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Canon is wrong, dragonborn have tails
the official canon states that tieflings can't be purple, and yet the official artwork for a tiefling is a purple tiefling
Possibly the most ignored sentence in the PHB, even by Wotc themselves:
Their skin tones cover the full range of human coloration, but also include various shades of red.
Purple is a shade of red, trust me I'm a colorist
I can do you a few of the most ignored pages in the PHB: I've yet to meet a table that uses Trinkets
Our group likes to roll on that table and then never bring up their trinkets in game. Such a missed opportunity
It counts if you consider every color with some amount of red in it a shade of red
Example: #dcd2f0 (my tiefling's skin color)
Official Dragonborn PHB description say Dragonborns are brown/rust coloured, with some being rust-copper green.
Artwork on the same page is a red scaled dragonborn.
The full sentence is "Their small, fine scales are usually brass or bronze in color, sometimes ranging to scarlet, rust, gold, or copper-green." So a red one is kinda like a real life human with ginger hair; uncommon, but not weird. There's also the bit about dragonborn with a particularly strong influence of their draconic ancestor shortly afterwards that says, "These dragonborn often boast scales that more closely match those of their dragon ancestor - bright red, green, blue, or white, lustrous black, or gleaming metallic gold, silver, brass, copper, or bronze."
You omitted that the draconic colored scales are from extremely rare and isolated clans.
Rare, yeah, but still a valid possibility. But the main part I wanted to bring up is that the sentence you were referring to actually already includes "scarlet" as an ordinary colour, so the red one in the accompanying picture fits just fine
Which is exactly the sort of origin that makes a fun character.
Or a one note one. But, while I like monstrous races as options, I dislike the trend of 5e to make our characters "special", unique, or noteworthy before the adventuring even begins. (If this is duplicated for some reason, I'm sorry. It tried editing and that didnt' seem to take, then I tried deleting my original message and reposting. Not sure what's up.)
The player characters are generally adventurers fated to achieve greatness, for them the extraordinary is just ordinary.