Dragon

**Dragons** or **true dragons** were powerful magical creatures, they superficially resembled gigantic winged lizards, more specifically stingerless four-legged wyverns, but were highly intelligent and deeply infused with magic. Each type of dragon had a different concept which they not only had a breath weapon related to, but radiated around them, slowly transforming their surroundings, and when they were low on food they could feed on the energy of their surroundings until they had enough physical food to start radiating again. Unlike true biological creatures they grew more powerful as they aged and when they were about to die or had been slain they rapidly grew larger over the course of 10 days during which time they were either taught the ritual of Dragon Ascendance and taken to Dragon's Eyrie or allowed to die which caused a massive explosion of energy instantly transforming their surroundings into their preferred biome. In the Prime Material Plane dragons influenced the world around them, but in other planes they could transform into planar dragons, in outer planes this could only affect eggs, hatched dragons would repel the energy, but in inner planes the energy was more subtle and so could seep in more easily.

Dragons had their origin ancient creatures which were the ancestors to other draconids such as wyverns, transformed by dragon gods into intelligent elemental. Dragons were and are more or less the ultimate beings, at least that's how they saw themselves, and their great power and intellect allowed them to build large empires and lord over humanoids. The Thousand Year War wrecked dragon society and their sparse numbers allowed their greed and egomania to take hold and turn them into almost entirely solitary creatures. The split between Bahamut and Tiamat happening at the same time only served to further the shrinking of dragon populations.

Dragons were capable of living in cities of hundreds of individuals but that had not happened since the Dawn Age. Dragons who lived with each other were typically spouses or children who had not yet left their parent's care, few dragons had both parents present in their upbringing as dragon marriages were only binding until the birth of the first clutch at which point one of the spouses often left. The sociable metallic dragons were known to continue living with their parents or spouses far past what was typically expected, and even occasionally living with close friends.

The Draconic language was subject to change and splintering like any other however the underlying grammatical structure and a great swath of basic vocabulary were baked into their genetic code, the result being that it never strayed too far from its roots, although this basic form of the language did evolve and splinter like the more dialectical features it simply did so at the rate of genetic change and not at the rate of societal change. Each dragon variety had its own dialect and the dialects of some of the more reclusive dragons could be considered their own languages. Additionally creatures related to or accustomed to work under Dragons such as Lizardfolk, Kobolds, and Dragonborn spoke languages descended from Draconic and/or a spectrum of creoles between these languages and proper Draconic.

There were 7 surviving varieties of metallic and chromatic dragons each, during the Thousand Year War there were far more however, already being deemed odd misfits among dragons, they remained the neutral in the conflict between Bahamut and Tiamat and were hunted by both sides for this, the only remaining neutral dragons are the Underdark-dwelling Iron and Purple Dragons, and the Mercury and Yellow Dragons who kept their neutrality (and many other things about them) closely guarded secrets, though many other dragons suspected them of neutrality neither Bahamut nor Tiamat issued a decree against them like they did for the other neutral dragons. Metallic and chromatic breeds which shared a breath weapon often shared other traits, though they were not strictly counterparts and diverged in many areas.

Other varieties of dragons included the psionic gem dragons, rare hybrids between different dragons unpredictable in form, and elemental dragons who made themselves one with a particular elemental plane, and draconids or lesser dragons who were related creatures, some of them experiments, most of them naturally evolved from the creatures the draconic pantheon transformed. Finally when dragons and humanoids mated they produced Half-Dragons, who typically spawned lines of Dragontouched.