Dragons are the eldest of Gaea's living children and the most dangerous she ever made. The dragon-father Nagatayora was the first of them, raised to guard her world from the sky, and every dragon since is of his line. They do not die of age. A dragon can be killed, and across the long history of the world a great many have been, but nothing in a dragon's body fails on its own, and the oldest of them predate the mortal races by millions of years. What that span does to a mind is the part outsiders underestimate. A dragon has patience for any scheme and time for any grudge, and more than a few pursue ends that make no sense to anyone else for no better reason than that an immortal has to fill the hours somehow. The same emptiness turns many of them cruel. When a creature has done everything and outlasted everyone, the suffering of others is sometimes the last thing left that it can still feel something about.
From the reign to the scattered age
For an age before there were mortal peoples, dragons held the world. The Reign of Dragons ran from roughly ten million to two and a half million years ago, and at its height Nagatayora's children ranged across all six planes with nothing above them. Wolf and lion came into the world beside them, Gaea's two other great children, and the three lines have never preyed on one another — a peace still kept among the Naga, the Sharabha, and the Ulvsjael who descend from them. When the druids made the elves from wood and river-stone, dragon and elf ruled together for the long stretch the elves still call the Walk. The age bred its own undoing as well. Eyachria, Nagatayora's favorite, grew until cities stood on her back and then reached for Gaea's place as keeper of the world, and her own father struck her dead for it; her spine is the mountain range that walls the south of Aboyinzu to this day.
The reign ended with the dragon-father himself. At the Shattering, the titan Hykravones broke Nagatayora open in the air above the field, and he was the first of Gaea's three children to fall. His death ran two ways at once. His blood came down burning in the east and changed the mortals it struck into the first Naga, who carry his shape and his long memory still; his last breath went west and set over the sea as Oblivion, the standing memory-storm that hid the hatch-ground so no fleet could find it. Leaderless and thinned, the dragons began a decline that lasted ages. The mortal peoples multiplied, raised walls and kingdoms across ground that had been dragon country, and the dragons drew back into the wild and high places, fewer every century and no longer a single power. They were still the deadliest thing in any valley they chose to enter. They were simply no longer the thing that ruled it.
Then they pressed back out. The Return of Dragons, dated to 8,104 BSD in the Great Expansion, was dragonkind forcing its way back into a world that had filled with peoples who never had to share it, and the conflict ran bloody and long. One people did not fight them. Far later, in the early Seventh Dawn, the Naga of Adron crossed Oblivion to the hatch-ground and came home bonded to dragons of their own, and for the span the Middle Sea called the Wyrmward, Adron flew war-dragons no rival could answer. That ended in a night. Around 2976 SD the Waterdark order cut every bond at once, and no rider of Adron has crossed the storm since. What is left in the present age is what the world mostly knew before the Wyrmward: dragons scattered and wild, each its own power and answerable to nothing. Kanzekill quarters the southern Dragon's Spine after a fortress she cannot find. The brothers Rothogomos and Tepheranos hold a frozen feud across the Kharvorn passes. Chavux raids the shipping of the Blades because the Naga who could end him will not raise a hand against a dragon. They do not coordinate, and they rarely acknowledge one another. A dragon is a thing a kingdom endures, not a power it bargains with.
Where dragons hatch
Every dragon in Alaria traces to one island. Nagayeshi sits at the eye of Oblivion, a single smoking cone over black sand, and it has been the hatch-ground of dragonkind since the deep age — since long before the storm closed over it, and long before there were Naga to give it a name. The cone's slow fire warms the clutches buried on its slopes, and the young take their first flight there. They do not stay. A grown dragon leaves on its own wings, the memory-storm that unmakes any other mind holding no power over one of the dragon-father's own line, and scatters into the world to take whatever range it can hold. That is how a single hatch-ground stocks a whole world with solitary, far-flung dragons.
What set Adron apart was never that its dragons were born differently. It was access. Once Nagatayora's death sealed the island behind Oblivion, only his blood-kin the Naga could hold a course through the memory-storm, so for a few centuries the riders of Adron were the only mortals who could reach the hatch-ground and treat for a dragon at all. Everyone else met dragons only where the dragons chose to be met. The island itself is kept by Eyatora, Nagatayora's eldest living child, who has raised every clutch since before her father died, and on her black beaches the rule that governs dragons everywhere else is turned on its head. A dragon takes what it wants and answers for none of it. The one thing it cannot take is the bond. The joining of dragon and rider could not be forced by a Naga or faked by a dragon; it ran to the soul or it did not happen at all, and Eyatora's whole office was to weigh which pairings should be offered and to refuse the rest. The most powerful creatures in the world, and the only lasting alliance any of them ever made with mortals turned entirely on the dragon's own consent. She raises clutches still, though no one has come to claim one in centuries.
The forms a dragon takes
A dragon's color is not fixed at the shell. Over a long life its form drifts toward what it has become, until hide, breath, and bearing settle into a type the way a face settles into its habits, and the color a survivor reports is really a reading of temperament and attunement worn on the outside. The reading is rough. Plenty of dragons never fit their stereotype cleanly. It holds often enough to be worth knowing before you meet one.
The commonest are named for their color, and the color is a fair warning. A black dragon is the schemer, patient and manipulative, its breath fire or acid — the feuding brothers who broke Argysis are of that kind. Green is cruelty and poison together. The white dragon is crueler than either and breathes killing cold, while the red is the hoarder out of the old tales, greedy past any use it has for the gold, breathing fire. Worst to bargain with is the blue: insightful, deceptive, more patient than a creature has any right to be, its breath lightning or ice, and some of them grown so far into water that the sea seems to move with their mood.
The rarer kinds take their name from a force rather than a hue. A time dragon breathes warped and stuttering hours and is attuned to time itself. The dark dragon looks made of living shadow, wound through with darkness. A force dragon runs toward grey more often than not and bends raw force; Kanzekill of the Dragon's Spine is one, though her hide kept its rust. Rarest of all is the void dragon, attuned to the void, so seldom seen that most of what is told of it is guesswork, and most of those who could have corrected the guess did not survive the meeting.
Game mechanics
Statblock
960, 800, 640, 480, 320, 160 d20s across board. Size L6 (Push extra 30 (60x5) feet further)
+14 defense
600 foot flight speed, 400 foot move
Attacks. Each bodypart can enter engagement separately.
Breath: 20d6. Telegraphs action. 1/heart die
Claws: Slashing, +23/+27
Tail: Bludgeoning, +25/+29
Bite: Piercing, +23/+27. Also, contested might/agility or 2 levels restrained. If you haven’t moved more than 40 feet by the end of turn, then dragon can make this attack. Next turn, CN 26/15/11 agility check or else swallowed. Immediately begin taking wounds.
+14 defense
Lair Action Ideas