Howdy! As always i am dumping and messing around with larger canvases, trying to find a balance with drawing size

As always top down left right!

One of the guys in the DragonScape discord recommended a drekir run cycle because we have decided to let drekir sprint on all fours! and how they get to it. So running on all fours is a good option to run even faster (breaking 30MPH) but at the sacrifice of any sort of control while running and you cant really use your arms as now they are forelegs for a hound sprint. This is good if you are just running and need as much speed as possible! But its also very exhausting and takes a lot of energy to do a hound sprint for a prolonged duration, so running on two legs is a slower, but more sustainable choice and is still very fast (20MPH)
So the stages of getting to a hound sprint are left to right
Walking: its walking
Jog: The drek hunches down a little bit for better balance and really starts hustlin
Sprint: A full velociraptor styled run which is good if you wanna keep your usage of arms and have somewhat better turn control (but turn control is still pretty bad drekir are only really good at running in straight lines
Hound leap: a transition into what im gonna call a hound run, if its a wyvern we're talking about they can instead leap further up to take flight from this point
Hound run cycle: this is the fastest way a drek can run, at 30MPH, however they can't really turn at all and they lose the use of their hands to do it. But considering the speed its a great option for running away from the bigger angry dragons.

So this will get into a larger discussion because i have finally changed my mind about bullet cartridges in VerdaStal guns. Simply because there is SO much brass tubing it would be impossible for drekir not to make bullets (assuming they can make percussion caps) Though black powder will still and mostly always be the main propellent of these verdastal guns cartridges would make life a little easier. Also anything that isnt the barrel (which has to withstand a VerdaStal bullet) would probably be made of the steel laying around, its cheaper to buy a teal barrel and build a scrap gun around it than buy a fancy full built VerdaStal gun after all. So expect guns to have a more scrappy post apocalyptic feel. In very primitive areas like Northern Canada in terms of guns it would be more common to see a musket and these cartridge guns would be more common as you head southward.
this drek here has a revolver and i wanted to do like a crouching and shooting and it turned out alright. they need to adjust their neck though to aim down the sights however

While im making guns look more scrapyardy and post apocalyptic i wanted to do that with drekir medieval school stuff. As drekir may not be making things with a Zweilhander design in mind. and additionally again, VerdaStal is expensive. The fighter pictured has supplemented some scrap steel and wood in their shield and armor over a VerdaStal chain shirt since the steel will still do alright in a fight and is better than nothing. Their sword is full VerdaStal (a great weapon vs great armor i would pick the great weapon) and the sword is more based off of a big meat cleaver than any sort of historical sword. But yeah dragonknights should also have a little less polish to their look in my opinion

Trying to redesign hobo! This is just one design, didn't like how it turned out but figured it wouldn't hurt to post so there ya go!

In the case of brass cartridges shooting VerdaStal i feel like a common type of gun one would see would be slamfire shotguns and rifles. Basically its a barrel you put the cartridge into that fits into a slightly bigger pipe, at the back of the pipe is a firing pen and you just slam the barrel (with the bullet) into that firing pin and fire the gun. As long as there are some properly fitting pipes nearby and you have a VerdaStal barrel you can make one of these very easily. This makes them relatively cheap, and they can do the job thats needed to be done! They are usually shotungs but rifles (as seen in the picture) would exist too! The downsides as these things are single shot (you can only put one bullet or shell in the barrel at a time obviously) and they aren't efficient to reload. But they are cheap and very simple to make so in most regions that have cartridge based guns, this would be the most common form! cheap dirty and simple, but it works good enough. These slamfire guns often compete with crossbows in terms of what gets used more often by villagers.

A local DrekirHimi talking to an Indian explorer. The phrase should translate into something like:
"Wait for me here I need to scout ahead to figure out if its safe"
This wyvern is a drek mage! Because they have vials of milk to drink on quick notice that are basically mana pots, filling them up with magic and allowing them to unleash a magical barrage. Ill talk about this more below. I did want to the human explorers to look more like they were prepared for a biological hazard as they don't seem interested in growing scales any time soon.

More notes on VerdaStal guns since im trying to start a bigger paradigm shift: Often gunsmiths will just sell VerdaStal barrels to villages, its affordable for the village and gives the gunsmith enough supplies to work on more intricate firearms. As such with only barrels its the villagers job to make the rest of the gun, this leads to very crude, often singleshot types of guns that are crude, and unwieldy. The drek on the left has a more professionally made shotgun that actually resembles something you might see for sale in a local gun store as a single shot break open shotgun. The one on the right has a shotgun i loosely based off of homemade shotgun depicted in the TM-31-210 handbook that talks about this very subject.

There is a drek who is overcharged and ready to spit some spells.
So a drek mage in a fight needs to constantly "recharge" on magic and the best way to do that is milk! which is almost pure magical energy, like a mana potion persay. so drek mages often have a couple dozen of these on their person so they can charge up quick and if the fight lasts long enough for them to spit out all of their magic, they can chug another one and get back into the fight!

Another drawing of a drek hound running!

alright thats it
Shaggy out!