Legacy: Designing Dragons, Part 1

Greetings, Patrons!

In the Legacy series, we're going to take a look at the Dreaming Door creative process and learn about how art and games are made. We hope you enjoy the exclusive behind-the-scenes info and exclusive, never-before-released Dreaming Door art!

This time, we're going to take a look at how the Dreaming Door dragons went from idea to living color. First, however, I must introduce my first artistic partner in crime:

RACHEL SEEGER, Artist of Destiny

Shortly after deciding to go through with my mad dream of making a Game That Mattered, I went to Lawrence Technological University to interview a professor there about any recent graduates whom he felt had promise. I needed a solid artist to help me realize my vision. The Game Arts classroom was strewn with student projects, and there was one that stood out to me; a beautiful poster featuring blends of different architectural styles of the world in a natural setting. Something was special about it.

"Who did this?" I asked.

"Rachel Seeger. She just graduated."

I called her up, met her in a Panera on Woodward, and was deeply impressed not only by her artistic abilities but by her organizational skills, ability to take direction, and her strong, no-nonsense spirit. This was not a float-in-the-clouds artist; this was a great craftsperson in the making with serious leadership potential. She was talented, she was driven, and she was real. Days later, she became Dreaming Door's Lead Artist.

(LEAVE OUT the part where you slashed yourself with a razor blade and bled all over the place, going through SEVERAL bloody napkins while trying to still look calm, cool and in charge during the first Dreaming Door leadership meeting with Rachel and Bryce at the Pita Cafe. No one needs to know about that. Remember to DELETE THIS BEFORE YOU POST THIS ARTICLE.)

Later that week, in a meeting at the Pita Cafe where absolutely nothing strange happened, Rachel unveiled a few prototypes, including the Jungle Dragon pictured above. While undoubtedly creative and cool, it was a little too fantasy/alien, a little too Monster Hunter and not enough True Child of Sun and Earth. Rachel asked a reasonable question: "What SHOULD a dragon look like?"

Not an easy question to answer, of course. Every human culture injects its own ideas, tastes, and fears into representing dragons. Each of them has things they get right and things they get wrong.

DRAGON HISTORY

Long ago, this world was ruled by dragons. Gigantic saurian creatures of immense power roamed the world, which was, at the time, a cruel and glorious symphony of beautiful creation and destruction. The creatures came in all shapes and sizes, transforming and evolving from generation to generation into ever more perfect forms. Human beings, and anything like them, were absent.

Then came the gods from the heavens. Desiring Earth to be their garden, they began changing things, like the climate (which was a massive blow to the dragons) and finally the dragon queen could take no more. She summoned all the dragons and declared war on the gods.

It was, by all accounts, a terrible conflict, and the dragons very nearly won, but in the end, with the help of some interesting technology, the gods won. The dragon queen was defeated, and the rest of the dragons were either killed or hid away from the wrath of the gods. With the pesky carnivorous megafauna out of the way, the gods created humans, told them to spread across the world and harvest its resources, and to follow the rules; if the humans succeeded in making the world into a beautiful garden by the time the gods returned, they would be taken up to the heavens to live with them. If not, they would be destroyed, just like the dragons.

I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. It is recorded in mankind's most ancient records, from the Enuma Elish to the Abrahamic Bible, though the story gets more and more twisted as time passes.

Marduk vs. Tiamat.

Zeus vs. Typhon.

Odin vs. Ymir.

Bel vs. The Dragon.

Horus vs. Set.

Michael vs. Lucifer (in dragon form, no less; the Bible calls him "that old dragon".)

Sometimes the dragons become titans or jotunn or whatever... "the gods fought these big sort-of-reptile-sort-of-bird things before the creation of humanity" becomes "the gods fought these big humans before the creation of humanity" because, well, natural bias. It's easier for humans to picture things looking like themselves. But this conflict before human existence is interestingly consistent in its overarching basics. In my mythology classes, I call it "The War Before." Because humans are creations of the gods, they are aligned against the dragons, and human mythology and folklore is filled with tales of brave heroes defeating the last few remaining horrible dragons/monsters/sirrush/zmey/whatever. So I decided to go along with the ancient records, and tell that story, but perhaps a bit from the opposite side.

In twenty years of studying world mythology and history, the source material, as a whole, suggested the following about dragon morphology:

Dragons were related to dinosaurs, and were the de facto rulers of pre-humanoid Earth. Looking to dinosaurs and their evolutionary paths was a good place to start. They were carnivores, so a powerful body good at moving fast and divesting prey of their lifeforce was a must.

Most dragons could fly. (And swim pretty well, too. They were quite comfy in the water.)

Dragons had scaled bodies, with some accents; given the former point and how some dinosaurs evolved into birds, it seemed that feathers would make sense. (By the way, for the record, the vast majority of dinosaurs had zero feathers. Only the ones on the way to evolving to birds... velociraptors and the like... had anything like them. The ones evolving to reptiles or other things, which was most of them, never did. Sorry, Dipper, but putting feathers on stegosaurs and dimetrodons does NOT make them more scientifically accurate.)

Dragons were associated with fire. (Flaming breath is the most common, but some versions have the fire take different forms, including coming out the tail in some South American versions.)

So how should they be drawn?

While several factions were clamoring for me to make them just like THEIR culture sees them... the winged-yet-quadruped high European D&D dragons, for example, or the mustachioed snake-in-the-sky-or-water East Asian version... none of these struck me as reasonable. What the legends agree on was that the dragons were natural creatures that were here before the gods, and no animal I know of had such bizarre morphology. Those are definitely badass creatures, but they're not natural. I also didn't want to favor one culture over another in the representation of dragons; I wanted all cultures to look at the Draak-Kin and say, "Okay, that's a dragon. Not exactly the way my culture would portray them, but that's a powerful, beautiful animal who actually could have existed on this world."

For me, dragons represented both sky and earth; elements of snakes, a very earthy creature, and eagles, a very sky-y one, mixed together. In a way, they represent totality, wholeness, complete mastery of the environment. The rulers of a purely natural, pristine Earth, deeply and intrinsically linked to the ecosystem.

(I had also had my own spiritual encounters with dragons, which I won't go into detail about, and while I can't be sure that my experiences represented any kind of historical being, it felt more natural and real than the stock versions.)

After explaining all of this to Rachel, we started over with more natural models; a realistic evolutionary path, body elements that weren't crazy-alien magic but real wonders of biology, a form sculpted by the natural elements over hundreds of millions of years. The work had begun.

I'll continue this in another post, but for now, I've attached some of Rachel's early sketches of our designs. You can see the Draak-Kin morphology beginning to take shape.

-L