 Howdy how's it going? My name's DavyChappy and now that a new book has come out filled with information on the big lizard monsters, it's time for me to update my dragon tales so that you know what to do the next time that you want to get your hands on its mighty horde. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you find yourself scooping up a pile of dragon gold only to find that it was a massive swarm of bugs this whole time, feel free to play your game however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, dragons much like Fridao have appeared in cultures all around the world, with no central location that one can point to and say that's where they came from. The best hypothesis given is that early civilizations found dinosaur bones and wondered if they could belong to a magical monster of infinite wisdom. The fire bit just came about because fire equals magic and much like unicorns and lions, dragons were so prevalent in art and literature that plenty of people bought into the fan fiction and thought that they actually existed. Fast forward a thousand years into the future and some old guy decides to name his board game after them and now I'm required to always reference a company that won't sponsor me every time I talk about dragons. As for the in-game lore, dragons are the oldest civilization to exist in most versions of D&D history, sharing their living space with giants who wanted to kill them, dwarves who wanted to kill them, and elves who changed it up by creating a magic meteor that made dragons kill each other. Basically, after all these really shitty roommates, the dragons got the message that they weren't welcome and fucked off to some desolate corners of the world where they could continue to exist without being mercilessly attacked. Their relationship with outsiders plus the pathetically small number of living dragons compared to everything else made dragons evolve as isolationists, taking large territories of land for themselves and posting a no soliciting sign for anything that wasn't edible wildlife, including other dragons, which only made the population numbers that much smaller. But if you were a little dragon baby raised by a proper dragon parent, you would most likely have heard the Elegy of the First World, a mythological poem that asserts dragons as being the first beings in all of existence. As the story goes, Bahamut created the world. Timot gave it color and they worked together to create Sardior, the first gem dragon who promptly ascended to godhood and then helped the twins crack the races of metallic and chromatic dragons in their own likeness. However soon, other gods came from outside the first world, looking for a place to plant the seed of mortals. The dragons asked if they could all live in peace, but the other gods politely said no thank you and started to kill them all. Bahamut surrendered when he fell in battle. Sardior chickened out and hid in the core of the world, but Timot refused to budge and as she faced down her certain demise, the other gods pulled her out of death's embrace and bound her in an inescapable prison. Then while the invader gods were playing Farmville on Bahamut's server, he was quietly getting along with the deities and going, yo, hey, so it's really cool that we have all these mortals running around now, but since the war is over and you guys totally won, can we perhaps let my sister out of her cage of eternal damnation? The other gods, who had gotten to know Bahamut, thought that he was a total bro, so they were about to say sure thing when that inescapable prison proved to be a very poor name for a prison that Timot tore open, letting loose legions of chromatic dragons and deciding that if she couldn't have the first world, no one could. She started a huge rampage and Bahamut tried to calm her down, citing how some of the gods were actually pretty nice guys and they were totally about to let her out, but she responded with the fact that they locked her in a prison for all eternity while he did nothing about it. And then she blew up the world, as one does. The ripple effect caused millions of alternate realities to manifest, creating the cosmology of material planes that we know today, and the dragon swooped into all of these new realities along with most of the other beings of the first world, and that's how everything got made. Of course, you might remember Sardior, the gem dragon who just happened to be hiding in the core of the planet this whole time. Well, they were content with getting the world record for hide and seek until they heard some rumbling, thought, ah fuck, and then accidentally got exploded into millions of crystal shards when Tiamat blew up the planet, as one does. Those shards embedded into the multiverse became the gemstone dragons and they all decided to follow in their creators footsteps by hiding from the rest of the world as a basic survival tactic until one asshole named Fizzban decided to write a whole ass book about them. Growing up with so much notoriety is bound to inflate your sense of self-worth, and dragons are a prime example of that. From the moment that they're hatched, dragon warmlings are raised by their parents to believe that everything the light touches is their kingdom, and they spend the beginning years of their lives going around and learning how to hunt, how to collect random items, and stack them into something that could be called a horde. And depending on whether the dragon is good or evil, it might swoop into a nearby village for a game of baby's first tyrannical subjugation. In the time before Fizzban came out, 5e was happened to claim that dragons were completely binary. Metallic dragons were good, chromatic dragons were evil, their alignment was a direct result of their god holding power over them, and a dragon could not change their alignment willingly, similar to how angels follow the alignments of their gods. I personally still use this in my game, but Fizzban made a point of retconning the slur so any dragon can be whatever it wants to be. This makes societal norms bedamped, meaning an evil dragon can produce a non-evil offspring and vice versa. Because of this, a dragon's happiness level will depend entirely on how shitty their parent is, and while evil dragons protect their young as fiercely as any other, they tend to kick them out of the nest sooner as well, both as a way of teaching them independence so that they can become strong on their own, and also because once a young dragon starts to get that gold fever, they start wondering if they're strong enough to take their parents horde. Good line dragons eventually leave the nest as well, but it's typically once they're already strong enough to live on their own, and not because their parent is paranoid about losing their vintage coin collection, but also because metallic dragons having natural shape-shifting ability that lets them see the world through humanity's eyes, and also because the more dragons there are, the more likely it is that danger will come looking for them, so maybe a very close family is not a good idea. Regardless of the reason, an adult dragon will eventually find their own plot of land to terrorize, and then once they've settled down, they're not likely to leave unless they're either kicked out by a team of four adventurers with attitude, or they hear about another dragon in the world and decide to fuck Mary or kill them. In the case of the former, two dragons will do the flying tango and lay eggs to start the circle of life again, but it's unusual for most dragon males to stick around at that point, since more dragons equals more danger. In rare cases, the mother might dip out too, but this is only if they decide that it's not worth the trouble of finding a dragon daycare. Unfortunately, despite providing us with dozens of new dragon variants, Fizzban's book doesn't answer the question of what happens when two dragon types mix, so I'll answer the question for you with hypothetical homebrew. This is unofficial. Either the eggs are a collection of both types, so a group of five, three might be green while two are blue, or they can make a weird hybrid that looks like a colorful Dalmatian and shoots one parent's breath weapon using the other parent's shape, so a cone of lightning or a line of cold. Or it doesn't work at all and everybody's just wasted their time fucking around. Since dragons live a long time, this process might be repeated from decade to decade so that one dragon may have a very extensive family, although only dragons born in the same clutch of eggs typically consider themselves real siblings. But regardless, after a while, dragons go through a midlife crisis where they get tired of boning and focus instead on finding themselves, amassing a greater horde and valuable magic items. It's around this time that a dragon goes from being considered an adult to being considered an ancient dragon, and the legend of their exploits become so well known that they gain a title like icing death or desert doom or puff the magic dragon. Their old age may also come with an ancient gift known as dragon sight, which tunes them with the frequency of the multiverse and lets them see not only their current self, but all alternate versions of themselves living throughout all possible realities. What they choose to do with this knowledge is up to them, but it usually brings a dragon to the end of its life cycle where it will either go out in a blaze of glory battling its worn foes or die peacefully surrounded by its favorite thing, money. In either case, the dragon soul will either float up to be with Bahama on Mount Celestia, descend into Avernus to live out its days with Tiamat, or in the case of Gem Dragons, they will dissipate back into the world, perhaps one day finding their consciousness returned to the shattered will of Sardior. Some dragons, however, refuse to go quietly into the night and cling on to life so tightly that they ascend even beyond ancient dragonhood and become great worms, titanic beings of unimaginable power who embody the purest aspect of their draconic bloodline. A single breath from a great worm can wipe out a city, and nothing in all of dragon kind can defeat it, save for intervention from one of the dragon gods themselves. Now, when you look at this incredibly powerful monster, you might wonder to yourself, why? Why in the world would you willingly choose to pick a fight with the embodiment of fire? And why in the world aren't dragons at the top of the fantasy food chain? The answer is greed, my friends. Remember how dragons love collecting shit? Well, the thing they love collecting most is money, but that's not the only thing they love collecting. Magical items, ancient relics, princesses out of towers. A dragon's horde is so powerful that the very items that lay dormant within their layer absorb all of the residual magic expelled from a dragon's very being, coalescing into a horde magical item that grows stronger as the dragon gets older, like a fine rosé, but with a broadsword. Not only do they get stronger, but they oftentimes manifest completely new magical abilities that would water the mouths of would-be horde stealers. That said, the only thing stopping those thieves from getting their hand on the treasure is you know the dragon, so it's a high-risk, high reward type of thing. It gets even worse if you go in prepared for a dragon fight, but haven't done enough research to know what other things a dragon keeps around to ward off intruders. Being creatures of intense magical energy, a dragon that's old enough to march off into the world and settle in its own area will start to have an acute effect on that area. While it's true that black dragons prefer swamps, white dragons prefer tundras, and so on, the actual terrain becomes sort of an extension for any dragon that calls up their home, letting them mold the terrain, command the wildlife, detect the presence of those who pass the this is my swamp sign, and generally making life more difficult for adventurers looking to fight a dragon before they've even gotten through the layer. These traps will most likely ward off people who didn't even mean to enter the dragon's territory in the first place, as it becomes ever more apparent that something dangerous is living here. But for people with more pocket space than sense, dragons often employ or enslave other monsters to guard their treasure. Often the local dungeon bosses, or especially cobalds, tidalized people who have a very tenuous connection to dragons and therefore revere them as gods. If the adventurers managed to cut through the monsters that are minding their own business by living there and make it to the horde with or without the dragon knowing, then they've won, or so it would seem. Careless heroes might pick up a piece of gold only for the top of it to flutter open like wings, followed by the rest of the gold doing the same thing, and then suddenly you're attacked by a swarm of horde scarabs. Or, better yet, you'll go to pick up a piece of gold and then your hand gets stuck, the pile shifts, and it opens up into the giant maw of a horde mimic. So you say, okay, maybe we don't go for the money, but the eggs are valuable, we can sell those. But besides the fact that if the parent dragon is still alive, this is a thunderingly stupid idea, egg snatchers might pick up an egg only to find that it is actually the large inflated tail of an egg hunter. A terrifying centipede monster that cracks open unborn dragon eggs pours down its own eggs into it to eat the baby, then inflates itself up to masquerade as an unbroken egg. The worst part is that they have a natural camouflage against dragons, so it's likely that the dragon won't even know about these parasites until it's too late, and every single egg has been devoured by the worms, as the poor adventurer who picks up the fake egg will soon be too. So, yeah, dragon hunting is a dangerous profession. You probably already thought you knew that, but damn, that shit's rough. And just because you might find yourself somewhere other than the material plane, that does not mean that you will be safe from the never-ending dragon craze. Much like elves, dragons have populated pretty much everywhere in the cosmology, creating hundreds of offshoots like shadow dragons and moonstone dragons, dragons that live in the Shadowfell and Feywaugh respectively, as well as deep dragons that live in the Underdark, eye drakes, which are what happens when a beholder accidentally stumbles upon Spyro X Cinder fanfiction, dragon turtles that live in the sea and provide a day you sex Machina for what is otherwise a very well written anime, ghost dragons who decide not to die, hollow dragons who decide not to die, but for good reasons, and dracolidges, which are what happened when a dragon becomes so powerful and also so bored, they decide to try out another dungeon boss's bone skirt. There are even more dragon offshoots that I refuse to list here because this isn't supposed to be a video about me just listing off the monster manual, but I felt like I had to at least mention the ones that I did, or else the comment section would hang me for it. Point is, dragons are like elves where you can take any concept that exists, put a dragon suffix next to it, and then suddenly it's become so awesome that an entire Twitter hashtag will be made for it. Overall, dragons continue to be one of the greatest and most iconic monsters in all of D&D history, and hopefully now that you've gotten a better grasp on their biography, you'll understand how to best utilize them to destroy all of your adventurers and teach them to always beware of dragons in dungeons. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoy this video, be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford all these dragon eggs that may or may not have a weird scuttling sound going on inside of them. But yeah, Daffy out.