#the rotisserie dragon

[dragonsdenstudiosofficial]

The Pizza Knight Saves The Princess is a fantasy-comedy choose-your-own-adventure-style visual novel being developed by Dragon's Den Studios. Set on the planet Comestibla, where everything & everyone is made of food, we play as the Pizza Knight as he tries to save his beloved Water Ice Princess from the castle of the evil Chocolate Count. You can download the demo for free HERE: https://dragons-den-studios.itch.io/the-pizza-knight-saves-the-princess

Over the course of this month I'll be posting some of the game's art to this blog!

This image depicts the Pizza Knight getting flown back home by the Rotisserie Dragon after freeing him. Horse D'Ouevres is hot on the trail of his master. To explain how dragons can fly with disproportionately small wings, I decided that dragon wing membranes generate magic to provide extra lift. You can also see some of the half-food scenery: a ketchup river, gumdrop flowers, a living gummy bear, ribeye salmon, a dragonfruitfly, cotton candy clouds, and a sunny-side-up sun.

[vonspe]

doodling to get emmrook out of my system(its not working)

[raayllum]

Such elegant simplicity, such power. For ripples grow: They collide, they churn, they drown. They rise like waves or drag into the darkest depths below. I hope the stars were watching. I hope they saw it: the moment their perfect reflections turned warped and ruined, churned to chaos by the touch of a single human hand. In this, the humans taught me another lesson. And so I touch the surface of the water. I watch the ripples spread.

Moonless Night / Ripples

[chicaneryatelier]

things from random sketch files

[vangbelsing]

Emmrich Volkarin being an older man who is a calm, scholarly sweetheart who loves learning, has a robust vocabulary, an obsession with death as a comfort and not a scary way, is a natural nerdy scientist who is well meaning and wants to help guide and teach others, has a slightly macabre sense of humor and who is intimate and sensual??

Ooh this is gonna go great next to my other one of these

[danwhobrowses]

Okay yeah I wasn't ever gonna be contained with just one post so, Callowmoore stuff that's on rotisserie in my brain from ep.94

Long and deep looks at each other and a hug right off the bat!

When asked by Laudna if they were okay in ep. 91, Ashton deflected with 'say that again?' and 'are any of us?', but when Fearne asks they give a genuine answer and then also ask her how she's feeling, because she's been quiet and they care

Ashton, despite hurting when they're touched and exhausted so the chronic pain is as intense as the first time, still wanting to cuddle with Fearne - and feeling at ease when they do

And like, the way they were trying to articulate it implies that they've wanted to ask for quite some time, but the timing has been off or situations have gotten in the way, and they don't want to wait any longer

But also they don't ask if they can cuddle they ask if Fearne wants to; they want to, but they ask Fearne if she doesn't want to sleep alone, because her comfort is as important or more important than their own

Fearne given her past experiences with people of course thinks they mean the other kind of company, which she notes she does want (so that's not off the table) but asks if they could just cuddle - to which Ashton doesn't entirely deny either, but notes that they're tired and in a lot of pain right now so they too was asking for the same

Also the fact that Fearne, who has been in a threesome inside a corrupted haunted wood, will later flirt with a dark echo of herself, and spooned with a ghost pirate captain, got so flustered about asking Ashton that she just wants to cuddle

Despite the awkwardness they still just laugh and joke together through it, they're awkward but it's in a sweet way

All of Ashton's immediate action the second they realised Fearne was missing - similar to how they wanted to find her after the shard incident but this time in a position where they could take action - no nonsense, no pissing contest with Chetney about her scent being on their bed, "Find. Them. Now."

And then still being soft after seeing Fearne again, because all that matters right now is that she's still here. And another post I saw said it better but, Ashton never seeks to change or 'correct' parts of who Fearne is; she can still follow cute animals just next time bring a buddy along (which given how they were in bed together would imply meaning them), they love her for her, fae and all, they just want her to be safe

Not entirely ep. 94 but given how on 91 Ashton pointed out that they needed to sleep and 'figure out who they wanted to be', and then here ask Fearne to be there beside them so they could have someone to wake up to, it to me at least says a lot about what Ashton has already decided; and how despite both of them having dealt with grief and anger and helplessness by bottling it up, hiding away, and shouldering it alone, this time they both wanted to just feel at ease with each other

[sneakyneighboururchin]

Rook: Outsmarting someone and being right aren't always the same thing.

Solas: Aren't they?

Solas you fuck you make me crazy

[thegoodceai]

many thoughts about how warden!rook and davrin's shared faction makes their dynamic and relationship so much more compelling (for me) than the other same-faction relationships in the game if only because the grey wardens are always. tragic, i guess. and just the commonality of 'we both willingly joined an order dedicated to stopping a threat that most of the world cares very little about, even when considering the fifth blight was so recent, and we knew from the start our lives will be forfeited sooner rather than later and yet we're both willing to fight and sacrifice for the greater good with no expectation for recognition or reward'

the game makes rook into a hero, so i doubt they got conscripted, joining the wardens feels like their decision, plays into rook's heroic main character trope. especially with some of the choices you can make (saying rook was completely right when saving that village when they ignored direct orders and not regretting it and reiterating that fact when you meet the first warden for the first time, talking the first warden down, even punching him but still having the order trust rook enough to know they have their back etc)

also rook telling davrin multiple times "i'm a warden too" sounds so much like "you're not alone in this, i know what you've been through, i've been through the same things myself, i know what others see when they look at us, i know what fate we brought onto ourselves when we drank from the joining cup, i made the same choices as you, like recognises like and we're both of us both monster and monster hunter." it also adds another layer to every interaction when davrin asks for rook's advice, or just picks their brain, cause rook knows. they know what it's like. we share the same family, the same purpose, the same cursed blood.

also something something the parallel between the warden and alistair in origins (young, inexperienced, one of them conscripted, fighting a seemingly hopeless fight against a country and a blight) and warden!rook and davrin in veilguard (older, capable wardens, here of their own volition, knew the early death sentence they signed up for, fighting a seemingly hopeless fight against literal gods and the blight to end all blights) and it feels like no matter how you play it their epilogues always feel like "we survived but at what cost"

anyway. many thoughts. love creating some "history is a circle and it will inevitably repeat" type narrative with my game characters

[seance]

I HOPE THAT YOU WILL FIND YOUR WAY / I HOPE THERE WILL BE BETTER DAYS

[temporoyales]

some dd2 pawn details of azem and arthur (they both take turns being arisen and pawn respectively in my playthroughs!)- i love looking at the weapon models they use and all the other tiny details ingame

[dragonsdenstudiosofficial]

The Pizza Knight Saves The Princess is a fantasy-comedy choose-your-own-adventure-style visual novel being developed by Dragon's Den Studios. Set on the planet Comestibla, where everything & everyone is made of food, we play as the Pizza Knight as he tries to save his beloved Water Ice Princess from the castle of the evil Chocolate Count. You can download the demo for free HERE: https://dragons-den-studios.itch.io/the-pizza-knight-saves-the-princess

Over the course of this month I'll be posting some of the game's art to this blog!

This image depicts the Pizza Knight meeting the Rotisserie Dragon, a dragon made of rotisserie chicken who has been imprisoned in the Chocolate Count's courtyard & forced to be a living garbage disposal for the knights slain by the gumbots. While the demo version only sees him desecrating one set of remains, each of the toppings that can encounter him will feature him desecrating a different set of remains. On the Pepperoni route (seen here) he's chewing on the bone of the late Lamb Chop Knight.

[smitten-miqitten]

Lavellan Post-Veilguard headcanons:

If Ellenere Lavellan becomes immortal due to living in the Fade with Solas, the conflict she'd feel would be so profound.

Immortality is something SHE actively worked to deny the Elves of Thedas. That wasn't the specific goal, but it was the end result. The Veil remains, and the Elves stay mortal.

Therefore, it is something she shouldn't want. I don't mean it's something she should refuse, but rather something she feels she shouldn't want as badly as she does. She doesn't have the right.

And yet

Nothing in her entire life has ever stung SO harshly, like a white hot knife in her gut, than the day Abelas said she was no better than the shemlen.

Ellenere was Dalish. She for the earliest part of her life considered herself Elvhen the way all Dalish consider themselves Elvhen. The last of the Elvhen. The ones who carry the past on their backs. The ones who will never again submit.

Abelas, with his disdain, disabused her of that notion.

Ellenere was Dalish. She is no longer.

Ellenere casts aside her Vallaslin.

Ellenere is no longer of The People. Her clan believes her tricked out of her Vallaslin by Fen'Harel and therefore unable to perform the duties of First, let alone Keeper, and though her name remains she is not welcome among them. But she never was of The People. Not in a way that Elves of the past would care to accept. Something so very precious to her, the former First of her clan, had been nothing but lies she told herself to keep getting up in the morning. She was never one of them.

She lived the past ten or so years as... nothing. Even her title is hard to cling to with the Inquisiton disbanded. She's nothing, no one, she has no people.

So when she gains the gift that makes her actually Elvhen in the way that sets the past and present apart, she's so HAPPY. And she feels so guilty about feeling that way. It should be incidental, a mere fact of the choice to stay with Solas in the Fade, not something she specifically wants or seeks. But now that she's finally, finally one of them, the alienation she's felt since the Temple of Mythal is eased. She's happy.

And how could she possibly make Solas understand without sounding like Thedas's biggest hypocrite?

[raayllum]

A few things because I realize without it, this amalgamation of screencaps may not make much sense but it's all I've been thinking about for like 3 days:

As the two mages of the younger generation, Callum and Claudia are caught in a loop of both competing with and furthering each other's progression in their magical goals. We see this manifest in two main ways:

Callum and Claudia giving each other knowledge they need, even if it's incomplete. Claudia gives Callum the first half of the fulminus spell (and Rayla the second); Callum figures out the riddle that lets Claudia know there's a map to be had. While Claudia offered to literally teach him dark magic, it happened solely accidentally, with Callum's acquired knowledge being her 'undoing' (on behalf of Rayla) in 2x07. This transfer of knowledge and goals means that even though Callum helped get the prison from the Sea of the Cast Out with the opposite goal of Claudia's, he will likely 'finish' her half of the spell, if you will, by being what results in Aaravos actually getting out (possession or otherwise). Likewise, this references back to Claudia giving Callum's Harrow letter after he similarly lost it, and it is that very letter that gives him his biggest piece of information (thus far) about Aaravos' key: "Why would I open it? It's for you" / "Perhaps it will be you, Callum, who discovers the key's secrets" / "Come on sad prince - let's go get your cube" (1x04).

They're both clever, and even when they're screwing each other over, it usually results in some kind of knowledge being transferred back to each other, willing or unwillingly.

We see this most directly in the initial primal stone theft, which is arguably what kicks off both their arcs in the series in a lot of ways. Callum steals and ultimately destroys/smashes Claudia's primal stone in order to free Zym (and subsequently Rayla). He repeats this pattern of (thematic? literal?) theft a few more times: he steals/uses her dark magic book in order to free the dragon in 2x07 (and subsequently Rayla); he steals and empties out her potion in 5x09, knowing that she relies on it for her magic; and as mentioned, him and the rest of the dragang successfully steal the prison from her grasp, too.

The similarity of the prison to the primal stone has likewise been reinforced. The Dragang get the prison from Claudia after Rayla has already allied with Ezran, just like in 1x03, leaving Callum to be the one to actually disempower Claudia by removing her object of power (potion, primal stone). 6x01 ties the prison to the primal stone by giving Callum a similarly staged nightmare about smashing it, which echoes his old 2x08 dreams that do have a premonition slant surrounding them. The fact that Aaravos speaks of a great shattering (Patience) and Callum compares the whole world to a primal stone only makes this potential thread of symbolism more foreboding, whether it speaks to Aaravos' desire for getting out of his prison or for taking revenge on the Startouch elves in some manner.

Last but not least, we have the basis of for why Callum smashes Claudia's stolen primal stone (future prison?) in the first place: he had a good reason. While it's clear this sentiment is important for Claudia (and Terry) as she uses it as justification for her own actions - "Everything I'm doing is for my family. It's to save my dad" - and as the basis for why she's not evil, we see in a few instances that it's important to Callum too. He is relieved when Claudia can tell he had a good reason, specifically criticizes Rayla for not having one upon her return (as she didn't even get closure about Viren in her time away), and asserts that "if she didn't tell me, she had a good reason" when he sets her free in 5x01. And Callum asserts his own justification for both doing dark magic in the past and presumably in the present: "I had to, to save [Rayla]" and Finnegrin affirms this: "Oh, how noble."

When Claudia says "I need to tell you about some things back at home, you know, good things, bad things," Callum tells her about another good and bad thing in destroying the primal stone. It hatched Zym and took off Rayla's binding, but it also left him magic-less (and in the future, vulnerable to dark magic use). Which, ironically, is also true of Rayla's return both being "kind of good, and kind of bad" in helping Callum unlock another arcanum ("To love is simply to know this: the tides are true as the ocean is deep") and simultaneously making him more vulnerable to dark magic use (the snake chains in 5x08).

All of this being a long winded way of saying I am intrigued by how Callum and Claudia may continue to circle and 'take' things from one another - Callum leaving a deceptive pearl in the castle that Claudia may mistake for the real one / Callum being responsible for achieving Claudia's goal of freeing Aaravos - in season six, because they really have one of the most interesting and thematic foil relationships in the whole series.

[reliquiaen]

Okay, a few years back I made this graphic to explain the Great Cycle. Now that I've mulled over DD2 for a few days, I'm updating it. Some of the same assumptions as before remain: The Dragonforged fought the dragon, his weapon broke, he tried punching it (lmao), but he did survive without killing the dragon, possibly there was a second Bargain offered in the face of his determination. So you don't have to kill your dragon to survive it. Also still assuming that different classes become different types of drakes because I just like that detail, even though we see nothing to confirm it in DD2 (except maybe for the wyrms in the post-game, I hope that's what those are, just a bit redesigned).

But this time, I'm making some NEW assumptions: A Great Dragon can be manifested directly by the Seneschal's will (I'm guessing this is why our DD2 dragon doesn't have a name, I suspect this dragon was created after Rothais defeated his - he didn't become a dragon OR Seneschal so it had to come from somewhere). The challenge a Seneschal poses to the Arisen can be anything; Savan gave us the opening of the Everfall and unleashed a ton of powerful monsters upon the world; but Pathfinder gave us what the world would look like without a Seneschal to oversee things. My assumption is that the Colossal Dragon that appears out of that final red pillar of light IS the Pathfinder (possibly using his will to force order back upon the world) and when we kill it, our Arisen becomes Seneschal (because Pathfinder says he won't be there to see the new world that's forming). So the challenge can be anything, not just the Everfall. I'm curious what happens to our pawn after that fight, though. And it's a much better Seneschal fight than the one against Savan, sorry Savan.

I'm also assuming that (given we see the Pathfinder rewind time and rewrite the world) the Seneschal can simply will the world into a state of being that suits them. This includes wiping memories of events. Though I like to imagine that our Arisen-turned-Seneschal didn't wipe memories of themselves or of the apocalypse-world. There was an entire plotline going through this game with Rothais and Phaesus where mortals are trying to get rid of the Seneschal and so it makes sense that they need to remember what would happen without the Seneschal's presence.

Anyway, thanks. I'll probably have more thoughts later, but this is the part that gets me most. I like to know how things work so I wanted to sort the Cycle out.

[mc-260627]

It is God's favorite greasy rat (my cat cinnamon)'s 9th birthday today (October 10th). Wish her a happy birthday and go favorite her fandragon

[vir-dirthara]

And when Anders finds the templar - the one that made the mistake of performing the rite on Hawke - his Hawke - it is not Anders' voice that growls. Nor is it Justice that reverberates; it is something new, something vengeful that is at last allowed to surface.

"Finally."