 Howdy how's it going my name's Davy Chappy and I don't know if you know this but I enjoy playing Dungeons and Dragons and despite that I have been woefully silent about one of the most iconic parts of the entire role-playing experience, one of the most popular and spectacular pieces of the D&D mythos that have inspired countless pieces of art, lore, and many different fan fictions of negligible quality. I am of course talking about dungeons and what better thing to put into a dungeon than dragons! So today I will be going over the limited lore, lifestyle, and variations of the Big D itself by scouring through each and every source book and ringing out what little droplets of information 5e has bothered to give us. As always keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion so if you feel like I am not a dragon but in fact some guy Dan met at the bus station in a dragon suit feel free to RP your scalies however you want but with that out of the way let's begin. So a dragon is a giant mythical beast that breathes some sort of dangerous element usually fire and has appeared in every mythological fantasy series under the sun. They're known for being huge powerful and some people think they're sexy but definitely not me. Also just a side note this is not a dragon this is a wyvern. Easy way to tell wyverns have two legs and then their arms are melded in with their wings. All you Game of Thrones fans can go home now. Dragons have four legs and wings that are not melded into their arms and are actually some of the most intelligent creatures on the planet. They're portrayed as being wise, greedy, and extremely dangerous with an entire game being centered around the idea of you going on an epic quest through a strong underground prison cell to kill one. Dragons come in all sorts of different colors and chromatics. You can have gold dragons, red dragons, old dragons, dead dragons, shadow dragons, good dragons, bad dragons, blue eyes, white dragons, the list goes on. But the two main factions of dragon that you're likely to meet are the evil and tyrannical chromatic dragons and the good line metallic dragons. The duality of dragons came about due to as most things in D&D go the falling out between two gods. In this case they are Bahamut the platinum dragon and god of metal scalies and Tiamat the five headed dragon goddess that is really good at ludes and really bad at adventure modules. These gods command their half of dragon kind directly waging a silent and secret war against the other half and ensuring that through the completely ethical method of literally being mind controlled and therefore being incapable of making their own moral decisions, the battle between good and evil will rage on forever. Literally this bears repeating because not enough people know this. Dragons cannot choose whether they want to be good or evil. Metallic are good, chromatic are evil, it's in their magical DNA and they have to listen to their dragon god. And this is a 5e thing too. If you read Rise of Tiamat and then go to the dragon council section, one of the dragons make a point of how mortals being good or evil actually mean something because they have the capacity to choose. Unlike dragons who are physically and mentally compelled by their god. Wake up people. Dragons are robots in disguise. Praise the god machine. But I digress. Much like the descriptions of dragons as a whole, due to 5e having the barest minimum on dragons possible, the history of dragons is muddy and obscured to the max. Nobody knows anything about their original civilization other than the fact that out of every single race in the entirety of D&D, dragons have been around for the longest. Giants? Babies. Elves? Babies. Yawn tea? Snakey babies. Especially given that 5e has yet to release a source book dedicated to dragons in staunch defiance of the scaly part of the fandom, we don't have a lot to go off of besides other races' records of their dealings with dragons, which go a little something like this. Giants showed up and dragons were already there, so the giants took a shed on the floor and everybody started fighting. When that was over, dragons were greeted by elves and they were all cool until the elves decided they wanted land, and also they might have been getting enslaved, but that's muddy right now. So they made a big meteor that would cause all the dragons to go insane and kill each other every year, as one does. After surviving two races trying to kill them, the dragons were finally greeted by dwarves, who because half of the dragons were made out of metal, got confused and began mining the shit out of all of them, invariably killing even more dragons and starting another race war, which finally proved to push the dragons into obscurity where they remain to this day, trying their best to stay out of everyone's way because for some reason everybody wants to kill dragons in this game. And besides being monstrous hulks of power and magical affinity, there actually is a good reason to want to go hunting down the local dragon, and that's for the dragons horde. Dragons are, for no reason in particular, incredible magpies that steal everything and anything that interests them, and then they take that thing back to their lair and toss it in one big pile for the exclusive purpose of being able to say that they have really cool stuff. I shouldn't judge, I collect woodwick candles. For pretty much every dragon, the horde is made up predominantly of treasure stolen and tithes given to the dragon, some of which dragons have evolved to be able to digest, meaning dragons literally eat diamonds when they're hungry or bored, and it also means that anyone who can slay the dragon and take what it owns is gonna be filthy, stinking rich. Not only that, but dragons don't only collect gold, they're also prone to collecting magic items, exotic animals, precious stones, pictures of spider-man, you name it, a dragon could, if it wants to, become the collector of anything, which is why getting to that horde is so rewarding, and also why it's so difficult. Dragons are violently protective of their horde, and with them being the magically charged powerhouses that they are, slaying a dragon, especially within its own lair, is a task easier said than done, but those who can accomplish it will go down in the annals of history as one of the most prestigious titles in the realm, a dragon slayer. As you might expect, the life of a dragon is fraught with danger from mortals who want to use your body as ingredients for powerful magic items, otherworldly beings that want to dominate your mind and use their power of being a motherfucking dragon to destroy the world or something, and other dragons who take one look at you and then their central processing chip activates as you both crash into each other in a flurry of claws and teeth. Therefore, as you may expect, dragons live very secluded lives, hiding out in places reminiscent of the element that their scale color ties them to. Red, gold and brass dragons breathe fire, silver and white dragons breathe ice, blue and bronze dragons breathe lightning, black and copper dragons breathe acid, and green dragons alone breathe poison because apparently poison is exclusively evil, but acid isn't! And so, dragons can be found in places where they have easy access to these elements such as volcanoes, stormy mountains, icy tundras, swampy marshes, really most places that are out of the way have a chance of having a dragon squatting in it. However, metallic dragons have an additional trick that they can pull, allowing them to, once they reach a certain age, shape-shift freely into the form of another creature, effectively acting as a cultural rye of passage. Once a dragon has lived for long enough to master itself, it then unlocks the privilege of living and learning among the other races, thus furthering its wisdom. Unfortunately, or perhaps very fortunately, this is a trait exclusive to metallic dragons, so the evil chromatic dragons will never get a big enough brain that will allow it to go woke on all the other species. And speaking of the other species, the dragon umbrella casts its shade upon quite a few different types of Spyro enthusiasts. I've mentioned briefly the mainline dragons as well as wyverns, but there are still more to mention, such as the ever-popular pseudo dragon, a bite-sized dragon with a scorpion-like stinger that mages are prone to use as familiars, or the fairy dragon, an absolute abomination of nature whose mere presence taunts God's divine plan. There's also the dragon turtle, a giant fucking snapping turtle that breathes steam and exists as the dragon of the deep sea, and the drake, which is what happens when a wizard doesn't know what a dog is and just tries to give it their best guess. All of these creatures draw a pretty interesting picture of what the world might have been like back in the time of the dragons, and they help guide new DMs along with creative possibilities for worlds where the age of the dragon never ended, and dragon kin of every form and formality replaced humanoids as the dominant species of the earth, except fairy dragons. Fuck fairy dragons. Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to share it with all your weirdo friends, check out my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford the onesie for my dragon dance. But yeah, Davie out.