Revisiting Gnomeworld (Patreon)

Actual title Aftergarden. I left this project unsatisfied, not feeling like the designs were interesting enough to hold my attention. The tumblr tag is here if you're curious (it's not that long).

The gnomes I think I want to push harder into a fairytale-like aesthetic with an emphasis on their animal traits. The original designs are cute but they feel very furry-core and, er, "animated movie protagonists." I'd like to make them less generically appealing. There not many doodles here but I want to make them true eusocial marmosets with a hierarchy and ethnicity codified by the kinds of hats they wear.

The dragons.... well. I find people who taxonomically categorize all dragons from every piece of media by the category names they learned from a different piece of media very frustrating, i.e. the kind of fellow who corrects you when you call a lizard beast with two flying limbs and two walking limbs a "dragon" because according to someone somewhere, the lizard beast needs to be a quadrupedal winged hexapod to be a "dragon." While I love a fictional taxonomy, I reject the idea that one property's categories must apply to all fiction.

Anyways, because I am a troll who burnt out on my interest in classical dragons when I was 13, I made the gnomeworld dragons giant carnivorous parrots with external ears. (The "um actually it's a wyvren" types bounce off when it's literally a bird). However, I ended up trolling myself because I wasn't that interested in my own designs for them. 

But I couldn't change them without upping my troll game! So now I'm experimenting with making their tail a walking limb, which I think thoroughly complicates any limb based dragon category. I've also been unsatisfied and skeptical of a lot of odd-limbed designs in spec bio, so I wanted to play around and see if I could find a design that works for me. 

There's developmental sketches here and I'm not settled on anything. Currently I'm angling to make the Aftergarden dragons bimodal walkers who walk pentapodally like a kangaroo, and sprint tripodally with their legs tucked. When they're using their hind limbs to hold objects, they'll walk tripodally. They are sophonts like gnomes with complex languages, but are much longer lived and less intensely social and industrialized. They're fickle and some groups and individuals will trade with gnomes and regard them as relative equals, some see gnomes as a nuisance, and some see them as a particularly clever and challenging prey item.

I would also like to make them fire-breathers in some capacity, but I'm not sure how I want to handle it yet. I'm at an impasse on whether I want to include actual magic, technology indistinguishable from magic (in the form of ancient human artifacts), or go hardline science-core and have an explanation for everything mechanically. The latter makes literal firebreathing tricky, since most methods of producing fire chemically are far more likely to hurt the animal making those chemicals than anything it's spewing them at. I'm also considering importing spellworms from an inactive worldbuidling project (CTC) as the "magic" for gnomeworld. In this case, dragons would have symbiotic spellworms that live in their body and lend energy to ignite their fire (a safe distance from their mouth).