What would Lovecraftian Dragons be like?

>What would Lovecraftian Dragons be like?
Massive, ancient, and powerful beyond reckoning. They would follow their own far-reaching agendas which make sense only to a nigh-immortal being; the trivial side effects of their actions could change the world as we know it. A dragon could decide to simply lie down somewhere to take a hundred-year nap, and the smoke from its nostrils would block out the sun and create a localized ice age. There's no malice behind it, no ill will, that's just the sort of thing that happens around a living force of nature.

Basically, they'd be dragons.

Like a regular dragon but weaker to steam boats.

Ignorant slaves, you know already.

Dragons are actually the size of a big dogs and were relativelly numerous. They were the noble cast of a lizard-like alien race who immigrated to earth due to their world dying. Dragons are very intelligent and have two heads, with two brains. Their two brains more than double their mental capacity and if they lose one of them, they regress to the level of intelligence of an intelligent man, which is considered idiot for them.
They also have a dozen of eyes all over their body. Thanks to their amazing intellect, they can see without any problem with them, and even react faster than a man.
Since they're noble, each of their two head have a crown.
Finally they can mate with human, producing human with superior intelligence. Most of their humans offspring are loyal to them and treat them as royalities. However, their downfall came from one of those superior human.
A dragon raped a queen, in order to have a royal children who could be used as a pawn. However, the king discovered the truth and managed to keep the child, Alexender, hidden from his true father. THen, when Alexender became old enough to reign, his first noteworthy act, forgotten by history, was to wipe out the dragons who plagued his country and who eluded the royal familly for generations. He then started a campaign over all Europe, wiping dragons hideout one after another, thus building a great empire.

If you're doing it right, they probably shouldn't look any different from other eldritch abominations--the term "dragon," is what your people call it to try and justify what they looked at.

>like this

Dude you're an idiot.

They'd be just like the Medieval interpretation of dragons.

Seriously, have you not seen that shit? Some had eyes all over their bodies, others were fishy-worm-lizard hybrids, they were just NASTY.

Well, I used the epic of Alexander the Great as an insparitation

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Can't go wrong with taking ideas from Dark Souls.

>One route might be to make Desire even more fundamental to what Dragons are.

That does sound rather Lovecraft-like.

There's enough variety in Lovecraftian creatures that this could go a variety of ways.

1. Ancient Aliens. In this version the dragons are initially awful in appearance but have some social or mental aspect that makes them relatable to humans like the Yith or the Elder Things. They predate humans, they are far above humans but their menace is not particularly cosmic.

2. Tainted Humanity. Dragons are what people BECOME when something foul in their blood manifests, twisted through the generations from a human form to something utterly unnatural. This might be due to fundamental malevolence of their line or it might come down to an ancestral mingling of the human line with an inhuman one. Think the Innsmouth fish people or the Dunwich Horror.

3. Cosmic Force. Something so far above us and unknowable that to directly behold it is to be fundamentally unable to cognitively process what your eyes see. The best one can approximate when describing them is metaphor, ala Cthulhu's soapstone statue (a bit like a dragon, octopus fish man?) or the thing Houdini sees in Under the Pyramids (the idea being that ancient Egyptians created the Sphynx in the image of something they worshipped that was not a sphynx but was lion-like, bird-like, man-like etc.) See also Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth etc.

Nuclear.

Well if you want to go more along the vein of true Lovecraftian writing, rather than the "slap tentacles on it and call it a day" approach, I would suggest turning the question on its head. Instead of making a Lovecraftian dragon, you could make a Lovecraftian entity that human culture based their concepts of a dragon off of. Some Asian cultures used to see dragons as forces of nature, religion and the universe. Perhaps long, long ago, they came into contact with something that truly was an emissary of the greater universe?

>A proper eldritch horror take on Dragons, though, could be interesting.
bogleech.com/dragons.html

Soft sci-fi dragons.

Their scales, bones and teeth are primarily made of an extremely dense & hard stable transuranic element capable of resisting penetration by anything short of a nuclear strike. Their internal organs aren't quite as tough, but are still far tougher than anything organic; essentially flexible metal. Their blood is molten metal, their body temperature so high that they visibly glow red from their own body heat. Their metabolism is based on a mix of high-energy chemical and nuclear reactions. Their scales keep their internal radiation from escaping and they usually leave surprisingly little contamination behind, as they can sense radiation and tend to lick up anything they render radioactive - they like the taste.

Their wings and fins are upon close examination not solid but are a fractal webwork of fibers of the same material as their scales; they are not for flight, but for heat dissipation (think REASON's fractal heat sink from Snow Crash). For flight they produce throughout their body a sort of massive neutrino like particle that they can emit directionally, invisibly flooding out of their body to provide lift or thrust as needed. They can achieve a roughly 10 gravity acceleration and keep it up for years before exhaustion.

In combat they can breathe moderately radioactive "fire" - really just superheated air, or for a longer ranged attack superheat air inside their mouth & throat into a plasma and spit it out as a very high velocity plasma bolt. Their brightly glowing eyes can also emit laser beams that are longer ranged; these double as one of their main sense organs, they see by LIDAR and radar rather than conventional vision. For large scale damage they can fly low over an area at high Mach speeds - Mach 20-30, say - to devastate everything with a shock wave. For truly large scale damage they can fly into space and divert an asteroid, although this takes a great deal of time and usually other dragons would stop one that tried since they don't want an asteroid falling on them.

A nuclear strike can kill them, as can a sustained attack with enough conventional explosives (the latter doesn't break the scales, but can damage their internal organs through them), and so can enough incendiaries (causing a meltdown). However, when a dragon dies it melts down like a nuclear reactor without a containment dome, and spews horrible contamination over a wide area Chernobyl style. Killing one is a last resort; paying them off is normally better.

They hoard heavy elements such as gold and can be paid tribute (or just hired) with them. Their favorite payment however is radioactive waste, the more radioactive the better; it's like chocolate to them.

Wild.

Aww yiss. I came here to post the Dragon King, and you beat me to it.

Look at this smug fucking bastard.

Watch the latest episode of RollPlay: West Marches, where Galahan and crew enact the plan they've been building up to in the past three episodes, to finally hatch the dragon egg that he acquired way back when.
Steven Lumpkin's dragons are weird and terrifying. We'd previously seen Baharaditana, a gigantic brass dragon who's like a flying furnace beast. Pic related.
Hatching this black dragon required them to basically whip people into a mad frenzy of terror and violence and rioting, and burn down a good chunk of the city of Great Pyrrhinor, in order to feed the egg the required emotional energy.
It was a truly magnificent piece of the murderhobo's art.

Like Iron Kingdoms dragons.

Wrong one, whoops.

Kind of applies, but the most boring of the breath weapons anyways.

Anyways, to elaborate, the dragons in Iron Kingdoms are blights upon the world, unnatural monsters who corrupt the very world around them. They're immensely powerful, practically gods.

They're also practically unkillable, with the only true kills happening by another dragon. In fact, the giants of the setting ended up having to fight off a dragon, and it took an entire army to do so. When they finally managed it, they were left with the dragon's athanc, it's heart. Knowing the dragon could regenerate from it, they split it in two and threw it into a volcano.

Now the giants face extinction as two very angry dragons continue the destruction their sire had begun.

"We had been tracking the beast for weeks when we eventually arrived at its cave, it was obvious that this was was no natural cavern, formed as it was out of warped stone with the texture of glass. We sat waiting until the beast began to emerge, I watched as its long, serpentine body rose out of its hovel and marvelled at its scales like metal plates of a warrior's armour and gaping maw filled with teeth, each of which looked able to tear a man in half. Already me and my companions were getting ready to leave when we saw the terrible breath, everything the foul air excuding from its throat touched became shriveled and blackened, as though touched by an invisible flame, the very ground becoming malformed in front of the beast. At this we ran, and I passed the message on to stay away from these cursed caverns on this dreadful mountain. Here be Dragons."

source for this mini?

It's from Kingdom Death.

>are blights upon the world, unnatural monsters who corrupt the very world around them
Seriously, it's like magical radiation. You get the magical tumours and depending on whether or not the dragon wants you around, you die. Or turn into pic related.

And god help you if Everblight's rapesnakes are around.

Cthulhu is explicitly described as a "dragon squid" several times in The Call of Cthulhu story.

there you go

I hate that people draw him as just humanoid, or even green human with squid head and wings, ingroing that dragon thing.

Well I can appreciate when it's done in such a way as to be some kind of parody of classical sea gods, it reminds me Rousseau's quote about the eroded statue of Glaucus, which is a pretty cool image.
But somehow it always turns out really boring.

And to be honest the depictions that play up the "dragon" aspect usually make him way too cool-looking to be scary. I prefer when artists go for a gangly bloated undead look. Something that suggests it's been rotting away for 60 million years and is mostly made of goo.

Like, imagine this, but with wings and tentacles, and half a mile tall.

I fucking love that design.

I think it's wrong to try and intermingle the word "lovecraftian" with "dragon" outside of one cthulhu description, but if you wanted eldritch/weird dragons you could have just asked, I can spare a few.

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This desu.

Lovecraft's alien races are all 50% gross, 50% goofy.

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Fantastic.

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what is that guy with the large shield on the left doing with his sword

And that's it, that's all I got, no more weird dragons from me. Hopefully someone else can take up the torch of weird dragon dumper, but if not I hope my healthy bundle have helped at least one person out today.

Thanks man, it helped me a lot for sure.

I remember thinking about this a lot a year or so ago, and I'd always come back to the notion of dragons being a chtonian archetype. Which is to say dinosaur earthworms. Primitive subterranean monsters that are unlike any other contemporary creature, and that's lovecraftian as fuck.
So when I try picturing that it ends up as some ugly, creeping mass with an elongated fat body and stumpy half-legs that don't do anything. Like something that's not supposed to fly or even crawl or swim but that just convulses its way across and through the earth, so not like a crocodile, more like a misshapen basilosaurus that spasms and creeps around without any grace.

Like a massive slug writhing in pain, and I really must stress that part, because if you remember old engravings of sea monsters and dragons like Doré's Leviathan, they're basically wyverns and snakes, nothing amazing by our standards, but they're never drawn in a cool elegant pose like a recent artist would, they're always coiled up and contorted in weird ways that suggest intense pain and effort, and looks completely unnatural as a result, and that's 50% of why they still look creepy nowadays.

So it'd be like a mixture between a graboid, and an obsolete depiction of whales, and way uglier. No wings, just vestigial fins, no horns, just petrified tentacles, no scales, just basaltic concretions. It doesn't breath fire but belches sulphuric smokes and constantly drools vitriol and all sorts of poisons, and it's more likely to just crush people without noticing than to actually attack them.

I was reading this thread and remembered how the phrase "here be dragons" was used historically to denote dangerous or unexplored areas, so what it dragons essentially represented the wild and the danger of the uncivilized world.

Wherever they go they act as a draw for primordial fury, bringing storms, floods, sandstorms. They would be elemental creatures whose appearance in a kingdom means it will soon fall. For there are many things in this world far older than humanity, and they're not leaving quietly, nature will form empires of its own, and dragons are its rulers.

>elemental creatures
those would be Derlethian dragons then.

I meant elemental as in a fundamental part of the world as opposed to air/water/earth/fire

Preparing to stab with it, his body is turned to the left a bit his right arm is hidden behind his shield.

>Lloigors
This is one option (pic related)

Or Hunting Horrors.

And did no one mention Shantaks fer fuks sake?

Kaiju of various forms acting either like a really stupid ancient red dragon or ayymaos invading from another dimension.

As for looks:
Deformed sharp mouths with tounges that sprout another mouth.
Extra pairs of eyes
Tentacle whiskers
Fins and drilling horns allowing them to move through everything
And most importantly LAZER BREATH!!!

I think you nailed it.

setting. dragons done right can be all kinds of scary. huge size is also a plus. don't forget that godzilla was at first a horror film.

Is the Glaucus statue just a metaphor, or is there an existing damaged statue of the sea god that he was referring to?
The internet just points me at that fountain in Italy.