journey has only just begun. 💜 🌿 Yodayo 🍄 Moescape