I've been thinking about drawing a frosty mountain town for awhile, but the exact design I just made up as I went. I was thinking of various old games as I made it.

loosely named after Thule


I made Tahei with the idea of a country at the top of the world that's perpetually frozen. There's a Christmas themed mining town (it takes a lot of coal for all the bad kids out there), a glacier roaming with snow beasts, frozen waterfalls during the winter when it gets really cold, a hot springs for the small monkey population (based on a type of monkey in Japan that does go into hot spring waters), an icy moon that's closer than you'd think (it is the top of the world after all), and a castle on the mountain top. I haven't decided who lives in the castle, but it's not Santa Claus. I like real world references and influences, but I normally avoid directly using fictional/real life characters or places since it is my own fantasy world I'm making. Tahei as a country may only be made up of one town and a castle, but they never have to worry about being invaded because no army would want to bother with it. The monkeys here are like miniture yetis, and the snow beasts are their much larger cousins (think The Empire Strikes Back and that big snow monster that attacked Luke at the beginning).

maybe the castle will be a pathway to the moon. The owner of the castle should be based on Kaguya Hime from Japanese folklore (a princess who came from the moon). The pathway should open up during the full moon, and there should be a race of Lunarians there like in Final Fantasy 4 or in the Touhou game series (Imperishable Night was about Kaguya). There was also a villan based on Kaguya in one of the Inu Yasha movies.