In my last Kickstarter campaign, I had a higher reward tier where backers could send me their names, and I would do an anagram of that name to use for a random minor character, ship, location, etc. There was also the caveat that I might need to add or subtract a letter, if need be, to make it work. And of course, the understanding that this was just a fun Easter egg and not meant to be a representation of the actual person in any way.

I’ve done this anagram thing a number of times early on myself, with Roka’s ship, the Khoruysa Brimia, being an anagram (with a few modifications) of the Kobayashi Maru, the ship training program from Star Trek II.

On this page, the Rune Mallyg is an anagram of one of my backers from that Kickstarter. Obviously, I won’t reveal the actual person’s name, but I thought it’d be fun to call out the inclusion here. A few others will appear later in the story.

I’m not sure I will offer that kind of reward again with my future Kickstarters. I do think it’s fun, and I assume the backers enjoy it as well, but it was a REALLY long time between that campaign and the completion of the reward (as of this page), which I feel kinda bad about. While I don’t plan for future volumes to take as long as this one did to come out, I don’t know if I’d want to take someone’s money for the reward, only for the name to appear in a story much, much, much later.

But we’ll see.