What you're looking at, by their account, is an archive kept long before anyone thought to put an interface on it. Draw a card and something that has never been named receives a name, an epithet, and a fragment of history — assembled fresh each time from a deep well of openers, turns of phrase, and closing lines, arranged so that no two dragons, however briefly they exist, are told about in quite the same way.

On repetition

They are particular about it. Ask three times in one sitting and you'll get three distinct shapes to the telling — a rumor here, a field note there, a line of dialogue passed down from someone who never gave their name. It is, they insist, simply how the old tongue prefers to be spoken.

The duller version, for anyone who wants it: several hundred hand-written lore fragments, recombined by a small script that keeps track of what's already been said in your visit, so the same lines don't show up twice while you're drawing.

Who actually built this

Dragonspeak is an independent, one-person project, built for the pleasure of building it and kept running because people keep coming back to draw one more card. The dragons get the credit. Any bugs, slow loads, or dragons that say something a little too on-the-nose are ours alone.

— kept, however loosely, in service of the old lines