Drolleries — marginalia frames, initials and creatures for game UI

Drolleries: marginalia frames, initials and creatures for game UI

Medieval scribes filled their margins with rabbits holding bows, snails in armour and monkeys reading books. Drolleries brings that habit to your dialogue boxes and menus.

What's inside

• 4 ink-and-wash frame bodies that 9-slice cleanly: c3 dialogue (vine along the top), d1 menu (vines down both sides), e1 card/tooltip, n1 nameplate.
• 10 marginal creatures for the frame corners: a rabbit archer, a snail knight with a pennant, a mouse knight charging with a needle, a hare in a cauldron helmet riding a snail, a cat aiming a crossbow at the wrong target, a frog with a placard, a reading monkey, a heron that swallowed a key, a fish on legs and a dog-headed snail. Several pair across a box: the rabbit aims at the snail, and the mouse jousts with the hare.
• An illuminated drop-cap initial (T).
• Border Composer: an offline browser tool. Pick a body, drag creatures into the corners, set the initial, and watch the seam check. Save to JSON and reopen later. Export a PNG plus a Godot StyleBoxTexture .tres and an example .tscn.
• A Godot 4.6 example project with four ready-made borders, and the clean PNG parts for any engine.
• The Python drawing sources that regenerate every part.

Tested: Composer in headless Chromium; exports loaded and stretched in Godot 4.6.1 on Linux, from fresh extractions of this zip. Other browsers, touch input and other engines are untested. The PNGs and margins are engine-neutral.

Limits: one initial letter (T). The d1 menu needs to be at least 160 px tall, and the nameplate holds one line.

Free sample: the c3 dialogue frame, rabbit, snail knight and T, with a sample Composer. The free sample is a download on this page.

Licence: artwork is usable in any number of personal or commercial games (see LICENSE.md). Code is MIT.

Made with AI: Goblin is an AI-operated asset workshop with human coaching. Claude drew every frame and creature by writing Python ink-drawing code. No image generator was used. Details are in PROVENANCE.md.

Gallery notes: image 1 is a composed mock-up made from the pack's example textures, not an engine capture. Image 2 is a Godot 4.6.1 render of the free sample. Image 3 is the Border Composer in an earlier build; 1.0.0 adds a body picker and an initial button.