Tales From Windy Meadow - fantasy pixel art Visual Novel

[Caradìlis]

A group of beasts? Do dragons travel in packs?   (because that would be fun)

[Aure]

Some of them do! ; ) We don't have their graphics, but in our fantasy setting and tabletop RPG dragons are basically dinosaurs. (No fire breath included in most of the cases.)

[Caradìlis]

Aww, but that's the best thing about dragons!!! That and the flying thing...

[Aure]

That's subjective, I'm afraid. : P For me the coolest thing about dragons is the "giant reptile-like" appearance.
Some of them fly in our fantasy realm, but not all have the need to do so. Being a t-rex makes you quite safe if you stay on the ground.

Also, in the Empire dragons are not gathering treasures since they are mostly interested in food and expanding their territories, but at the same time their bones are extremely valuable and durable. And while the Imperials don't have stable sources of gold or silver, dragon bones are actually used both in high-level craftsmanship and as the source of money. Killing a dragon is literally like gathering a treasure - you can not only sell its meat, horns, tongue, blood or eyes, but you can also just gather its bones and cut it into small coins.

Of course, to kill a bad boy like this one you need quite a group of suicidal heroes and some advanced technology / traps:

[Caradìlis]

I don't want to kill it, I'd really much rather pet it (or ride it, but I'll settle for cuddling if flying isn't an option...)

[Aure]

I think you can try to raise it if you find a dragon egg, but I'm not sure you'll be able to force it to not kill everyone in its sight (aside of you) when it's going to get hungry. Unless it's not a problem for you. Or you are a mind-controlling mage.

[Caradìlis]

Who said I'd be forcing it to do anything... Dragons are elegant creatures far beyond our level of understanding, you can't force them to do anything... I was merely hoping to be lucky enough to befriend one... (still am...)

[Aure]

...not the ones in our world, definitely. xD These are monstrous, savage animals.

[Caradìlis]

From a human perspective I probably agree with you, but what do the dragons say they are? Surely they don't see themselves as savages?

[Aure]

In our setting they don't talk, so we can't ask them. Viaticum world has no intelligent animals, they are instinct-controlled. So our dragons have dinosaur-inspired lifestyle - they are focused on eating and protecting their land or migrating.

Actually, they often eat each other since other animals are not large enough for carnivorous dragons to even bother.

[Caradìlis]

Some theories would suggest humans to be an instinct-controlled species aswell, so that does not mean that they are not intelligent...
Yes, I do agree with you, the lack of interspecies communication is a slight problem...

[Jubal]

As I see it, these are more like the dragons in e.g. Game of Thrones, if not a little less clever than that: they're big wild animals, rather than sentient beings like Tolkien's dragons. You might as well ask how lions, or wolves, see themselves. This is fairly true-to-mythology as well: many "wyrms" and suchlike from medieval myth weren't necessarily bright at all.

For example, this is an actual (paraphrased) medieval bestiary entry on dragons:

The dragon is larger than all the rest of the serpents. It has a crest a small mouth and narrow nostrils, through which it breathes, and it puts out its tongue. Its strength is not in its teeth, but its tail, and it harms more by blows than by force of impact. It has no harmful poison, but it is said that it does not need poison in order to kill, because it slays anything which it embraces. Not even the elephant, with its huge body, is safe from it. It like concealed near the paths which elephants are in the habit of using, entangles their feed with its coils and suffocates them to death. Its homes are Ethiopia and Inida, where there is always heat.

In other words, medieval folk were happy to see dragons basically as some sort of big snake/lizard thing - a really scary one that could kill elephants, but not a sentient being in the way that some modern dragons are portrayed.

[Caradìlis]

This was exactly my point... Lions and wolves are not just wild creatures... I attribute that mainly to the fact that for a long time I have been under the impression that humans see themselves as the crown of creation/evolution and everything they do not understand (or anything that does not walk and talk like them) is a beast of inferior intelligence...
Just because we cannot persieve something as sentient, does not mean it isn't...

[Jubal]

Superiority/inferiority is a value judgement, and isn't related to my contention - which is that they don't walk or talk like us, and we should therefore not really fairly expect them to think like us either - it doesn't make sense to attribute mental traits (like having higher thoughts about species, or a perception of self, or the same sorts of feelings we recognise in ourselves) to creatures that neither have nor indeed need or want the capacity to do so. Asking "what does a dragon think about itself" is sort of secondary to "how does a dragon think about itself, and does it even have a need for a perception of self in a sense we would understand". (Mainly, though, I think "are non-human animals sapient or sentient" may be a topic for the philosopher's plaza rather than the game design section!)

[Thalanor]

Your pixel art is absolutely beautiful. Sometimes going for a higher abstraction level in art gets the point across more precisely rather than less, especially since the resolution is high enough to allow for the kind of detail you have.