Stygian

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, stygians are flightless pterosaurs adapted for swimming. Like beavers, stygians are builders, creating dams and other structures to modify their freshwater habitats. Like platypus, stygians have and electrically sensitive snout used to navigate and find prey in dark and murky places.

More pictures and information about stygians...

Strix

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, strix are intelligent primitive birds with raptorial beaks and talons.
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Skand

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, skands are small intelligent predatory dinosaurs.

• information about skands
• more skand pictures
  

Phage

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, phages are pterosaurs that drink blood, similar to vampire bats. Pterosaurs are flying reptiles, probably archosaurs, with leathery wings. Pterosaurs look a bit like their bird cousins and and a bit like their more distant bat relatives, but they also have unique features including wings supported by a single elongated finger instead of the four-fingered wings of bats or the fused hands of birds.

Vampire bats are not the only real-life animals that feed on blood. Many invertebrates also practice hematophagy, including mosquitoes, some worms and most leaches. So do some lampreys and even a bird called the oxpecker. Although we don't know of any actual blood eating pterosaurs, Mark Witton and Darren Naish's Azhdarchid Paleobiology research challenges the stereotype that all pterosaurs lived by fishing and scavenging like modern shorebirds.

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Orn

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, orns are flightless primitive birds. This is the third intelligent species we designed for Squawk (after gafflings and myrmidons) and the first which was not based on a creature from one of our earlier RPGs.

(Drawing by my brother Ulrich.)

The original orn was a bird- headed humanoid called the "harpy." Next came the "gryphon" and "cockatrice" which were sometimes giant archaeopteryx- like creatures and sometimes feathered crocodiles.

Finally we settled on an idea that combines some of all those ideas, an anthropomorphic primitive climbing bird with a long flexible body (perhaps similar to the narrow-bodied, four-winged fossil bird relative Microraptor gui.)

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Myrmidon

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Myrmidons are intelligent ceratopsian dinosaurs. They are also the second intelligent species we designed for Squawk (after gafflings.)

• More pictures and information about Myrmidons
• Illustrated history of the myrmidon design
  

Lyndwyrm

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Lyndwyrms are intelligent theropod dinosaurs with massive horns and shaggy manes. Lyndwyrm horns are inspired by the horns of Carnotaurus, but they are much longer and twisted like the horns of Triceratops.

(The lyndwyrm images above were modeled and rendered with Blender by my brother Ulrich.)

The feathery mane is inspired by the primitive plumage of real life dinosaurs such as Dilong paradoxus, which are thought to be close relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex. We don't know for sure whether the direct ancestors of T. rex had feathers. If some of them did, then it is likely that T. rex itself had some feathers.

More pictures and information about lyndwyrms...