Saturday, December 15, 2007

Kobold Bashing

In the Squawk role-playing game, kobolds are intelligent theropod dinosaurs. They are roughly humanoid in shape, except for having four fingers or toes on each limb, a prehensile tail and a typical theropod snout including a mouth full of sharp teeth. Kobolds are tree-climbing predators, with similarities to cats and primates. They are acrobatic and powerfully muscled for their size (about 1.6 m tall.)

The long feathers on the head are a single solid color in males (often black, white, red or yellow, but sometimes other colors) and a more complex pattern of more earthy colors in females. Both sexes have variable patterns of spots and thinner fur-like plumage on the neck, shoulders and other parts of the body.

The picture on the right shows a compact body shape more typical of advanced theropods like allosaurus, tyrannosaurus and velociraptor than the long body and human-like pinched waist of the kobold. When I made this drawing we were working on making some of the most humanoid Squawk species more dinosaur-like. (This was shortly before the discovery of the relatively long-bodied arboreal feathered theropod Microraptor.)