Dragonnel

With four legs, great wings and a long tail, a dragonnel looks enough like a true dragon from a distance to cause a panic. It is its own species, though, related distantly to both dragons and pteranodons, and a closer look reveals a toothed beak and a bumpy, dinosaur-like skin.

Hatchlings are shiny black with red bellies. With age the belly fades to gray and the flanks deepen to a dark reddish violet, and adults grow long maroon spines down the back and white frills around the head. Most cannot talk, but 4% of wild adults speak the common tongue of evil dragons. They are not clever, yet they are usually evil, sly and spiteful.

Dragonnels have no breath weapon. They fight with the claws on their forefeet and a beak bite, and when they are not using their claws they can whip their tails at foes behind them.

Wild dragonnels are more sociable than dragons, banding together loosely to defend one another, hunt together and breed. Prime males avoid other males and keep small, fairly stable harems. A female slips away to bury her eggs in warm, damp soil, then leaves them, usually returning to her band but sometimes living alone until she finds another.

Evil humans dwelling among humanoid tribes on a lawless coastal peninsula are the best-known dragonnel riders, using them for war and raids. A dragonnel flies at full speed with up to 360 pounds aboard, but anything over 100 pounds drops its maneuverability to the rating in parentheses, and it cannot or will not fly with more than 360 pounds. On the ground it runs at full speed carrying up to 540 pounds; load it heavier and it sits down and refuses to budge. Mounts often wear leather barding, which improves their AC to 2. Such barding costs 600 gp and weighs 180 pounds.

Training them is hard work, and they serve only grudgingly. Wild adults cannot be trained at all, though evil beings may coax the talking ones into cooperation, and in such bargaining dragonnels prove as vain and greedy as any dragon. The usual method is to find a clutch, hatch it and spend about five years training the young. A trained mount is steered with four reins, two to each jaw, and a short goad with a metal point and a weighted butt. Even then they cannot be trusted, and more than one rider who approached his steed carelessly, without a sharp goad ready, has taken a painful or even deadly bite.

Dragonnels thrive in most climates other than the coldest and driest. They once roamed widely across the continent's hills and mountain ranges but today survive almost nowhere except that same peninsula, where they are kept as steeds.

A clutch holds 1d6+2 eggs, which hatch in 12 weeks if kept warm and moist. Hatchlings fly almost at once and reach maturity in about three years. In the wild they prefer big game such as cattle, elk, horses and the odd human or demihuman, but in lean times they will scavenge or catch almost anything alive, from rodents and fish to humanoids. Unlike dragons they are strict carnivores and cannot eat plants, gems or minerals. Captive dragonnels need red meat, roughly two cows' or horses' worth every month.

Nothing preys on them naturally, but humans hunt them for raiding herds and flocks, and every kind of dragon kills them: good dragons despise their stupidity and malice, and evil dragons simply resent the competition.