The Secret History & Design of Tal'Ock and Yarin Nyrok

Hello everyone, it's Lone Wanderer here again! From now on we'll add a bit more information to the character sheet posts we're going to make. We want to give you the writer's and artist's insight on them as well to go with the sheet. Just beware that this post contains some light spoilers, so if you haven't read our rework yet, you may want to do that first.

We know that this upcoming wall of text is a lot to swallow; this is ultimately for the people who want to know what is going on behind the scenes.

Tal'Ock

Let us first take a bit of time to skedaddle and talk about who Tal'Ock may have been and what he was about. If you ever searched this name on the Internet, you may have seen some references to it in some occult book. The Book of Azazel to be precise. We aren't sure what the design process behind this original character exactly was; our original author never explained how it came into existence.

However, given the old name of the hotel and other related pieces of information, it stands as a possibility that his name was indeed a reference to this book. Given the new direction of the story, we didn't exactly want this reference to be there still; if you find out that your main character is named after a demon just like the hotel, you may develop false expectations to face certain kinds of beings which may never be there. What's more, both Tal'Ock and Azazel are demons from Christian myths, an odd theme to mix with that of the old folktails, which were more akin to Indian Americans.

As a little fun fact, this player character's full name was "Dunce Tal'Ock". You only got to see his first name in the mobile version of the game, it was picked for the default as a joke by one of our former team members.

The looks of Tal'Ock were made up pretty quickly; we didn't really have a character description for him and merely told our sprite artist to make a black dragon, similar to one of our former team members' fursona. While their character looks great, we wanted to keep self-inserts from our side at a minimum, something that our previous writer actually wanted to do more of.

However what did stay the same is the narrative's focus on the player character. Tal'Ock was a writer who was a childhood friend of Brymror; the big brute was a fat kid at school who was bullied for his physique and this black dragon stood up for him. We may talk about Brym's scrapped background a bit more in a future post, but you get the basic gist of it: Their back stories were deeply intertwined into one another and Brym grew up to become a violent asshole. Brym set Tal'Ock up with Brando, who previously was both an actor and a professor.

While it may sound like a lot, there wasn't a whole lot to this old main character. He had quite a few issues which we would have had to fix and given that you hardly knew anything about him, just canning and re-doing the main character was far less troublesome.

Nyrok

The new player character is now an anthro antillean iguana called Yarin Nyrok. He is now an actor whose past is tied to Brymror's, although in a different way. The concept for this character came from Lone Wanderer. When I sat down to think up a scalie character to carry an entire story, I was going through a lot of possible species. Among these were a bearded dragon, a black lizard, a dinosaur anthro and even a shark. This character himself was born from the main character I wanted to do for a little spin-off game for Identity; when I first joined the project I was told to write something as a way to prove myself.

I already had something else laying around (It's "The dragon twins", it's on my FA in case you are curious, but it is very incomplete), which I showed and was quickly set on the task to write the scene for Draxima. This planned spin-off game I called... "Identity: Crisis". I had a lot of fun ideas for it, even though I only had two characters planned for it. The main character in that one was a black lizard and both his background and the story he was supposed to go through were unrelated to Tal'Ock.

Ultimately I decided to go for an iguana anthro because I find they are a little bit under-represented in the furry fandom and... I find them hot. A side effect from this is that the main character is obviously not a dragon anymore. Here is our new sexy boy drawn by Weißer Rauch: 

I felt making him not a dragon was a better way to create a bigger gap between the player character and the very first characters you meet which are dragons. An analogy for what effect I wanted to achieve is perhaps meeting a person of a different nationality or ethnicity you haven't seen before when you're a child; you may be filled with a sense of wonder or be cautious of somebody who is visually different.

Regarding his clothing, I wanted him to be a bit more approachable and down to earth with his design; he is clothed in a way that you would perhaps see on the street. I wanted him to be a character one would find easier to relate to and this is also why we have decided to only give him only one penis instead of a hemipenes which would have been more faithful to real iguanas.

The design of his sheet went without complications; he didn't need many changes. The only remarkable change was that the bridge of his nose was changed once... unlike another character which you haven't seen yet at all.

This is it for now. We hope you enjoyed the history lesson and we'll see you next time!