Parable - 31 - HD (Patreon)

EDIT - A couple of corrections

"A few"? It's going to take more than "a few" for Susan to make sure every NPC in town looks like someone she likes, darn it!

Commentary

I was originally considering general transformation potions you'd expect me to include, but they didn't feel specific enough to video games. They were just transformations I'd generally include.

And one could argue that these aren't that different from that, but I personally enjoy the video game context.

I was having trouble making Rhoda look distinctly dog-like in the last panel. I tried floppy ears, but I didn't like how they looked with her hair (or in general). Ultimately, I went for a corgi look, which sadly means no long tail, but happily means enormous ears and a nice fur pattern.

And now for something extremely nerdy

Panel one, reminds me of the Wabbajack from Skyrim. The Wabbajack was a magic staff that did random things, up to and including temporarily turning NPCs into small animals. How it did this, however, involved "disabling" NPCs, and some NPCs, such as generic bandits, were selected at random from leveled encounter lists, and...

Okay, this is getting a bit technical. Less technical, there were NPCs who, if you turned them into chickens for a bit, wouldn't be the same NPCs when they came back. A bandit would still be a bandit, but they would be a randomly selected bandit from a list of possible bandits.

In-universe, this potentially meant turning a male elf bandit into a chicken, and them going from a chicken to a female humanoid cat bandit. Or a lizard bandit. Or maybe the same bandit as before, but potentially with different equipment, because equipment was also randomized.

Naturally, I realized all this after experimenting with trying to mod in my own transformation magic based on the staff, and noticing that bandits were coming back from chickenification in different forms.