Writing Honor Bound Characters: Denario
Note: this post contains spoilers about a major character from Honor Bound, my upcoming dark academia text game from Choice of Games. If you don't know anything about Honor Bound, read more here.
Leading up to the late 2024 release, I'm posting about Honor Bound's characters and some of the thoughts and processes that went into writing them.
Denario Character Rundown
- Full name: Denario Vecoli
- Age: matches the PC
- Gender: cis man
- Personality: sardonic, bitter, daredevil
- Appearance: tall, with light brown skin, black wavy hair, and dark eyes. His build is fairly muscular and rangy.
- Style: Denario generally wears rough canvas trousers, a thick flannel shirt, and a tough denim or leather jacket.
- At his best: protective, decisive, charismatic
- At his worst: over-cynical, self-sabotaging, rash
- Background: Denario grew up in Elene's Prospect with the PC, either on the same street or in the same group home. He was a troublemaker as an adolescent, and got into some difficulties with the town leadership. This may have drawn him and the PC closer or driven them apart; either way, they fell out of touch sometime during their Teranese Service time and have not seen each other for a number of years. Until now.
- Possible relationships: romancing the PC solo, romancing the PC on the side while the PC is with someone else, close friends with the PC, past friends but no longer close, enemies.
Denario and Work
Denario was a career military officer for some years, in law enforcement. That…has not gone so well lately. He's out on his ear, roaming the countryside with his group of bandits, not happy with his situation but certainly not wanting to crawl and beg for scraps from the military again (not that they'd give him anything anyway).
Writing Denario
Denario is the character who changed the most from the initial outline to the completed game. At first, he wasn't even named and was a generic problem that the PC had to deal with: bandits prowling around the town and school whom Savarel wanted to help against the Mayor's wishes. But as I developed the PC's relationship to Elene's Prospect, I wanted more ties to the PC's past, and figured that this character would be the perfect candidate.
Growing up, you and Denario were close friends. You both grew up in the same foster family, and there were weeks during school vacation when you'd spend time together every day. As a child he'd get hair-ruffles and free sweets from stallholders since he was so good at putting on an innocent, deserving look, but as you grew older, he got more reckless, running into trouble with the sheriff at the time for stealing from the grocery store.
- After that, I distanced myself.
- I was the only one who stuck by him.
- Of course we stayed friends. I was his partner in crime.
- We stayed friends, but I tried to make him mend his ways.
- I told him to mend his ways. That didn't go well.
- Sometimes I wondered if we could be something other than friends.
- We slept together a few times. Though it didn't last, we stayed friends.
Denario is in various ways a reflection and foil to the PC. Where the PC has been fortunate enough to escape the worst consequences of the circumstances around their injury, Denario did not have an influential mentor and was discarded by the military system due to his mistakes. The PC is welcomed to Elene's Prospect with excitement, but Denario's fallen in with a bad crowd and he and his criminal friends are feared and despised.
He doesn't see himself as any sort of victim of his circumstances—he's too proud to accept that, and clear-sighted enough to recognise that he did behave badly and knew it at the time—but he does recognise the gap between his experiences and the PC's.
"I have no idea why, and it's probably stupid of me, but I kind of miss you," Denario says. "It's not the same. I…don't know what to say to you. You've made yourself into the perfect one, being a Field Marshal's star and all that."
He sighs sharply.
"I don't know if we can talk the way we used to," he says. "Can we?"
- "Maybe not. A lot has happened."
- "I don't know. It's been a long time."
- "I'm not perfect. Things didn't go well with me last year."
- I'd like to try."
- I tell him exactly how I was injured. "Let me tell you how perfect I am."
With Denario, I enjoyed showing another side to military life in Teran. There are flashy parties, superior officers playing favourites, and a culture that promotes respect and celebration of career soliders, but when it comes to veterans who ended their service badly, there are no resources or support. Denario has few options: he's blacklisted from any job requiring any kind of background check and if landlords know who he is, they won't rent to him.
If the PC angers the military enough throughout Honor Bound, that could be their fate too.
Savarel, one of the other major characters, is determined to give support to Denario and his friends, even if they don't behave well. But most of the other townsfolk do not agree. The PC can choose how to deal with Denario's situation: supporting him or becoming his enemy. Each option brings pros and cons, and affects the PC's reputation and relationship in different directions.
Denario represents not only a potential tie grounding the PC to their past life and childhood, but also another way I could tempt the PC to neglect their duties and work, and show that the PC only has so much time to spend because a lot of their time isn't their own.
Much of Honor Bound involves me as the author dangling things in front of the player and saying "will you do this thing that the military wants? Or do you want this other thing?" "Do you want to sacrifice something from your personal life or principles? Or do you want to sacrifice one of your responsibilities?"
Denario is one of those dangling cat-toys that I liked to tease players with. It's rarely possible to spend time with Denario without sneaking off from where you're expected to be, and rarely are there core scenes in which the PC and Denario can have one-on-one time. I had a few playtester responses saying that they wished they could have time with Denario without sacrificing time with someone else, or sneaking off, but that's part of the point. The PC's always having to weigh up what's important to them, and I'm glad that Denario was tempting enough to make that hard to choose.
On the other hand, I loved giving PC's the opportunity to completely reject Denario and make his life harder, whether the PC thinks he deserves it or just doesn't like him. I'm always up for giving players freedom to choose not to be friends with characters, and in a some cases the PC gets positive reinforcement from rejecting Denario outright. It's just a case of players figuring out where they want to stand.
You remember how Denario looked when he wanted to throw a punch: that disbelieving smile shifting to outrage. In this moment it's outrage crossing his face, and his fists ball, but he holds himself back with visible effort.
"Get out. Now."
It was interesting writing Denario as a non-gender-selectable romance interest; for some time, I've only written them as gender-selectable. But because Denario's age and background were so adjustable to the PC's, adding gender-selection on top of that made it tricky to envisage the character: it was too much to hold in my head all at once. I haven't decided how I'll construct the characters next time I make a game, but it was fun to do it a bit differently this time around.
You’ll like Denario if you like: someone cynical, who says what he thinks, who acts before they think, who wants more than they have but doesn't know how to get it, someone redeemable (or not), reconciling with an old friend or flame
You’ll like romancing Denario if you like: a long history, romantic or not, with the PC, a bad boy, someone who likes having fun but is bitter about not having the chance, someone with a great smouldering look, having a complicated we-shouldn't-do-this kind of relationship