GUFF 1: The Root Hog
Meet Root Hog
Root Hog, a sharp-tongued truth-digger from rain-soaked Vezna, believes only seventeen percent of humanity is genuinely good. His certainty comes from watching his principled father slowly bend under corruption, bureaucracy, and the influence of village boss Anton Varga. Challenged by idealistic Tess Vale, Root begins testing his theory against clerks, workers, criminals, believers, and ordinary citizens. Each encounter complicates his categories, while Lucien Vane weaponizes Root’s pessimism into an argument for control. By the end, Root realizes goodness is neither fixed nor simple—and leaves Vezna to seek a larger sample across the world and discover what different civilizations call virtue.
From the Editor
Dear Macguffins,
We’ve acquired acquired a hog.
Not a cute hog. Not a dancing hog. Not the sort of hog you put on a lunchbox and teach children a valuable lesson about sharing.
This hog has opinions.
Meet ROOT HOG, the newest original IP being developed inside the Macguffin universe—and possibly the first entertainment franchise built around the question nobody at a dinner party should ever ask:
What percentage of people are actually good?
Root Hog says seventeen percent.
He has notes.
Our opening story, ROOT HOG: SEVENTEEN PERCENT, begins in Vezna, a vaguely Eastern European village where it rains constantly, the public clock is wrong, bureaucracy has evolved beyond human comprehension, and one stolen chicken can generate several new government departments.
Root is an anthropomorphic hog living among humans. He walks upright, reads obsessively, drinks enthusiastically, argues professionally and carries a notebook in which he has attempted to classify humanity.
Good: 17%.
Wicked: 4%.
Pending: everybody else.
The percentages are provisional. Root’s pessimism has a source. As a child, he watched his principled father slowly surrender his ethics—not because someone put a gun to his head, but because life became incrementally more difficult until compromise started looking reasonable.
A permit stalled. An office sent him to another office. A favor got something moving. Then came gratitude. Then another favor. Then an envelope. Root learned something that has bothered him ever since: you don’t always have to make good people evil. Sometimes you merely have to make goodness exhausting.
Cheery fellow.
Fortunately, Root has Tess Vale.
Tess believes most people are fundamentally decent and finds Root’s seventeen-percent figure somewhere between offensive and deranged. Their argument eventually reveals a flaw in Root’s research: He has mostly studied one miserable village. His sample sucks. So Root does what any rational, argumentative, brandy-drinking hog would do.
He sets out to survey the world.
And that is where the larger IP begins. Root will encounter different cultures, political systems, religions, economic philosophies and definitions of virtue. Each story puts his theory under pressure. Sometimes Root will discover that people are better than he expected. Sometimes Tess will discover they are considerably worse. Neither gets to win. That tension is the franchise.
From an IP standpoint, that gives ROOT HOG an unusually expandable engine. The character can support illustrated short fiction, digital comics, graphic novels, animation and eventually interactive storytelling while retaining the same fundamental premise: put Root somewhere new, introduce him to a moral certainty, and let him start digging.
Visually, the world combines literary black-and-white illustration, European political cartooning, Kafkaesque architecture, anthropomorphic character design and a broken tusk that Root has been pretending doesn’t bother him for decades.
It bothers him.
We’re beginning with SEVENTEEN PERCENT—the story that establishes Root, Vezna, the notebook, the father, the argument and the journey.
After that? The sample gets larger. The percentage changes.
And Root Hog intends to find out exactly how much. -Ed.
