#weird dragon

Lurking Leaper - please accept this funky little guy

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!

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

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.

This is completely silly but that’s my jam! I very much have always enjoyed knowing that I am a (Fire) Dragon in the Chinese zodiac. And when Cat and I were looking over the descriptions at Pearl River I yet again shook my head and was like but it doesn’t seem like the right description (I’m always tired not into competition not motivated don’t like warm weather don’t like the spotlight). I’m a weird dragon. Anyway when I got home I did a spot check on some friends and their descriptions seemed really accurate and I could even see where some of my best friends were super compatible... so I guess it’s all true! And I should recheck my dragon ego!