#weird dragon

[bornulhuu]

Final few days of Smaugust. It was a very fun art challage, em glad to have participated.

[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.

[abigailbozarthart]

So here are all of Marinos' shimmer dragons- they're a wee bit cursed to us land creatures.

Shimmer dragons are an entirely separate family of dragonkind from DnD's typical chromatic, metallic, and gem dragons. They are very loosely inspired by Chinese and Japanese dragons, some of which (the Japanese dragons iirc) metamorphize from fish as part of their life cycle. That and being heckin noodles is where the similarity ends, though.

Shimmer dragons are aquatic, able to remain above the water comfortably for only a few hours, though they can magically fly. They are hermaphrodites, able to both sire offspring and lay eggs. Shimmer dragons of any species can mate to produce eggs for both parents- they seldom form long term mating bonds of any sort and rear their own eggs alone. The young are always of the seal-jellyfish form until pupation from wyrmling to young dragon, which is jarringly rapid and reveals their species. They can be the species of either parent; it is completely random and impossible to divine in advance. Shimmer dragons seldom care if their young takes after them physically.

Their personalities vary pretty wildly, but they all tend to be very ecclectic and to have very strange and esoteric hoards.

Like other true dragons, they can shapeshift and produce offspring with other creatures, but given they mostly see All That as a way to produce young and lack much romantic instinct, and find typical bisex beings to be repugnantly alien (often a mutual feeling), this doesn't exactly happen often.

As is the case for all true dragons in Marinos, shimmer dragons carry the Bloodsong, the immuteable essence of dragonkind that grants them power and majesty that ever increases with age for as long as they live. In desperation they can sing the Bloodsong for a Wish that is even stronger than the typical uses of the spell, sacrificing dragonhood in the process and becoming a new dragonborn. Their descendants after that are shimmer dragonborn.

Shimmer dragons all have dual damage resistances, sometimes in ecclectic combinations, and matching breath weapons.

Pearlescent- poison and piercing

Aventurescent- fire and thunder

Opalescent- radiant and lightning

Schiller- necrotic and acid

Chatoyant- psychic and bludgeoning

Irridescent-slashing and cold

They also have innate spells, which they can imbue their breath weapons with to turn them into areas of effect, sometimes to bizarre effect!

[rachaelmayo]

This is Winds of Neptune from 2002. It's part of the Dragons of the Spheres series.

The form of the dragon is close to the original concept sketch, where the main point that I recall was "how many joints can I reasonably work into one limb?" I managed six joints this time. This is still an early piece in the series, though; I later switched gears and went with a much more abstract design and decided to stick with it.

I made this with ink, Prismacolor pencil, watercolor, and acrylic.

[startreklesbian]

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES 2023, dir. Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Dale

[franeridart]

more dragon

[dutchs-blog]

Hamster's In Dungeon And Dragons

[eldritchblaaaast]

don't be weird guys

[noornight]

Long distance besties. This definitely happened after the third movie (source: trust me bro)

Based on this

[ilgattopatata]

god god i'm relistening to inquisition banter and it makes so much sense that it's varric to confront solas. solas is so fascinated by varric and varric is exactly the opposite of everything solas stands for. so what if orzammar is dying. dwarves still live. what is happening to the dwarves is exactly what happened to the elves but a hundred times slower and solas can't understand why varric wouldn't want to do anything to stop that. but varric never lived in a world that wasn't always changing.

[vaguely-concerned]

I understand and agree with a lot of the frustrations about the shortcomings of Inquisition as a story. but sometimes when I hear people complain about the chosen one narrative in it I do want to just be like... you know it's a deconstruction of the concept more than anything, right. the inquisitor isn't actually chosen by anything except stumbling into the wrong (right?) room at the right (wrong?) time because they like, heard a noise or whatever. or if you think they are chosen, as many do in-universe, that's something you have to take on faith, the maker-or-whoever moves in mysterious ways indeed-style. the Inquisitor isn't actually a Destined Chosen One, they're a Just Some Guy in a fancy hat, self-delusions of grandeur to taste as you'd prefer.

a running thread that goes through all of the personal quests of the companions is the concept of a comforting lie vs. an uncomfortable truth, upholding old corrupt structures vs. disrupting them, and the role of faith in navigating that. (blackwall the warden vs. thom rainier the liar and murderer. hissrad vs. the iron bull, or is that the other way around? cassandra and the seekers -- do we tell the truth about what we find, even if it means dismantling the old order of the world? and so on.) and your inquisitor IS at the same time a comforting lie (a necessary one, in dark times? the game seems to ask) and an uncomfortable truth (we are the result of random fickle chance, no protective hand is held over the universe, it's on us to make a better world because the maker sure as hell won't lift a divine finger to help anyone, should he against all odds exist). faith wielded for political power... where's the point that it crosses the line into ugliness? is it before it even begins? what's the alternative? will anyone listen to the truth, if you tell it?

interesting how you also get a mix of companion agency in this -- you have characters like dorian who ALWAYS choose one side of the comforting lie vs. uncomfortable truth dichotomy. he will always make up his own mind to go back to tevinter and try to dismantle the corruption of the old system no matter what you say, or how you try to influence him. meanwhile iron bull is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum -- so psychologically trapped and mangled, caught in an impossible spiritual catch-22, that his sense of identity is left entirely to you and your mercy. you cannot change dorian in any way that matters; you can be his friend or not, support him or not, but he is whole no matter what. you are given incredible and potentially destructive-to-him power over bull's soul. it's really cool (and heartbreaking) to think about.

this is a game about how history will eat you even while you're still alive, and shape you into whatever image it pleases to serve it, and for all your incredible power right now you are powerless in the face of the gravitational force of time -- of more than time, of History. you won't recognize yourself in what History will make of you, because you belong to it now. you don't belong to yourself anymore and you never will again. the further you were from what it needs from you to begin with, the more you will find yourself distorted in its funhouse mirror. (why hello there inquisitor ameridan, same hat!)

and to me this is so much the core of what Dragon Age is about right from the Origins days -- how and by whom history gets written, the inherent unreliable narration of it all. I hope you like stories, Inquisitor. You are one now.

I do think it's probably still the weakest of the games narratively, and it's hampered by its structure and bloated systems. but I also find it disingenous to say that there's nothing deeper or actually interesting going on with it, thematically. if you're willing to engage with it there is Some Real Shit going on under the high fantasy-tinted surface.

[edlucavalden]

Oh my god.. this post was cooking i had to..

[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.

[glassphinix]

dont ask how or why snapchat would exist in hyrule

bonus:

[rachaelmayo]

Space weirdos, ahoy! This is Uranean Man o' War, a 2002 piece that remains one of my personal favorites.

The Portuguese Man o' War was my point of departure for this dragon. I also had been looking at graffiti stylization and... was it LA Williams' art? I think so. (It was more than 20 years ago, after all, and I don't know where I stashed my sketches and notes.) I wanted the dragon to be semi-abstract, floating into pieces. I wanted teeth and eyes and spines and frills and horns. I wanted the somewhat limited color palette so that I could concentrate on shapes, forms, and values. It worked out better than I had expected (considering that it was very experimental for me), and the original art sold, BAM, just like that, at its first showing.

Prismacolor pencil over watercolor, with India ink for the black bars at top and bottom.

[numptypylon]

It’s s travesty that Runaan and Viren never got to be alive at the same time to reminisque about their surprisingly NOT unique experiences of coming back to life after being dead for 2 years to your daughter having aquired a boyfriend of the species your own species is at war with, and immediately having to go on an urgent road trip with them.