Been low-key obsessed with the art and worldbuilding of Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical lately, but also wanted to draw something on-theme while catching up on the Dan Jones and Dragons VODs, so have a self-indulgent Morenthal wearing Persephone's outfit.
Bonus close-up under the cut since Tumblr compression eats the details:
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dan Jones and Dragons
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Content Warnings: Emotional/spiritual abuse. Implied child abuse. References to canonical child-murder
Summary:
Faced with a choice, Morenthal leaves.
It was raining lightly by the time they made the town proper.
The main street emptied as they passed through, residents hurrying for the cover of their doors while vendors closed shops and stalls early in anticipation of the coming storm. Despite the thinning crowd, a lifetime of habit sent his eyes sweeping each rooftop and alley, automatically appraising each passerby as he followed quietly in the footsteps of the older man.
He knew the town by sight, if not by name. (He suspected he had been told it once, but in their business some things were safer forgotten). A cross-point, located at one of the forks in the main road passing southeast of Riverleaf. Not so far from the Shard Coast as to be unreachable, but far enough that travelling there from any of their fixed rendezvous points required several days of deliberate detour. Home to an even mix of Humans and Elves, a Gnome here and there, the occasional caravan passing through to the druid city. Simple folk living simple lives. Ordinary. Unremarkable.
(The perfect place to hide something no-one expected to look for.)
More Dan Jones & Dragons? More Dan Jones & Dragons.
Bringing the number up to four with Feyli, the Flower Crown's born-again Dhampir Druid and sole wielder of feminine wiles (played by the talented NicholeGoodnight), all dolled up for a night of lying her butt off, stealing from rich people and smuggling small woodland creatures into upper-class venues.
More Flower Crowns Gala Outfits:
Morenthal | Gelnek | Hobson
Design talk and also some bonus art under the cut:
Gotta say, Feyli's outfit was definitely the most tricky out of the set so far. Nichole gave quite a specific description of the details in Feyli's dress (a blood-red gown with black roses around the top, black rose-vines trailing down the body and a dark lace cape) so a lot of it was figuring out how to translate those elements in a way that felt nice and balanced, then adding some complementary embellishments for fun. Each Flower Crown has been pushing me to learn more program tricks and Feyli certainly gave me some fun new challenges to figure out.
For the dress itself, I ended up going with an off-the-shoulder mermaid-skirt gown in attempt to find something that would look nice on Feyli's body-shape and show off the roses without utterly destroying the line mileage if I wanted to draw her in it again later. (Still ended up doing the skirt-embriodery by hand so task failed successfully).
Accessory-wise I thought it would be fun to crank the "roses" theme up to 11, since Feyli really leaned into that with her alias and cover stories, so I threw in some rose-embroidery finishing to the edges of her lace cape (shout out to ClipStudio users rainbowgrimart and 얀얀씨 for their ornate lace and jewellery brushes, which were an absolute lifesaver for the detailing) and also traded up her usual hair-wildflowers to match.
Whether Feyli canonically wore her antlers to the ball is a mystery, but since she can change those now and Nichole did mention her keeping the hair-flowers I thought it would be neat to give her a smaller but more formal set of sparkly silvered deer-horns to fit the dress-code. I also had some fun playing around with her hair and make-up since it was a black tie nobles event and I figured Lady Infiltration might go the extra mile to style herself for the evening. She's the only party member with long hair, I had to.
The jewellery was mostly just goofing. I really wanted to give her a version of Tante Padva's "slit throat" ruby choker necklace from Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus since I felt like Feyli's backstory and Nichole's description of the dress would vibe with that aesthetic. For the rest, I figured silver would be a cute way to have her be matchy with Coil and contrasting to fellow-infiltrator Morenthal. Plus I thought it would be funny to give her a bunch of rings and loop-bangles since she's such an incorrigible fantasy-gachapon girlie.
Once I realised that Feyli had somehow managed to bring a bag with her rescue-rat companion, Soli, and recently-acquired copper dragonscale lizard through the cloak-room weapons check, I knew I had to find a way of including them as well. They're hard to see in the main drawing but I had so much fun with them that I decided to do a bonus sketch:
(Also feat. Pocket, the Party's new intrusive thoughts generator fairy friend.)
Double-bonus detail crop because I quite like how Feyli's expression-work and hair turned out:
Continuing the Dan Jones & Dragons gala parade with Hobson, the Flower Crowns' oft-harried Halfling Warlock (played by the ever-wholesome Dan Floyd). Is he trying to massage away the realisation that letting his literally-half-brained patron choose his gala attire might have been a mistake? Is Valse giving him a headache over something else entirely? Did he use Detect Magic in a room full of powerful items and accidentally flash-bang himself? Yes.
More Flower Crowns Gala Outfits:
Morenthal | Gelnek
As always, design talk under the cut:
But before that, a short story: I've been following Dan's content on Youtube for... oh jeez, that sure is almost a decade now, both on his current New Frame Plus/Playframe channels and back when he was the primary founder and narrator for EC. His old games education videos helped me get one of my earliest jobs in project work and introduced me to a bunch of media production concepts (like scope management) that would go on to inform some of my own storytelling analysis posts. It was a startling little moment of artistic ouroboros to realise I was mentally running through key points from Dan's own Pose Design 101 video as I was drawing his DnD character. Never expected things to come full-circle like that, but if you're seeing this, Dan: here's to you 🫡 If you're not Dan and haven't already, do go check out his stuff - it's all super well-produced, informative, funny and he's just an overall stand-up guy.
Now: onto the tiny little nerd and his passé party attire
This was a really fun costuming challenge, with a bunch of interesting curveballs thrown in the mix. Unlike the rest of the Flower Crowns, Hobson didn't choose his own party outfit: it was picked out by his patron after Valse kibbitzed him into giving up and letting a heroism-obsessed Fey call the shots. Dan cited Valse as having the fashion sense of Stede Bonnet-as-depicted-in-OFMD, briefing a vaguely 19th century-style outfit that had frilled sleeves and 'would have looked gaudy even when it was in fashion a century earlier'.
Actually dating his outfit was the first challenge. D&D settings are kind of an anachronistic uchronia, with classic swords-and-sorcery fantasy campaigns potentially pulling inspiration points from anywhere across the Arthurian era up to pre-war modernity. Which leads to the question: how do you make something seem dated in a setting where most everything looks vaguely ye-olde-fantasy? The other challenge was that, IRL, the 19th century (i.e Victorian era) was when menswear started taking on a lot of the shapes that would eventually become modern suit and top-'n'-tails fashion. Since Trilby was already going to be wearing classic top-'n'-tails formalwear, I decided to set Hobson's style earlier in the 1800s-1820s and pull in some 18th century Stede Bonnet flourishes to visually set them apart. This article provided some great reference images, and once I hit on the figured silk waistcoat I knew I had a potential starting point.
Colour-wise, I stuck with the burgundy-and-gold palette the Dans gave Hobson in his official gala stream art, since those looked good together and matched up with Dan J's tendency to draw Hobson wearing greens/earth-tones and Valse in reds/jewel-tones. The combination is a lot more colourful and richly saturated than is typical for this style of Victorian-adjacent clothes, which felt appropriate for Valse's gaudy tastes.
Fabric-wise, I figured a fun way to gaudy things up even further would be to lean into the silks and satins that were fashionable at the time, but make all of his outfit shimmery rather than just a single feature piece. As a bonus, silk and satin clothes tend be hot, inelastic and have horribly itchy seams if worn unlined, which felt like exactly the kind of thing Valse's all-form-no-function sensibilities would inflict upon the small, long-suffering fellow. Both these fabrics also have a habit of behaving hideously and ripping themselves apart when worn wet, which makes this a great outfit to, say, accidentally fight an Aboleth in. Poor Hobson.
Some other details, just for fun:
1. Hobson's sketch layers include a drawing of his un-removable cursed left bracer. He's pulled the frilly, puffy sleeve over it but you might spot hints of the shape and the gem if you squint.
2. The reference waistcoat I used had floral embroidery on it. Had this actually been a Hobson outfit, I would have converted them to his garland flower (Forget-Me-Nots), but since it was a Valse pick I decided to make them Senaliesse chrysanthemums; a flower given out to friends of the Feywild's Summer Court as a sign of protection and favour. (It also adds extra layers to Pocket mistaking Hobson for a denizen of the Fey, which is fun).
Close crop on the details because I'm very happy with how they turned out:
More Dan Jones & Dragons art! This time their glorious Double Leader, Gelnek (played by the inimitable JoCat) all fancied up in his best Goblin party-attire.
More Flower Crowns Gala Outfits:
Morenthal | Hobson
Design talk under the cut:
Unlike with Morenthal’s outfit (which was mostly drawn from Dan and Gamb’s official stream design) I thought it would be a fun challenge to take the chaos of JoCat’s Gala outfit brief for Gelnek (a large fluffy fur coat and stacked tower of Cowboy, Pork-pie and Trilby hats) and try to render out something fashion-adjacent.
Figure-wise, I wanted to push the broadness of Gelnek’s build and body-shape, since Jo introduced him as being atypically bulked-up for a Goblin (to the point that he sometimes gets almost-mistaken for an odd-looking Dwarf) and charging Hobson down like small green boar during their first training spar. I thought it would be fun to lean into him being a stocky bundle of muscle compared to how Goblins are typically drawn.
For the coat, I liked the idea of taking men’s fashion-furs and giving him a long-cut trench-style coat with a big fur ruff around the collar. Really fluff the guy up with an impressive “beast-coat” that makes him look even bulkier.
Gelnek’s under-coat situation wasn’t described, so I went with a close-fit black two-piece since I figured that could help emphasise his actual silhouette without being too visually busy, and might make some fun strong shapes if I wanted to draw him in more dynamic situations later. I also gave him a few sash-belts with some of his hunt-trophies pinned on (the Voidcrystal Snail-eye, a Wyvern Tooth from their fight on the Javelin and Trilby’s gifted Dragon-Scale button), just to keep the under-outfit from getting too conventional.
Hat wise, there’s not much that can be done to rein in the “putting a hat on a hat” effect of the Trilby on Porkpie on Cowboy tower, so I just tidied them up a little with some nice complementary colours and bands that coordinated with the rest of the ensemble. The Cowboy brim and long coat combo ended up giving him some strong gunslinger energy, which is kinda fun for a traveling war-bard.
For his hair, I wanted to neaten up his big mess of fluffy curls for the formal setting, without going the same slicked-back conventional-imperial-common route that Hobson and Morenthal were already sporting. Since Gelnek’s birth-tribe come from a swampy region and places a lot of cultural importance on headwear, I thought it might be fitting to do him up with some neat protective braids.
Gelnek’s shoe situation was an interesting one since canonically he doesn’t wear them. I didn’t want to deprive him of his quest for the perfect shoe, but also figured he would need something to avoid the standard “no shoes, no service” rule at formal events, so I ended up pulling inspiration from Across the Spiderverse and giving him some Pavitr Prabakar-style foot-wraps with a bit of fancy gold trim to match the sash and middle hat.
I also decided to rep’ his drum-shield, seeing as Gelnek ended up being allowed to bring it into the venue. It’s barely visible in the final drawing but a good quarter of his thumbnail page was notes on how do drum-shield work? In my head I see it as something like a kettledrum set inside a convex round-shield/Dhal that lets him beat the drumhead while keeping the shield between him and danger. I also like the idea of him being able to play the shield part like a handpan.
Bonus look at his sketch layers because this man's hats and physicality fought me harder than he fights drakes:
Going back over the earlier stream VODs and I really like that the adamantine short-sword which Hobson would go on to name "lockpick" was originally given to him by Morenthal after the Mosswing Farm encounter.
It's just one of those many little serendipitous moments in the campaign that organically popped up via roleplay but make a really nice narrative handshake. The party Rogue gave Hobson his lockpick. That's cute.
