Well, here is my deformed attempt at a 'raptor body from a front (pouncing) view and then decked out in armor. Hard to draw, and it shows, but my goal now is to draw these things I have in my head instead of constantly holding back. You have no idea how much has been "withheld" from being created and shown over the years...

The Grar Knights - Armored Monsters
800 years ago, the possibility of the Grar conquering the world was very real, and very terrifying. At a time when the rest of Rapis had barely advanced out of the stone age, the Kingdom of Grar (properly pronounced as a growl) was the first to invent iron working, and soon had full plate armor seemingly centuries ahead of its time. Culturally, this isn't quite as big of a leap as it first appears, as what they did, in their minds, was take Ranvar-style of armor design of overlapping lacquered plates to its ultimate extreme, with first making the same design out of steel plates, then covering the entire body.

The Grar made numerous "experiments" in different kinds of melee weapons. The orthodox school of thought was to enhance the claws by fitting extended metal cones over them, for the enhanced slashing with the raptorcats' natural weapons. A related concept was wrist and ankle scythes, which could brutally slash apart and eviscerate a raptorcat. (This was actually considered a "swift and civilized" method of killing at the time, as opposed to the fighting styles of the Ranvar and Sthell, which tended to inflict terrible wounds that were not immediately fatal, and often caused slow death.) Perhaps the most influential invention of the Grar was the tail mace, which added another lethal weapon in addition to their natural claws, an innovation which would be copied by armies the world over, eventually.

Located in the heart of the Eastern Continent, the Grar Kingdom was the terror of its day, able to strike at all the other tribes. The Ranvar in particular were susceptible to them, and suffered defeat after defeat. Perhaps the only reason the Sthell warriors were not slaughtered by them was the walled City of Triven, and the Sea between the continents, lay between them, and blocked the Grar armies. Even the Ezzen Bow Knights feared them, despite having the only weapon that could reliably penetrate such heavy armor.

In hindsight, the Grar armor, and exotic weapons mounted on it, was an extravagance they could not really afford. Labor-intensive to produce, they were not able to ever equip and bring large numbers of knights to the field. While it made them nightmarish killing machines in melee combat, it also slowed them down greatly, eliminating that natural advantage of raptorcat soldiers - their speed. The much more lightly-equipped Ranvar and Ezzen were often able to flee, and so they rarely inflicted large numbers of casualties in actuality, instead driving their enemies back, and capturing areas by sheer psychological pressure.

Eventually, the tail bow would proliferate from the Ezzen to the Ranvar, and they would organize an effective defense, and the Grar would become an extinct culture. In hindsight, classical Medieval weapons and armor technology was unsuitable for the raptorcats' biology and body plan, and ended up being a short-lived "experiment" of an "exotic" culture, as opposed to the mainstay it usually is for more humanoid races.