So I’ve been working on a semi-secret project with a friend that involves the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game system. It may come as no surprise that it involves a dragon, specifically, a green dragon.

While I was preoccupied with stat blocks and game balance and whatnot, when I was winding down to get ready to work on the dragon for tonight, I wondered what the descriptive text for the green dragon was:

Chromatic Dragon, Green

Scales the color of emeralds armor this ferocious dragon. A single sharp horn protrudes from the end of its toothy snout.

That’s it. The other nine “true dragons” are similarly sparse, with the occasional description like “long-winged” or “serpentine,” which is at least a little helpful, but on the whole kind of falls flat.

So the question becomes, if I were to draw something based on the Pathfinder Green, how much should I crib from its 3.5 predecessor? In the interests of intellectual property and whatnot, probably nothing, though clearly the older dragon is an influence.

So in the end, without reading too much into descriptions that weren’t there or drawing on game mechanics, I decided on something like this:

I need to go and stare at scales again, but I was happy that I stopped and considered the brows a bit for this.