Here I've refined my interpretation of an elf. I'm also pondering what sort of non-traditional fantasy tropes I want to allow- one of my favorite fantasy books is Brian Froud's The Goblins of Labrynth, which I poured over constantly when I was younger, so not-quite-humanoid goblin-ish thingies is something I like a lot.

I kinda figured if the series goes on long enough and we run out of fairy tale tropes, it'd start branching out into wholly original stories.

One of my visual inspirations is the CD-i Zelda games, which I think is actually think is a very good example of "ugly funny" character design. I'm not really sure how likely I'd actually have a King Harkinian parody, though.