Owl the Mechanical Owl
“Think, Owl, think. If Owl were a parchment, where would Owl hide?”
– Owl
Favourite spell: Electric Bolt
It’s easy to be charmed by a high-speed lightning projectile that stuns its targets. So much potential for experimentation, observation and unintended lightning injuries!
Owl is a self-aware mechanical creature and one of the many peculiar oddities of the Astral Academy. Being capable of casting spells and learning magic, Owl was accepted to study a couple of years ago. It seems to have a knack for lightning spells.
Owl is curious, analytical, perky and completely lacks all common discretion. It loves word plays, food and quirky pieces of clothing.
And Owl is full of questions. Who made Owl? For what purpose? Where does magic come from? Why do sandwiches taste so good? Most of Owl’s rapid rate inquiries go unanswered, but it hasn’t stopped the metallic construct from piling up the questions. Coupled with Owl’s distinctive ability to produce a steady stream of idle talk, conversing with it can prove a confusing endeavour.
Having learned from numerous people around it that money is an excellent thing to be in possession of, Owl can’t wait to graduate from the Astral Academy so it can enter the working life and start making money, so now Owl considers it very convenient that the Academy’s spell parchments are missing, offering Owl a chance to complete its spellbook.
Who else might want to find their Nine Parchments and complete their spellbook? Find out in our next post.
8 comments on “Nine Parchments Characters — Owl the Mechanical Owl”
I love the design of Owl, but I have a few questions regarding the story of the game. If it’s not too much trouble here they are. You said a while ago that all of the characters will speak on their journey, but it won’t be the standard way. Will we hear them through a narrator, a strange talking device or something else? About the story, will we have some beautiful cutscenes like in Trine 3 or some of the gorgeous art pieces that take the place of cutscenes throughout the game? Anyway, can’t wait to dive back in that magical world of yours. 🙂
Hello TheraNord, glad you like our Owl.
As for your questions, I don’t see why I shouldn’t answer them 🙂 We can use this reply as a draft for a blog post about it later on, if the occasion rises.
Our truant students will be talking across the levels. After the boss encounters which were actually seen in the Switch announcement trailer, there is a spot of dialogue in the level right after. What you will hear them talk about will depend on who they are with. If they are alone, they will talk to themselves about their quest to find the Nine Parchments. If they are with another character, they will engage in conversations with them about their personal differences, grievances, questions, histories, similarities and mutual interests. And if you have three or four different characters, they will shed a leeettle bit more light on what is going on in the world, why is everything trying to kill them, and what happened to the Astral Academy library to cause their current situation.
More than Trine, Nine Parchments will attempt to draw you into the adventure multiple times, and we thought this kind of dialogue variation would be a fun little detail to give variation to the narrative as you embark on your quest for the Parchments.
And since we have a somewhat… hmm… ridiculous amount of variation with these party banters, (each trigger has like a hundred different conversations depending on who you are and who you are with), it’s not feasible to have cutscenes for all of them. But we’ll have beautiful loading screens – just like the one with Cornelius, which was seen at the end of our Monthly Report post just recently in the blog. And of course the levels themselves are amazingly gorgeous!
Expanding the Trineality has been an exciting journey, and we hope you’ll like what we’ve done with the place 🙂
You killed me on the spot… so much info? A hundred conversation options on EVERY trigger? Wow! 😀 The amount of information that we’ll be getting sounds massive and do I like it? I’m stunned by what this world is becoming. I’m one of those people that always reads codex entries, character info, bestiaries and so on, you could say I’m a lore geek, more like a loremaster. 😀 So more info is always welcome. Seeing how that universe expands can only make me feel happy. Keep up the great work, looking forward to using my spells against other people. 😉
Ok on the other hand, there are only eight of those triggers, because we wanted to remain sane during development 😀
Remember you can’t get your parchments if you keep killing your fellow wizarding students…
Still, for me that’s huge. 😀 What if I resurrect them without the help of an ancient artefact or a checkpoint? Can I graduate just because I can bring back people? I’m sure they would want to know too. ( I would be a terrible wizarding student…) 😀
Well, maybe some of these mysteries will be answered after the launch day 😉
Alright. Nine Parchments takes place in Trine Universe, doesn’t it? So it makes me wondering things like:
“When exactly action takes place? Before, after or during which part of Trine?”
“How would Sarek commentate the shortcut these mage take to raise in power?”
“Will anything be mentioned somewhere related to Trine series storyline or Three Heroes themselves?”
And other similar to them 🙂 Would you be able to answear them at this point in time?
Hello there!
Let me answer your questions:
– Nine Parchments is set into a period of time after a completed Trine 3 story. There is the teensiest, tiniest bit of overlapping in some metaphorical-representational sense that is logical in my head, but is difficult to translate to reality, so I won’t go there. Let’s just say: after.
– I don’t think Sarek really cares about anything but himself.
– With the Nine Parchments taking place in the world of Trine, there’s always a chance we might hear of a familiar face or three. But the focus of the game’s characters is definitely on our truant students!
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