Make them related to iguanas. Pretty much the same thing.
I have to admit some Iguanas do look pretty “baby dragon” like.
That quote was in the news at least twice in the past three years.
Googling, that apparently became a thing all the way back in the 3rd Edition.
That’s my recollection. In original AD&D (I can’t speak to OD&D), they were sometimes depicted as doglike – but other times had horns and such, and were more lizardy, as I remember it.
3E recast them as kind of like wimpy dragon wannabees, and at least the kobolds themselves claimed to be related to dragons. The first WotC-published 3E module, The Sunless Citadel, featured a tribe of kobolds that had captured a baby white dragon, which they worshipped as a god.
It’s how the Japanese and Western versions of kobolds diverged; the Western versions got more lizardy, the Japanese ones got more doglike.
Nowadays they’re more crafty and clever, with a fondness for traps - basically something between goblins and gnomes. Their default alignment is also neutral now rather than evil.
Our own real world includes lizards with four legs plus two wings. The scientific name for them literally means “flying dragon”.
And lizardfolk were playable long before 5th edition. Their 3rd edition stats include a section on lizardfolk as characters. They have a LA of +1, meaning that, due to their better stats than the standard races, a 4th-level (say) lizardfolk is considered equivalent in power to a 5th-level character of a standard race, but you can totally play them.
Note that the “wings” are elongated ribs, and (as far as I have read) use their front limbs to manipulate them. They glide somewhat like a flying squirrel (I don’t think they use a moose to propel them into the air 
)
Brian
And taken out of context both times- in that letter The professor was complaining about things the animators/artists got wrong on the Rankin-Bass LotR films. “19. Why does Z put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form
of Auks.) The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the
?human? form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad,
flatnosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact
degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely
Mongol-types..” This wasnt in context of his legendarium or world building, but an attempt to help the artists and animaters- who clearly didnt know an orc from an orca, and give them some grounding in what orcs looked like in terms they would understand. I mean Beaks and feathers? This is the issue of why it is best not to take things out of context. This is not at all what JRRT meant orcs were in his world, just some guides for clueless artists so they could better understand.
Sometimes I forget how many books WOTC published in its 3-3.5E era, and how much content (some useful, mostly useless) they contained. There’s nothing you could tell me was there that would surprise me.
I wouldnt say “mostly useless”. I mean AD&D had the ‘wilderness survival guide”-
Whatever its flaws, the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide was at least interesting. The same, sadly, cannot be said of the Wilderness Survival Guide, which is probably the most dull, tedious D&D book I have ever owned, for any edition. Rather than inspiring me, as I expected and as the DSG had, the Wilderness Survival Guide actively discouraged me from wanting to inject a little environmental realism into my adventures and campaigns
I owned them both, and to the best of my recollection… yep.
OTOH, 3E had Ghostwalk.
That definitely does not seem to be the case, even with the fuller quote you provided.
True. But it’s weirdly open-minded given that Tolkien’s life overlapped with respected authorities who would argue that beauty was purely objective and that some groups of people weren’t just unattractive in the eyes of other groups of people - they simply were unattractive. Obviously it’s a rotten thing for Tolkien to have written, but it sounds almost like he knew it was rotten and was trying to make it less bad.
I mean it’s not terribly surprising that Tolkien might not be antisemitic AND still not like Asian or Black people. The claims of “anti racism” as a label for Tolkien seem to be quite tenuous.
And that’s fine, he was middle of the road when it came to that stuff for an old English dude.
True, but playable lizardfolk wasn’t a matter of splatbook creep. Their monster entry was in the Monster Manual 1, and by the time of 3.5, the default position was that almost everything could be a player character (albeit sometimes with such a high LA as to make them nonviable).
They’re even older than that! Stats for lizard men were first published in 1975, in the Greyhawk supplement. The first (AFAIK) rules for them as PCs were published in '81, in White Dwarf Magazine.
Even First Edition it was possible to have a playable lizard man via Reincarnation. I recall a collection of pre-made NPCs, one of whom was such a reincarnation; so the idea was already there even if it wasn’t properly fleshed out.
Later editions made it easier and something that could be done from the start. And less restrictive to play nonhumans in general.
One of my favorite effectively one-shot characters was a black kobold monk who basically thought he was Batman. My answer to “why does a member of a monster race go adventuring” was that he was first out for revenge against the party that came through his warren as a child and killed his family and once he got his revenge decided to be a protector as he found revenge wasn’t as satisfying as he had hoped.