What if dragons were like kingfishers?

What if dragons were like kingfishers?

They're princessfishers.

...

why doesnt your setting have dragons with no magic that use firearms?

What if dragons were like shrikes

So they pick people up and throw them onto spikes?

What if Dragons were like bombardier beetles that could fly

>The dragon's hoard is entire forests worth of creatures impaled on imposing black spires. Like a hunters trophies on their wall, the dragons keep the most interesting of the creatures they find on their patrols. They keep impaled trophies fresh with their petrifying breath weapon and may arrange their hoarded creatures in odd patterns.

What if dragons were like giant flying lizards that could breathe fire and liked to hoard gold?

Legit someone needs to make a high level mouse guard encounter called the "Shrikes' nest"

>roll a d6 each turn
>on a roll of 1, the shrike crucifies you on a thorn bush and tweets joyfully from a nearby branch as you bleed to death

I'd be so fucking terrifying because you could see and hear the dying and dead strewn through a forest of brambles.

Some mice will probably even call out for help.

you mean wyverns?

>What if dragons were like the Fisher King?

Man, I remember having a shrike living in my yard when I was a kid.

She was a such a wonderful little bird, cleansing the yard of vermin with such a fierce glee, while having the friendly demeanor of a songbird.

I might just have a use for mouseguard now. aside from being a good comic as is.

You know I've always wanted to impale a shrike, to show it how it feels like.

But then that's not how minds work, it'll most likely feel unjustly attacked and not understand why it is on a spike.

Does your setting have cannibal dragons

How do you even get shots like this. Nature photographers are wizards.

>How do you even get shots like this. Nature photographers are wizards.

You spend months and months out in the field and get some shots of any number of animals in their natural enviroment. Then you go to a zoo or something and spend months waiting for some other animals to do something interesting.

Then you sit in an editing room with hundreds/thousands of hours of boring ass shots and edit together the couple minutes of actually useful stuff so that it looks like a coherent story featuring a single animal.

They also have to do all their own sound effects and insert pre-recorded animal calls and stuff because the actual distances/conditions involved in recording outdoors makes decent sound pretty much impossible.

>His name had its origin in the Romanian sobriquet of his father, Vlad Dracul ("Vlad the Dragon"), who received it after he became a member of the Order of the Dragon. Dracula is the Slavonic genitive form of Dracul, meaning "the son of Dracul (or the Dragon)".
Checks out.

>Feathered drakes versus Wyrms

That's going right into my setting

He-he's fast!

There's only one Dragon so... maybe?

That's how they hunt their favorite food. Orcs

what if dragons were like The Kingfish?

This. It's 40% patience, 40% hard work, 10% luck, 10%"holy shitballs did you see that?!"

t. Zoologist

>10%"holy shitballs did you see that?!"
Nah, it's 5%"holy shitballs did you see that?!" and 5% "Yeah, but my camera is pointed over this way."

>The Heroic Snake Fist vs. the Dasterdly Eagle Claw Clan

>An Elder Dragon that east Elder Dragons
Too bad his name is shit

>What if dragons were like kingfishers?
Only instead of fish, they dive up to kilometers beneath the surface to snag whales, giant squid, and sharks.

Birds hunting is a fucking miracle of the universe
>From way up high they can hone in on fish through the surface of the water, sometimes blended into the dirt or plants as camo, and are able to pin-point hit those fish despite the surface of the water causing the actual positions of the fish to be way off

One of the secrets to draconic success as a species is the various breeds' colorful coats. Many scholars mistake the brilliant crimson hue of a fire dragon for aggressive mate-attracting plumage, or the shimmering azure of a blue dragon for analogues to the poison dart frogs whose color tells other predators to stay well clear.

In fact, all the many colors of dragonkind, while serving many purposes, are camouflage remaining from their breed's most ancient days. A green drake blends into its forested home, the red into volcanic ash-reddened skies, the blue into crystal clear desert air without a trace of cloud. White draconics of course have their pick of snow or cloud, and black their choice of nighttime assault or lunging out from tannin-dark swamp water as does a crocodile or an alligator.

Each of these adaptations was made possible by one thing and one thing only; the Orc.

Humans are just clever and numerous enough to be troublesome prey, and their visual acuity and former arboreal status makes them well suited to distinguishing two similarly colored objects. Elves of course are thin and swift, hardly worth the meal or the effort it takes to acquire it though a dragon in desperate straits will on occasion try and crack open a tribe's nesting trees.

But the orc is large and meaty, a burly warrior used to overcoming its prey through brute force and unsubtle actions. Their eyesight is not as good as man or elf, and they make a filling meal for the draconic apex predators. Reproducing quickly, the orcish population can also sustain large groups of individuals which can be attacked repeatedly. If the orcs do manage to band together quickly enough, a dragon can be deterred from its business, but their generational memory is short, and long-term anti-dragon opposition rarely if ever emerges.

One must also note that these perennial feeding raids have the side effect of driving massive orc hordes across the landscape, terrorizing human and elvish land. Indeed, it can be said that the dragons are primary culprits for the hostilities between all three major races. While orcs are poorly suited for countering their ecosystem's superpredator, they can devastate settled lands with little effort. More than one "Mighty orc warlord" has simply been a surviving chieftan seeking shelter before the dragons come again.

Some learned scholars have posited that this too is part of divine providence, maintaining an ecosystem in much the same way that forest fires clear undergrowth before crisis points are reached. The dragons feed, the orcs move, the human and elf populations are reduced, and the cycle continues. However, any mage who promulgates such ideas openly had better prepare themselves for pitchforks and torches raised in opposition to the suggestion that the gods condone such means of control.


>okay im done trying to be Attenborough now

pls no bully snek

>be merfolk
>just chilling
>harvesting coral or some shit
>see some kind of weird shimmer above you out of the corner of your eye
>suddenly fuckhueg dragon talons stab you
>Press F To Pay Respects

What if dargon in 40k

What if dragons were like orcas?

What if dragons were like eagles?

Anything above some kind of lizard monster is probably a C'Tan and we already know where he is.

Those are not eagles, they are striated caracra, a kind of island falcon.

What if dragons were like vultures

Thanks for saucing my up then

Any regular lizard-like inhabitant of a Deathworld?

This, but with whales instead of fish.

>red panther theme

What if dragons were like Seaking

>pink panther theme

dun screwed up

mmmMMMMMMMMMmmmmmm...

>when your wings are so huge they don't even bother with any intricate kind of shape

......please gelfing.......please?....PLeeeeeeAAAAAAseeee gelfling? mmmmmMMMMmmmmm

GELFING?! PLEASE?! PLEASE?! PLEASE?!

...

What if dragons were like beetles?

The surface of the water is the veil between our world and theirs?
Magic users of all stripes have to deal with dragons divebombing them from the outer planes to abduct (and probably eat) them.

More like 50% "Yeah, but my camera is pointed over this way."

>Damn you, you transplanar dragons! Stop trying to eat me!

...

>Fuck you in particular.

>dragons as bower-birds combined with shrikes
Nice. Also gives another reason for them to *have* a hoard.

>dragon grabs wizard in its mouth
>quickly goes back to its world
>wizard manages to cast a spell in his panic
>breaks free of the dragon's grip, falls somewhere unfamiliar
>injured, in a world of dragons, and in a place where the very air will slowly kill him, he must survive and flee back to his home
I have a new campaign idea.

>Your dragons behave like Secretary birds.

...

Oh trust me, it's worse than you think it would be.

That's stupid... Wyverns already do that! Look at Smog! (Typo intentional)

What if dragons were more like Lizards

Wow those birds are cunts.

There would be much more wealth sharing.

I don't have any comments to make I just want you to know that this is a very good post.

>Intelligent pack hunting dragons which trick and toy with their food despite being strong enough to just rip their prey apart. They have cosmopolitan distribution and no ecosystem is safe from these apex predators. For some reason, they never attack humans.

Then what would be colossal enough and dying often enough to feed such large scavengers?

It'd be like the icthyosaurs, the ancient oceangoing reptiles of the mesozoic. The only difference would be the jets of fire that they spit to down flying or land dwelling prey.

>Bipedal dragons with long, stilt-like legs. They have little need for wings any longer, as they can simply stride over any obstacle in their path. Any prey item or opponent sighted is kicked to the ground and curb stomped until dead. They retain their breath weapon, but only to force flying opponents to descend to a kickable altitude.

A branch of wyverns who've lost all ability to fly but retain their venomous bite. however, instead of actual venom they have vicious bacteria in their mouth and guts.

Their skin is like tank armor and their blood can be used to craft potent curative items

Craggy, well camouflaged dragons with slow metabolisms. They can lie motionless for months, only faintly breathing. They burst into motion to snap up a tasty morsel like a fat buffalo or orc before resuming their camouflage. Plants often grow on the dragon's craggy hides and they take pride in their own private "gardens". Magical, rare and sentient plants are particularly prized.

Turns out the creepy shit is actually real.

>Dragons have diversified into a dizzying number of species, and 22% of all described species of multicellular organisms are some form of dragon.
This is true for bettles by the way.

I love fantasy ecology

>dragon flies above a city
>his putrid magical aura makes everything organic in the city rot
>including living creatures
>fast forward two weeks
>everything is dead and rotting
Either that or just make the fucker smart enough to shit in their water supply and poison the retards to death

that fight is the pinnacle of power creep wankery
dudes that move so fast that the radio waves look like they're not moving at all to them...
and some fags still dare to try and say that it's fucking sci-fi

Certain species of Dragon are carriers of virulent diseases that they themselves are immune to. These in particular target large fauna such as cattle causing them to drop dead within mere days as hemorrhagic fevers burn through them. Days later the beasts return gobbling down the rapidly broken down remains.

y'know, first time I read that I thought that beasts was referring to the dead cattle.
>undead dragon infects cows
>cows turn zombie
>dragon takes kingdom over with undead livestock
I'm using that for my setting now

All I'm, picturing is a sub species that is not unlike herons.

So what other good real,world animals could dragons mimic?

Radio waves are still waves of light, IE moving at top possible speed. Light can NEVER look like "it's not moving at all" in a vacuum, not near a black hole

Yes, I mad

Every Dragon a King...

Where are you on the spectrum?

Fuck Yeah Seaking was a meme at one point. Like 2007ish. God damn I been here too long

There was a movie about this with sheep in New Zealand

That sounds really stupid

So I herd you liek mudkips.

That's relativity for you
lightspeed is one of the few constants

>Dragons flying from battlefield to battlefield feasting upon the corpses of the dead.
>Open mass graves becoming the best way of getting rid of corpses that died by plague.

Fiddler Dragons. Or any other crustacean really.

What if dragons were like bats?

No, the book. Reality is cool, I'm cool with reality. It's some fucked up shit but I'm cool. I'm saying the book sounds dumb.

WHY WON'T THIS FUCKER DIE???

And 100% reason to remember the name

Yup, called Black Sheep. Pretty good actually, it plays itself completely seriously but still has a sense of humour.

>Reality is cool, I'm cool with reality. It's some fucked up shit but I'm cool.
Thanks for the laugh user.

Holy shit that air kick 10/10