How do you do dragons in your setting? Are they ferocious beasts, or aloof big guys?

There's three types.
Dragonkin are generally feral, animalistic, and malformed. They result from attempts to create dragons through magic or transform things into dragons. These are wyverns, drakes, etc. They have varying levels of intelligence, but are uniformly incapable of spellcasting. They do generally have innate magical abilities.

Normal dragons are, well, mostly normal D&D style dragons. Big, smart, cast magic, breath death, get knocked off by heroes and villains.

Last, there's the Dragons. Capital D. As far as everybody's aware they've been around as long as the first Gods, and they claim to have created the world. Of course, the first Gods claim to have created the world themselves, as do the primordial Elementals and nobody's managed to prove anything. Each Dragon has claimed some spot and does whatever they please there. One's raising a kingdom like some fantasy SimCity, one's building a castle the size of a metropolis and not letting anybody inside, one's tearing down a mountain and carrying it away rock by rock.

>How do you do dragons in your setting?
In the butt

A dragon leads the space empire of man in my setting, using their polymorphing to have a very hands on approach to the empire.

They're dead and the 7 people who were alive when there were dragons have gone out of their way to completely wipe all mentions of them.

Dragons are intelligent and have their own society, albeit one that's tucked away from the eyes of other sentients.

They exist in loose alliances of dragons, united by a single leader, who represents them in a draconic parliament. These "Nations" of dragons don't exist in physical boundaries, but are rather groups of allied dragons.

Red, green, black, gold, silver, they are all of varying alignments, meaning there are lawful good red dragons and the very rare lawful evil gold dragon. The different breeds of dragons tend toward certain alignments, but it's not set in stone.

Dragons, historically, were created by warring gods during the lost mythic ages of the world to act as living siege engines, and after the war ended, they were left to fend for themselves, and the nations of dragons grew and evolved.

Typically, dragons don't get involved in worldy affairs, as things that concern regular races are typically not a thing that they even remotely care about. When the Nations of Dragons get involved, it means something world shaking is happening or is about to happen.

Very rare, very old, all completely insane from human perspective. It's hard to relate to the mentality of a dude who was old when your species invented pottery.

A mix of the Pillar men from JoJo and the Necrons

However, they are very isolationist, with very few folks getting out of their empire, they employ a mix of science and magic/faith, they only appear to deal with cosmic horrors that threaten the whole of existence, otherwise they just don't really bother or antagonise the lesser species.

A fun game on their setting was a band of criminals and rougues being released from jail under a contract: Call the spess dragons so they can stop the madmen who fucks black holes

Ancient creatures, almost as old as creation itself, that have more or less retreated from this world to the point of becoming the stuff of myth and legend. Many doubt the existence of these dragons because they're so isolated. Some are what can be called anti-social and will kill anything that comes close, while others will allow small communities to live near them as long as they stay quiet. These isolated communities often worship these friendly dragons as their guardians and bring sacrifices to them (mostly in the form of food, so it's a pretty good deal for both sides involved: the dragon gets to eat and sleep all day, and the humanoid creatures near them know that nobody will mess with them if there's a dragon looking out for them).

Creatures created froim the left over skin of the Fruit of Life, which was used to kickstart all mortal life in the universe. They are semi-immortal entities that predate nearly all biological life, and exist and raw magical entities. As part of their pact with the Creator of the Universe, they chose to stay in the world and maintain their power and immortality, and were even blessed with conditional rebirth and reincarnation to save them from the grips of ennui, though in exchange they had to avoid interacting wigth other lifeforms too extensively until Sapient life had evolved and developed enough.

They are quite rare, as there are only ever 20 in existence at a time, and are also assexual in nature.

Historically, they have most often tried to avoid getting involved in mortal affairs, but after the War of Bleeding Heavens many have had a more vested interest in the mortals, such as Rubrinizar who acts as a Banker-Lord of a merchant city-state, and Pelenthizel who constantly tries to get mortals to help him kill fae.

Oh, and don't ask them about the Tarrasque

Furthermore, dragons make up 7 of the 15 deities in the world with two others being human, three being fey and the remainder being a mishmash of nature deities, khorne/slanneshi ripoffs, a duo of good vs evil and a god of necromancy.

One red dragon who attained godhood by claiming rulership of hell and is currently fighting a civil war aggainst the fiend that he deposed for the title. He calls for all his children/decendants/relatives (basically every other draconic creature in the world that happens to be red) to fight for his side.

Another dragon god is neutral good philanthropist who is trying and failing to be a patron deity to all creatures that don't already have patron deity ((Basically all half-breeds, people who have been rejected by their deity for some reason and beings who have been cured of being undead)) On the side she grants miracles to the peasantry.

Kobolds, lizardfolk, younger dragons and the dragonborn are all grouped into one big Hindu-like dragon worshipping religion where you are expected to to pick a Primary diety and worship them specificly over the others mostly based of their colors though exceptions to this is a perfectly normal ocurence. Reds get a lot of shit for being the guys who are specificly being called to arms aggainst hell by the their supermegaevil granddaddy.

Originally creations of Tiamat to kill the gods. When Tiamat was slain and split in two, the Dragons broke, and the Metallic Dragons, reflections of the Chromatic Dragons, came to be.

They're also just intelligent magical flying reptiles.

First of the four primordial beasts, representing fire, equalled by the Leviathans, representing water, the Roc, representing air, and the Titans, representing earth.

Every creature is descended from the Primordials, each of them interbreeding and mixing the pure blood to create a myriad of child races.

For example, the Coutl is mostly Dragon + Roc, with a little Leviathan. It basically just determines the elemental makeup of the different creatures.

As for the dragons themselves, they're mostly extinct. The few that remain are so old that their ability to create vitae has decayed immensely, meaning that they go into torpor for hundreds of years just to build up the energy for a few weeks of activity. Whatever unfathomable plans they may have account for this, and the awakening of any Primordial is always a huge event that inevitably causes vast upsets to any society which exists at the time. The last time a Dragon woke up, it used it's built up energy over the course of an hour to nuke an entire continent. Nobody knows why - Historical texts don't say that there was anything particularly important there, it was mostly mountainous wildland. It just woke up, took off to the sky, and razed EVERYTHING on an Australia-sized landmass, right down to sea level.

>skin of the fruit of life
>dat pic
Diggin it. This is the style of Dragon we deserve, but not the ones we have now

My Dragons are basically flying tremors graboids whose tongue heads look like King Ghidorahs and the beak is more of an always opened ring of white bone.

They have a plague like effect that has turned most of the giants in my setting into Ogres and Trolls, who are basically zombified giants with some mutation.

Dragons are relatively normal, if powerful, members of society. Most of them have an unhealthy obsession with gaining wealth, which manifests itself in different ways. Golds and Silvers are obsessive collectors of rare and wonderful magical items, reds and greens typically coerce, steal, and pillage their way to wealth. This obsession often progresses into full-on mental illness, and it tends to ruin their lives (and the lives of those around them, since a dragon in a mental health spiral tends to have issues very quickly).

Dragons are one of the older races in existence, only surpassed by humans and some types of beasts in terms of age. Draconic and Commonspeak are fairly similar languages, and lots of ancient ruins will contain dragon-related artifacts.

Slightly more interesting is the gods. Bahamut insists that Tiamat is his hated twin sister, which is actually non-accurate. They were originally created to be perfect mates, and were for a time, until a certain event turned them against each other forever. I haven't written out this fully yet but Bahamut himself used to be supremely evil, then his wife went too far and he started to turn towards the light with the help of some other gods.

So mild twists, but fairly traditional.

Oh, there's also a fuckload of them. The average person has about a 1% chance of interacting directly with a dragon at some point.

The pic I chose at random, because I lack particularly weird looking dragons.

Still working on the setting, and not much else is solid yet

They're all dead now. Their souls were wiped from reality and their meat fell from the sky when the Ansible of Spirits shunted them to another level of existence.

They were just big dumb fire breathers, but they subsisted on MANA as well as meat. They could grow as big as houses, were spiny and vicious, and very territorial raptorians.

Tell more. Is it in space or just one fantasy world?

What about the Tarrasque?

>Are they ferocious beasts, or aloof big guys?
in my current game: evil ones are greedy, good ones are curious as all hell.
good old ones keep to themselves sort of out of the way, evil old ones scheme and lurk and use minions
evil young ones know that the little fleshing things have a lot of shiney stuff to horde, and are a little more common, good young ones are harder to find but always super curious.

had the party meet a friendly young one when they were just mindlessly exploring mountains looking for stuff to kill before they called it a night.
>what's a name?
they named him. good times

Basically a secret weapon of the gods - they have the blueprints lying around, and some god always falls to temptation and creates dragons. The dragons eventually turn on the gods and try to form their own cults, and are subsequently exterminated, before some new god gets the brilliant idea to get the dragon cycle started again.

There are always a few dragons out there left from the last dragon purge, cruising the sea of stars in hopes of finding a world free from the influence of gods.

But there aren't any.

thats fucking hilarious, do they ever do shit?

Most of the dragons in my setting are exceptionally powerful and really could get together to gain major power, but must of them are to autistic and self-indulgent to do anything.

Most of the Silver and Gold dragons that kept the metallic dragons together to keep the peace and rule over the continent died fighting off a Demon invasion. Now a majority of the surviving dragons have fucked off and pursued random bullshit. My players are going to meet one of them who is a pacifist who should be helping the people in the lands around her recover from the war, but fears that doing so would involve violence so she doesn't even try.

They were just flying dinosaurs from the back yore, but due an event causing all sorts of imagination creatures starting to pop up and altering existing creatures they became generic princess stealing, gold hoarding and farmer extorting magic lizards.

>They shift genders depending on who ends up being the alpha dragon in an encounter. So that big male SOB might end up being the big female egg machine if she meets an even more dominating dragon.
So close--why not play it like clownfish, where the dominant alpha is actually the female, with the males competing amongst themselves, and the dominant male becoming the female when the existing one dies?

Why did it do that?

Maybe in my next campaign friend

That's a good idea actually

They sometimes try.

Male dragons amass hoards to try and attract the much larger and more powerful female dragons as mates. These hoards can be anything from the traditional gold and jewels, to livestock, to books; some bold males have even been known to lay claim to an entire settlement as their hoard.

Because it needs a really, really big mirror to focus the light of the moon for ritual purposes when it next wakes up, and glassing a continent was the most expedient way to get that.

The ritual is intended as an attack against the sanctum of another primordial beast who the Dragon in question is at war with.

Its kinda both. The best way to put it is Kirkbridian Fantasy.

The main world is sort of a post magical apocalypse where the current tech of the world is comparable to that of the Late Antiquity/Early Helenistic period of our world.

There are multiple planets, including an artificial planetoid populated by artificial Crysto-Organisms.

The world has mostly forgotten the Old World, as the Dragons and various other factions after the war worked hard to systematically erase every trace of the old magitek empire, save for a few individuals and cultures that only have minor snippets of things. Though to this day the influences of the ancient empire still remain and can be felt, wit one of the biggest examples being The Human Race

While the race has multiple races, most of them are completely unaware of the others' existences, as they tend to be separated by either continents or planets, so generally a continent will have and focus on the interactions, conflicts, and such of all the various ethnicities and cultures therein.
I'm taking a lot of inspiration from TES, WoT (without the idiotic gender propoganda and conflicts Jordon fapped to), and a bit of Dark Souls.

Tarrasque stuff in next post

They never stop growing as they age, and they don't die of natural causes. They also get smarter with age. They reproduce asexually.

Once a dragon reaches adulthood (at roughly 10,000 years), their bones become completely indestructible, as in, not even a black hole can bend or break them.

Ancient dragons are more intelligent than any other creature (including humans and elves), but there's like 6 of them left because they fight among themselves and they're the size of mountains. They spend most of their time cruising the stratosphere to collect solar energy and magic. They possess no language and do not talk, but nothing is stopping them from learning. They're very good with magic and use it to obtain complete control of their biology, they can mutate at will, but mostly don't bother because they think they're perfect as is.

Basically, they're extremely alien creatures and will never interact with the players in any meaningful way, but traces of their actions can be occasionally seen, pretty much the same way you can see the results of a volcanic eruption but you can't really interact with a volcano.

Settlements tend to form around the bones of dead ancient dragons because they infuse the land with magic allowing crops to grow plentiful and provide some protection against wild animals. People living in these areas do tend to have a higher rate of cancer, but society is not advanced enough to make the connection.

This.

The playable races were created in a bid to bring order to the setting thanks to Bahamut and Tiamat not doing enough to keep their kids in check, so they're these ancient god-like beings to most people that can only be defeated by those chosen by the gods (surprise; not true)

Most people on the main populated continent in our setting are aware of the 5 chromatic ones that still live there.

The red dragon lives trapped in the secret den of the Dwarf King
The blue dragon rules over the desert, but figured out the secret to creating half-dragons had has them do the direct pillaging and enforcing of her rules.
The green dragon USE to be in a wild impenetrable forest that separates the human kingdom from the rest of the continent, but has mysteriously disappeared, even though the forest still has all the markings of it being his lair
The white dragon is just running wild on the arctic plains and doesn't come to main continent until its winter.
The black dragon is enslaved by the drow.

As for the Tarrasque, the reasons why the Dragnos don't like talking about him was because he was once one of them. In the waning days of the Eldraan Empire, when the War of Bleeding Heavens had begun the Dragon who's name has been struck from remembrance chose to side with the Empire, allowing them to experiment on him in exchange for the power of divinity and true immortality/perpetuity. While the empire extracted much information and data from his volunteering, he himself was changed irrevocably. While he did gain power beyond his kin, and gain true perpetuity, his mind was destroyed and he became little more than a mad beast.

At the war's climax, while the armies of the Chosen of Limvri, the Acolytes of Anenz, the Host of the Drealith, the Risen Slaves, and numerous other factions united in their final struggle against the Virtual Optims of the Eldraan Empire, the remaining 19 Dragons united together to defeat their traitorous brother, with Pelanthizel himself fighting head on to seek revenge at being betrayed by the Nameless dragon, who had decieved him and delivered him to the Eldraan for further experimentation before he was rescued by Scion of Limvri.

However, it was soon apparent they could not in anyway over power him, so they weaved together a great magic from their own blood and bound the Tarrasque in a great prison, comprised of seven smokes, ten chains, stored in a raindrop, locked within a boulder, and hidden away in the shadow of a moon.

Since then the name of the one who was the Tarrasque had been whiped away and devoured by the dragons, who to this day refuse to acknowledge even his existence, out of shame for their kind.

Coincidentally, this is also why many dragons despise the creatures many people call "lesser dragons", as they are abominations born of the experiments of the Eldraan using the Nameless Dragon.

>lore-wise
Big ol' bullies. Smart, but only by comparison to regular beasts. They only thing they had going for them was longevity. Still, they didn't do much with that long life. The oldest dragons spanned centuries, and bullied the younger dragons to get their way, so their culture was horribly slow-paced.

It was only once mortals started popping up and building civilization in their microscopic lifespans that dragons really began to 'learn'. And in doing so, scared the ever loving FUCK out of mortals.

Dragons were hunted nearly to extinction, even as they fought back by swallowing towns whole. They never had a large population in the first place, and being terribly territorial and requiring huge hunting ground. Numbers won out. In the last century, the suspected dragon population dropped into the double digits. Color purity meant nothing any more. Crossbreeding between metallics and colors was essential - and rife with genetic issues. Most of the current generation is sterile.

In further panic, they reached for magic. Whelps were taught magical guises and illusions from the cradle, and thus the birth of the "arcane beast" myth was spread. This only fueled the crusade against the dragons. Their bones were strung along the walls of forts. Entire noble lines hail from old heroes of the Hunt. Any time a dragon is sighted in the wild entire nations will mobilize in fear or seeking glory.

>in our campaign
The players haven't dug into the lore too deeply. Yet. The only dragon they have met is a paranoid cleric who they glimpsed, by chance, as a dragon. Despite being proficient in battle and magic, she nearly went catatonic when the players broke her illusion, and when she heard them offhandedly discuss her 'other form' while at the bar.

That's awesome.

You're a cheeky fuck, you know that?

Well, someone has to remember that Cancer Lord
Which, coincidentally enough, is also another one of their titles due to being masters of manipulating flesh and life.

The dragons sleep deep with vast dungeons they created long ago to keep people from touching their shit and to keep their own vast mystic powers from destroying the world. Thanks to their spawn taking a portion of that power, the world has been reduced to ruin and all that's left is the vast ultra dungeon that their lairs have become. It's been so long since anyone's seen a dragon that their spawn (wyverns; they become actual dragons only after they absorb enough magic) are mistaken as real dragons.

A running threat in the setting is that one of the dragons is going to turn into a wyrm soon, which will give it all power over magic. You know how, in Hinduism, when Brahman wakes up from the sleep he needed to create the world his waking destroys the universe and everything in it? That happens when a wyrm is made. The only reason why anyone remembers this is that the hero from the last world who tried to kill the previous wyrm's cries for help are now why nightmares happen.

Very sleepy sons of bitches who are never awake when you fight them, even if killed. Their attacks being the equal of slapping the shit out of your alarm clock trying to find the snooze button.
Complete with sleep talking.

Insatiable.

Somebody feed this poor girl.

they're all kawaii anime girls
but they still behave like standard D&D dragons

Dragons only "technically" exist in our setting.

Every human has dragonic blood flowing through them because elves basically made themselves cease to exist to kill all dragons and trap their powers inside of what was left of their bodies. This is our setting's explanation for why humans are so powerful, can use magic that mortals shouldn't be able to understand, and their insatiable greed. Dwarves don't know about any of this because they were fighting against the setting's Lucifer when this happened, so they just assume the elven gods just forsook the elves.

Unfortunately, any human that gains too much magical power or has a bloodline with too pure of dragoblood actually runs the risk of turning into a dragon. Most humans can summon up their "birthright" powers in some small capacity, but the most powerful can essentially turn into Dragon-Born for a few minutes before it starts to kill them. The fey fear someone full draking out, though, so they're trying to remake elves.

I like having dragons be smart, but still monsters. They're cunning like a cat, they're nasty reptillian predators, but they don't talk.

In one setting I think about on and off, a god made them by shattering the first sun and putting a piece inside most of them, which is why they can breathe incredibly hot fire (save a handful of chaos dragons, who breathe fire-like chaos). Most are evil or bestial by nature as they were created by this god as war machines, but a few of the originals were noble or even intelligent.

As time has gone on, dragon fire has gotten weaker. The fire from the first sun is a limited resource, and every time a dragon has offspring, it loses some of its own fire to give to them. With that inner strength being weaker, dragons have devolved into forms like wyverns, drakes, lindworms, wyrms, etc.

Good tastes

A still-living species from when dinosaurs were around. Not much smarter than humanoid species in most subjects, but excel in one or two particular fields depending on what they obsess over during the roughly 1,800 years that they live. Most dragons stick to their own society, while some like to try playing "big fish in little pond" with the surrounding locals. Currently, the majority of dragon family lines are known in political circles since they've been doing the politics game before humanoids were even around. The colors that D&D gives is what defines the families and influences the way they act somewhat. The cool dragons learn magic or martial arts. All in all they're still just big sapient dinosaurs that have family lines too old to recount anymore.

P.S. they don't look like cats

>How do you do dragons in your setting? Are they ferocious beasts, or aloof big guys?
Depends on the dragon but I often default to one of two versions, some flavor of what said, though to what degree (and what they tend to obsess over) varies from dragon to dragon, and/or a a being that's a slave to the seven deadly sins (even the good ones but they at least try to parse things in ways that'll cause the least amount of harm
...As long as you don't have anything they want and won't give/trade it to them
....Or they get REALLY hungry
.....Or horny
......Or just feel insulted
.......ect)

>Are they common, and numerous, or rare, and hidden?
Rare, but not always hidden, while many will fuck off to nowhere so people won't bug them, most of the time when they're in "civilized" lands they're locations are known

>Do they rule nations, have their own nation, or are they usually on their own?
Can vary, it's not uncommon for them to rule city states and there is a few "god empress" dragons, but for the most part they're on their own

All of the above. Because I use a variety of different dragons, from the animalistic wyvern to the powerful and hyper intelligent true dragons, from the tiny drakelet to the greatness of Apsu, god of dragons.

The western continent sees certain select dragon types, linnorms, true dragons, some drakelets, and small populations of drakes that have been imported and either escaped or were let loose. In addition its not uncommon to see the two humanoid dragon species of kobold and dragonborn, though they tend to be rarer the farther west you go.

Heading east from the western continent you will run into the Dragon Empire. Its western edge is the satrapy of Qadira, a once human controlled land of desert and tropical forests. To the East of this is the full Dragon Empire, a land of dragons ruled by dragons. Its capital is currently Ur-Keleshaat, the current emperor's birth place.

The governmental architecture is often grand and large, mainly due to needing to accommodate bodies that can get up to 60 feet long. Much of the rest is more accommodating for the much more numerous humanoid servants of the dragons.

As to the dragons themselves, they are neither reptile nor mammal but occupy a separate branch from both called Draconia, as much as earth taxonomy can be applied to a realm where most creatures were crafted by gods can be applied.

The setting involved in it's heyday a war between the forces of the First Man who intended to conquer and essentially terraform the world, and the fey, which are arguably the native life forms of the planet. He essentially invented the concept of domination over animals, domestication, hunting, etc... and much of his military force was made of animals he had changed to be beasts of burden or weapons of some sort ala Melkor. As a result, many of the creatures that exist today are the descendants of those first changed creatures, as the setting does not have evolution per se. Horses and cattle and the like were once the primal fey creatures that resembled giant deer, etc, etc.

Dragons are essentially the progeny of primal fey... dinosaurs, for lack of a better word. They're the result of selective breeding and divine magic to create war beasts. The remaining dragons are more like raptors with wings- some of them can breathe fire or have venom, and they are comparable in intelligence to a clever pack animal like a wolf or an orca. They're typically the size of a large horse, but they vary in size. The largest recorded dragon (before mcguffin dragon) was about the size of a schoolbus. They aren't sentient and cannot speak, but generally they're so rare and exotic that all sorts of myths are created about them by common folk.

>the setting does not have evolution per se
>the result of selective breeding
Contradicting yourself there bud.

thats a thick dragon

Easily the most useful reference in the last mont-... 30 days. Probably the last 6 months even.

Rare, impossibly long-lived, and capable of FTL travel.

I have two settings with dragons.

One has magically enhanced dinosaurs to serve as dragons and the other one is set in the distant future after the end of the world and the dragons there are genetic engeneered weapons from a war that destroyed civilisation and became apex predator after nature found it's way and integrated them into the ecosystem, kinda like Monster Hunter.

I don't like the smart fantasy dragons, I prefer the fantastic animals kind of dragons.

Assuming we're talking true dragons, because wyverns have a tad different situation.
My setting is significantly high power, and the kingdom can send an elite squad that is more than capable of slaying any dragon that presents a threat to the local citizenry.
Dragons that enter the country with permission are treated as legal residents with full rights, and given a cave and sometimes a nearby piece of land as their fief, where they keep their entourage (often kobolds, half dragons and such) as their direct subjects.
This is also so that the dragon needs not fear being hunted down while living there, as dragon corpses are basically a bunch of mid-to-very-high quality magical components packed together and in a generous quantity.
Giving that a dragon hunting for his own meals could accidentally destroy the local wildlife, instead he takes a part of whatever his subjects grow, fallen off scales and teeth (also magical materials, if a bit lower quality), or sells magic, lore and information (acting as a tutor sometimes) to the local populace in exchange for the amount of meat the dragon may need for sustaining.
The original storm dragon population of the region was extinguished, though (Except for the species patriarch, although he lives in spirit bonded to the kingdom's most powerful weapon-out of his own will). However, there's some silver and blue dragon scholars intent on seeing if they can bring the local variation back again.

I just haven't really thought about it I guess. There could be a case made for the fact that the internal setting has only existed for like, ten thousand years or so. Maybe twenty thousand at maximum.

I guess technically there should be genetics, as the external setting has genetics. The setting takes place in a pocket universe that is cut off from the future of our reality, where a technology that allows the observer to modify reality on a macro scale essentially creates a war when most people effectively become gods. The outside universe is a scorched hell. One of the gods used to be a human starship pilot. The humans in the internal setting are essentially stranded seedship progeny ala trigun, except they were accidentally planted there to be cattle for another god from the Outer Hell.

But I digress.

Dragons are former powerful dwarves that succumbed to their greed and went mad with power. They're essentially forces of nature with completely alien modes of thought.

I forget where I originally got the idea from, but I've been using an old schema based on Greed, though it's not inherently bad. Their biggest natural magic makes them stronger and tougher when defending or expanding their hoards, and the larger the hoard, the more powerful the dragon. It also allows them to mark and locate bits of their hoard.
On the less destructive side of things, you'll have dragons running libraries (They KNOW where the late books are), banks or other security systems (A bit weaker if they don't directly 'own' the items in question), and even organisations of spies (It's a little more work, but even people can be parts of a hoard). On the more destructive side, of course, you have the ones raiding for gold, but that's generally a bit less interesting to me.

I also like to throw in some crazy old elder dragons that break all the rules and make no sense, apocryphal beings of magic and might that can't be fought directly, only outwitted or avoided. Pic related is one of my favorite villains.

is... is the cat a stripper? wtf is up with all those singles.

Generally neutral beings, who don't give two shits what everyone else is doing and will occasionally get involved if it pertains to their personal interests.

Ferocious, aloof and big.
Rare and mostly reclusive, but some evil ones are too arrogant and hateful to hide.
Usually on their own, but one rules the Kingdom of Drakary and there may be others like him in distant lands.

>Because it needs a really, really big mirror
>as an attack against the sanctum of another primordial beast who the Dragon in question is at war with.

I love this sort of absurd long term thinking. It really fits the way an immortal being might act, given how long they have to plan and carry out their plan.

The fact that everyone else literally can't comprehend the plan because they're just a small speck on the timeline makes it even better.

You can go to a bank and say "I'd like to withdraw $200 dollars from my account, ones only please" and they'll honor it to the best of their ability. I bet there's all sorts of crazy scents for a cat on 200 bills.

>hair-do
Furshit, kill it with blood and brimstone.

I just used dragons as parallels to that Australian aboriginal idea of the rainbow snake; an ancient animal that shapes the world wherever it goes.

At first I wasn't even going to have dragons in the setting but I had a player who wanted really bad to be a dragon ancestor sorceror so I made up a whole backstory for dragons so that he can slowly discover that they're all dead and he won't get to be friends with one..

Sardar Mulxidrahka is a very vain, arrogant, and stupid son of a local ruler and tends to style his crest hair as a means of flaunting his shameful ancestry that is he has inherited from his Imperial Sky Dragon father.

Kanna is a cute! And soft, too!

The softest.

Dragons are creatures of darkness, created by sin. If a king or a merchant prince get too greedy and really fuck everyone up in the name of wealth, they go insane and start growing scales. A short while after, they turn into full-sized dragons, dumb brutes that hoard wealth obsessively without actually having any use for it. They're not particularly intelligent, above beasts but below men.

Divine Enforcers.
By which I mean they were created specifically to punish kingdoms whose rulers fell too deeply into sinful nature, usually in the form of the king growing greedy. They usually do this by taking whatever is the root of the sinful nature; if it's greed, they take away the riches, if it's something like lusting after your princess daughter, they kidnap her, ect. ect.
This is a large part of why dragons haven't been hunted into extinction by dragonslayers and adventurers; the type of ruler assailed by dragons is usually either an asshole who deserves it, or an untrustworthy cheat who more than likely has no intention of actually paying you for the job. Additionally, getting the money/princess/whatever was taken back from the dragon can be arranged by giving a good reason/use for it; money to build orphanages, marrying the princess to make her off-limits for her lecherous father, ect. Which is why knights, who are bound by their word of honor, tend to be the most successful when dealing with dragons.

Of course, it's been about five generations since the Genesis of Creation (five Dragon generations, at least), so the prevalence of "bad eggs" is becoming more common, as are rather assholish tendencies. Despite this, most dragons still remember their purpose, even if they go about it in a jerkish way.

Modern Dragons would be bankers and stock market geeks

Animals that are born evil.

They are broken down into various categories:

>Wyrms
Wyrms are small flightless uncommon dragons that can rarely be found out in the wilderness. They sometimes find their way into settled areas like small villages or towns, but they are not seen as threatening. They are more curious than anything else, and enjoy spending time with humanoid races for various reasons. Fishermen see them as a sign of good luck because when a wyrm hunts for food near water the area tends to be good for fishing.

>Wyverns
The two-legged cousins of traditional dragons, Wyverns are less intelligent than wyrms, but they tend to have very defined personalities.
They are quite large, usually the size of a full grown elephant or larger.
Domesticated wyverns are used for business and travel, being used to carry and transport large amounts of goods either by land or by air (with air, usually more important things like documents or lightweight stuff) and they can be used to transport people. In some uncommon cases a wyvern egg might make its way into the hands of an individual and the resulting creature is raised with a family or a single person, forming a powerful bond. Military use of wyverns includes the bonding of a wyvern and a child at a young age, both of them entering a life of training and martial study to make powerful dragoons, mounted and winged knights, which grant major air superiority in forces.
Some smaller settlements even have a wyvern as a "guardian" of their towns, where it serves to play with the children, assist in manual labor such as tilling fields, or keeping an eye out.

Wild wyverns can vary. They can be extremely territorial, but some form small packs and are more open, but often avoidant, of other creatures entering their area.

Wyverns in general though differ greatly in their subspecies, each kind usually found in certain types of biomes.

(cont)

>Dragons
The true four legged two winged dragon. They are intelligent, but tend to not speak with non-dragon creatures. The colour of a dragon's scales generally tends to give away what kind of base personality it might have:

Red dragons tend to be tyrannical, agressive, powerful, dominating and think greatly of themselves.

Blue dragons tend to be loyal, straightforward, gluttonous, sometimes lazy, but strangely charismatic.

Greens tend to be more secretive and defensive, cautious, but rather curious and, if befriended, they tend to be playful, implying that they see smaller creatures like humans as miniatures or playthings.

Black dragons are a mix of the above. It is very hard to pin down what black dragons are like because they are the most rare of the species.

Copper dragons are rare as well, not as much as black ones though since they often have interest in humanoid creatures. They are commonly found near major port cities and engage commonly in trade (to acquire the newest unusual odds and ends from around the world), show an interest in fine arts such as theatre and song/dance, and they are usually well informed of the affairs around the world.
They are often a good source of information, but information isn't cheap, and they need that money to afford to amass their hordes.

>Ancient Dragons
They are incredibly powerful creatures that tend to keep to themselves. The ancient dragons are practically immortal - they do not have the same requirements as other creatures, but they do not interact with the world very often. Not much is known about them because they are often asleep and when they're awake they do not normally take visitors.

True dragons are dead.
Man stole their fire from them and destroyed them.

Dragon kind are still around but are mixed with mortal races and weaker.
The few that aren't feral are pissed at mankind and tend to avoid civilization, but torment humans whenever they can.

Humans are known as the unmade, they have no creator deity or purpose. This means they have thrown a cosmic monkey wrench into the grand design and perverted the patheons vision. They breed like rabbits and have intermingled with the other races causing them to lose their way.
Every so often the gods introduce a new calamity to wipe them away (see ruins/dungeons literally everywhere) but they keep coming back and many deities have just accepted they have to plan around them.

Humans also birthed the new gods, stole the knowledge of the world, and birthed the Undead.

Both

The most common are beastly giant animals that are tough as nails divided into three kinds:
Drakes: not winged, landed giant stocky lizards, huge predators
Wyvern: winged, more akin to flying dinosaurs with the head of a reptile, some have feathers
Leviathan: generic for giant aquatic beasts, with long extremities akin to crocodiles with fins but with scales and faces like sharks

Now, the real dragons are fuckhueg creatures made equal parts of destruction incarnate, wisdom beyond time and more magical power in a fingernail than an entire wizard tower. While their size vary a lot (from just 3 meters to the size of a mountain, excluding "Wh'hurler", a fucker the size of a moon) they are extremely rare creatures

Majestic as fuck.

Hail to Caeser, immortal emperor Dragon.

I do them in a very similar way. They used to be gods, titans if you will, but all that is left today is their degenerated tiny offspring.

My dragons are very stubborn and immortal. The big thing about dragons is that they can fuck anything and produce fertile offspring. In the old days when the dragons were all pure and shit they just went around fucking everything. This created a ton of shit, kobolds, lizardmen, drakes, wyverns, wurms, dragon ogres, etc. After a while of not bothering to fuck each other due to other dragons being a hell of a lot harder to rape the dragons started to die off, not due to disease or old age but because they were cocky assholes who would try to fight entire armies by themselves and get killed in the process. The smartest of the dragons gathered together and agreed upon the purity pact; an agreement among the 6 pure types of dragon that were left that breeding shall only be done in leisure with other dragons and intercourse with other species shall only be done for large sums of money. Currently, the majority of dragons are situated along the main trade route of the world, controlling almost the entire world's population of lizardmen and kobolds who worship their winged masters and provide them with food, taxes, and praise. Dragons are basically crime lords/bankers that sell out their hot dragonic dik to the highest bidder, because every army of the lower races wants a half dragon to fight on their side.
>TL:DR
Dragons love to fuck, acquire wealth, and boss around their worshippers

Reminds me of that loli getting dragon-dick in that one doujin.

All of those
Dragon its used as an umbrella term for any kind of "big dangerous lizard"
which is considered as an insult by the actual ancient dragons that though lenguage to the first humans so long ago, sadly true dragons are almost extinct as it usually is.

Dragons are animals, but very intelligent for what they are. They have an odd habit of picking up on what is highly valued or coveted within a large group of humans and they're compelled to try and take it, whatever "it" is. Whether it's a prized statue, a pile of gold or the fairest maiden in all the land; if a lot of people like it too much a dragon might try to take it somehow. It's part of their nature. They are very large and powerful and difficult to repel, and this odd quirk of theirs has put them at odds with human civilization throughout history. Outside of this strange hoarding behavior, they are still highly aggressive and tend to attack humans and other creatures that wander too near. They often range alone, but will sometimes form small groups with a large male and multiple females.

They also can't be domesticated as much as animals like lions or sharks can't be trained into reliable mounts. So no talking, no riding, just big tough monsters.

Also dragons, hydra, wyverns, wurms, etc. are all different rather than being synonyms for the same thing. Dragons are four legs, two wings, one head along with other typical features. They can have scales, skin or even fur. Some have horns and spikes, some don't. Some breathe fire, some don't. The smallest mature dragon might be about the size of an adult African elephant, while the largest can be enormous. Much bigger than any of their cousins.

Depends on their color, but the one I've had to play is the stay-at-home dad that plays with the kids because he's a dragon and has literally nothing else to do. In his younger years he used to be a revered guardian of a desert tribe, but once bickering broke out over what kind of sacrifice constituted as "proper" and started turning to bloodshed, he announced that they're both wrong and that he was fucking off. He then fucked off about 200 miles away because this is still his natural habitat, he's not that pissed off dammit.

annoying pests which keep fucking up the wool market!

bumpity

Varying slightly by setting and dragon type, I typically run most of my dragons as quite gentlemanly. Most of them are well aware that the age of dragons has passed, and are perfectly content to live out the twilight of their species sitting on bigass piles of loot and knowledge. Most of them usually play the hell out of the "lesser evil" card, and usually run with a "There are demons, old ones, and supervillains on the move. Do you really have the time to waste on a thief, especially one that will probably keep aforementioned demons, old ones, and supervillains away, since they threaten my hoard?". I honestly use them more as important npc's more than direct antagonists.
Young dragons, I confess, I have a hard time not running like stereotypical, angsty teenagers, usually with a generous helping of tsundere. I feel bad, but I can't help it. It makes me giggle every time.

I did run a more science-fictioney module a while back that had a Dragon whose hoard was the surviving members of a race from a doomed homeworld. He was pretty bro.

This. Dragons have too long of lifespans to be eagerly hurling themselves into conflicts. Dragons live to be thousands of years old by being unimportant, not by pissing people off.

Forces of nature that herald disaster.

Dragon in our campaign would rather lick the last of the peanut butter out of the jar across several hours than do anything remotely active. He has effectively beckme a living couch that the group keeps in the living room at home base.

That sounds adorable