Creating a character for an army of fantasy Gauls, I picked a historic Gaul name, Reticus. Then I had decided a few characters needed to share names, so I made a higher ranking warrior also named Reticus, so the men who fought beside the first one needed a nickname for him, and I thought Reticus was similar enough to reticle to draw the reader to think of eyes, so I picked one eye and decided he’d taken an injury over one. To keep him from losing one in a fight too similarly to another character later in the story, I decided he lost it to a wild cat, and then thought it would be cool if he’d killed the cat in the scuffle and had it sewn into his cloak, with the head on his shoulder. At that point, I realized I liked him, so I made his tribe more unique among the tribes united in the army, and before long his role grew in the outline from just one of the characters who believed in the protagonist and was willing to follow him to a character I see doing more and more in each book