So the dragons of Aftergarden are getting a redesign?
Yeeeeah despite making them just birds with ears to be a troll to dragon terminology pedants, I ended up trolling myself because their designs weren't weird enough to hold my interest. I was curious if I could make a creature with tripodal/pentapodal locomotion that felt "right" to me, since I had recently found out kangaroos use their tail as a fifth limb while walking and it blew my mind. Importantly this also allowed me to continue being a troll, since dragon terminology pedants usually define things by how many limbs they possess and walk on, and I've yet to meet any that account for odd numbers.
Here's the initial brainstorming sketches. I was also trying to figure out if I could do fire-breathing without magic, but the result was ultimately "Nope," at least for my own creature design standards. Flesh and fire reeeeeeally don't mix well. But I also wanted to steal spellworms/energy animals from an older fantasy project and add them to Aftergarden, so that's fine, I can just give them a symbiotic spellworm in their throat.
This is about as far as I got before I was distracted by designing alien wildlife and livestock. The spade at the end of their tail is actually a reversible foot, with claw/hoof keratin structures growing on the ends of vertebral processes. When sprinting, they are tripodal, and when walking, they alternate between the knuckles of their dexterous rear limbs and the wings/tail tripod. This makes them kinda a back-heavy flyer, but I'm fine with making them more focused on ground locomotion and reticent to fly. Most importantly, this is definitely a bizarre enough body plan to be fun to endlessly tinker with.
