Dragon reproduction concepts

[Kurt Kurageous]

I didn't want to post this in the "Let's Read the Monster Manual."

There doesn't seem to be enough of an ecosystem (prey, space) to support enough dragons of different subspecies in a conventional sense (solitary apex predators). So I'm contemplating a couple of concepts for dragon reproduction .

Asexual: Eggs form if the adult reaches a certain level of caloric surplus. Good hunting and lots of food = eggs.

Itinerant ancient male: There is one male of the species. He moves from lair to lair, staying only if the female is 'in season.' He forgoes a lair of his own and a treasure hoard of his own. Would he have to kill every other newborn male to avoid overpopulation? Or just neuter them?

Magical regeneration: A finite number of dragonsouls exist, and when the body is destroyed, they are reformed in another of the species.

Help?

[Mith]

Dragons are thaumaturgic creatures that eat magic itself. While they enjoy eating prey, it is not required for survival.

Perhaps dragons do their hunting across multiple planes, not just their local area of the Prime.

[MinotaurWarrior]

There doesn't seem to be enough of an ecosystem (prey, space) to support enough dragons of different subspecies in a conventional sense (solitary apex predators).


There's 10 subspecies.

There's no indication that they suffer from inbreeding.

Dragons can travel extremely long distances to breed.

Dragons are meant to be a declining population.

I don't see the problem. All you really need are ~20 Adult or older dragons and a bunch of wyrmlings that can be jealously guarded in case the mate dies off. The wyrmlings are close enough to normal animals to just blend into the ecology, and adults are just huge, so about the same size and impact on ecology as a Mammoth. Komodo dragons only eat about 9.6 times their body weight in meat a year, so an adult red dragon could theoretically sustain itself on just a small herd of a dozen or so mammoths that birthed a new member each year. Anything more than that is just gravy.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Dragons are meant to be a declining population.

I forgot that.

[IShouldntBehere]

Are we talking about dragons in the sense of "Giant Magic Dino-monsters that breathe fire" in general or, the skittles bag of color-coded D&D monster manual dragons specifically?

[hymer]

Dragons can live on inorganic materials IIRC. They can literally eat rocks and subsist on them, though they prefer not to. They hunt for pleasure, not out of dire need.

[DizzyWood]

I tend to think that these worlds actually larger in area than earth. So there are more animals to hunt I guess. Also we can assume that the dragon species can interbreed so the small populations are not really a huge issue. Then they are one of the most innately magical mortal beings so that alone solves a ton of problems!

[Falcon X]

We do get dragonborn and their kind from dragons that have shape-shifted into humans.

We do, however, have lots of precidence for there being dragon eggs and baby dragons in D&D.
Draconomicon from 3.5 says that they do mate as often as once per year, laying 2-5 eggs. It has lots more details of the egg and life cycle too...

I always liked the Shadowrun concept (if I can remember the details). Having children is a much different thing to dragons than us.
The dragons get together and decide they need a few more dragons. Then a female mates with a male (whom she likely has no affection towards), which looks like some wierd dance in the sky and is much more magical than physical.
When the new dragon(s) is born, she finds a male (not the birthing father) to raise the dragon and teach it how to live.

[pwykersotz]

In my world, dragons have two methods of needing to eat less food. One is the Dragonsleep. When a dragon is sleeping, it burns almost no energy. They can go centuries or longer without needing to hunt. They stay alive and strong thanks to the deep magic of the world that they are connected to.

Two, this is why dragons don't need quite as much food as their size would lead you to believe. They can draw substantially from magic instead of from eating. They still get hungry and need food and they still have enormous appetites, but it's dramatically reduced.

With regards to breeding, I just have dragons be not heavily fertile. They lay eggs every couple hundred years. Being a dragon is dangerous though, and with luck one of the clutch will survive to adulthood.

Basically, dragons are rare. There might be a thousand of them in the entire world, more or less, at any given time. Rare enough that they are obscure and special, but not so rare that killing one tips the balance of power in the world.

[Temperjoke]

Something else to consider, out of the clutches they lay (which we don't know the size of), not all the eggs may hatch for one reason or another. Then, of the ones that do hatch, I'd imagine the odds of them living long enough to reach adulthood is very slim, given the odds against them. Plus, we don't know how frequently they feel compelled to come together for mating purposes. I mean, all dragons, good or evil, have strong personalities and egos, so I'd imagine that the only time under normal circumstances that they seek out another of their kind deliberately is if they feel the urge to mate. It's also a common trope that long-lived or immortal races have low levels of childbirth, as part of nature's balance to prevent overpopulation.

[xyianth]

Here is the explanation I gave to one of my players when asked "where do all the dragons come from?"

When a wizard, warlock, or bard gains the ability to cast true polymorph they find a nice safe spot and undergo a transformation into an ancient dragon. Once the transformation is complete, these dragons terrorize all those incapable of such powerful magic, and build massive hoards of treasure. Eventually, these dragons get together and have a one night stand, producing a dragon's egg. Later this egg hatches into a wyrmling dragon. As that young dragon grows, the ancient dragon often finds that its behavior begins to annoy; and abandons it. These young dragons are then forced to seek out their own place in the world, quite often falling victim to adventuring parties that seek them out for their scales, treasure, or glory.

Player: "But I thought you banned the true polymorph spell?"

Me: "No dragon for you!"

[Drackolus]

I am trying to figure out a cosmology for a heavily dragon-oriented campaign, so this is a nice thread.
I like the sky-mating thing. I read it somewhere else too, but not in the context of Shadowrun. Maybe they got it from there.
The limited dragon souls thing fits well in the world I'm writing, but it may or may not seem odd when non-dragon "gods" are really just very powerful mortal races. Also makes half-dragon creatures draw question. Maybe I want that. Fits the theme of "some things just don't seem to add up" that I'm going for. Dunno.

[Regitnui]

Well, on Eberron, Argonessen is one of the few places on the planet where you can still find the really big dinosaurs. They stock their hunting range the Vast and their home ranges in the Thousand with Large and bigger herbivorous dinosaurs and beasts to hunt. The Vast even has large carnivores, but not so big that they'd threaten an adult dragon. So the dragons of Argonessen essentially farm.

On Xen'drik, they hunt like normal. This continent was populated by giants, after all, so has plenty large fauna. Heck, some of the flora in Xen'drik is probably big and aggressive enough for dragons to take on.

On Khorvaire and Sarlona, the 'classic' and 'psionic' continents respectively, most dragons maintain human form, so need less food. Doesn't stop them gorging themselves on occasion, but that's a different story. Sane dragons actually avoid Sarlona for some reason, leaving exiles there willing or not.

No, I'm not going to get into the mechanics of dragon breeding. Suffice to say dragon families raise their wyrmlings in the Thousand. Few dragons are born outside Argonessen, and they're considered lesser even by the game; an Argonessen dragon is an all-powerful meddler akin to FR's gods. A foreign born dragon is the classic big monster, unless raised well by their parents.

[Temperjoke]

From some of the fantasy books that I've read, the one that sticks out is from The Obsidian Trilogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Obsidian_Trilogy) where dragons are naturally immortal, but sterile until they bond themselves to a mortal. They then lose their immortality, but gain the ability to have children. It doesn't go into the process of child raising further than that, but it kind of stands out in my mind.

[Hrugner]

I'd say the general dragon feeding tactic is to amass a large hoard of treasure in a conspicuous location, then sleep waiting till their hoard attracts a horde at which point they awake burn the army to a nice jerky and demand any survivors drag the wealth and corpses of their fallen companions up to the hoard and throw it on the pile. At this point they go back to sleeping. When a dragon can't attract an opposing army, they seek to combine their reputation and wealth with that of another dragon. They approach the dragon and either negotiate a truce increasing their power reputation and wealth, or defeat one another keeping the better of the two reputations and combining their wealth. In the instance of a truce, the dragons jointly accumulate enough wealth in one area that they can afford to support hatchlings and recolonize the previously vacated treasure hoard once held by the partner who moved in with the other dragon. After the initial successful colonization, the pair would continue colonizing all the way back to their ancestral nest while spreading the infamy of the more terrible of the initial pairing. At some point, these colonization attempts would draw the interest of other dragons seeking to form a truce or defeat these hatchling colonies, once again either causing a truce or a defeat.

The main difficulty, that being the mass of food needed, can be justified by alternative sustenance or efficient digestion. The draconic ability to create powerful energy or mass at will shows that they have some method of alchemical conversion going on. If we assume that their ability to breath a powerful energy is internally reversed, then letting them eat a wide variety of substances and turn it into energy makes a fair bit of sense. Combine that with an alligator like trapping technique outlined above, and we can see that they should need to spend too much energy.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Here is the explanation I gave to one of my players when asked "where do all the dragons come from?"

When a wizard, warlock, or bard gains the ability to cast true polymorph they find a nice safe spot and undergo a transformation into an ancient dragon. Once the transformation is complete, these dragons terrorize all those incapable of such powerful magic, and build massive hoards of treasure. Eventually, these dragons get together and have a one night stand, producing a dragon's egg. Later this egg hatches into a wyrmling dragon. As that young dragon grows, the ancient dragon often finds that its behavior begins to annoy; and abandons it. These young dragons are then forced to seek out their own place in the world, quite often falling victim to adventuring parties that seek them out for their scales, treasure, or glory.

Player: "But I thought you banned the true polymorph spell?"

Me: "No dragon for you!"

Hey, I thought this was funny even if no one else has commented!

[Afrodactyl]

In my games, dragons of sufficient age, power or fame/legacy that die are eventually reborn, phoenix-style, as a wyrmling. From there they either are killed again before reaching maturity or they use their newfound agility and small stature to escape to a new lair.

In my universe, dragons are literally super-powerful ancient magical constructs, pure magic taken physical form. Thus, as long as there is enough latent magic present when they die, the magic will slowly coalesce into a new shell. Dragon numbers are also perpetuated on the belief that dragons exist and are these powerful superbeings, and if the belief fades, so does the dragons. But of course, no-one stops believing in dragons when they pop up every few years and eat/burn a settlement or two.

:EDIT:
In my universe, magical mortal beings of sufficient (read: unmatched, god-like power) will eventually lose their physical form and become dragons as the raw magic in them adapts it's host to a more substantial form. This also adding to dragon numbers and beliefs.

[Asmotherion]

This is not canon, I just gathered pieces of lore from across many myths (and a bit of impro) to come to those conclusions, which is the essential of my Dragonology campain:

-Dragons are a species of pure magical creatures. Wile the top of the food chain, what they contribute to the eccosystem is the magical energy they produce from their very souls. This energy is imbued to the weave, and absorbed by everything in the eccosystem. This magical energy is precent in all creatures, as it's this energy that gives them the foundantions of life. Some creatures can store more of this energy within them, and can use it to interact with the weave, to alter the laws of nature, a process which is called a spell. Other than dragons, there are other magical creatures that produce this energy, such as celestial or infernal beings, Genies, Deities, Titans etc. Sorcerers, be it because of a dragonic or otherwise origin share this trait, which is apparent in their "Font of Magic" trait.

-Wile Dragons do need to eat, and their excessivelly large stomach would suggest they would eat a lot, it is a missconception. A dragon must eat the equivalent of his challenge rating of medium livestock as a meal. Half that number for large livestock (multiply or divide appropriately according to the creature's size). The dragon will then start a progress of a very slow digestion that takes about 4 months to fully digest it's meal, and a couple more months to work on an appetite. From then, it must eat a full meal again within 6 months or start starving and put itself in hibernation. This state can last for years untill the dragon sences livestock have reprodused enough to provide a full meal. During Hybernation the dragon is awake for no more than 4 hours a day, and sometimes it may sleep for months or even years without waking. However in that state it can keep itself alive without needing food, and there are cases of dragons that hybernated for even centuaries, when entire castles were built on them without them even realising (usually due to camouflageing themselves with large rocks before hibernating), only to wake up one day and destroy the building that was literally built on their back.

-Different Dragons have different diets. However, Dragons are, above perhaps of any other species, the literal meaning of Omnivore. Their diets indicate their personal tasts; nothing more and nothing less. Some dragons, usually of the metalic species take a taste for humanoid cooking, and will pass large portions of their lives in humanoid forms for it. When in humanoid forms, the dragons only need to eat to maintain that form, so they would not need to eat the large portions they do in their true forms, making this also a perfect economic plan for dragons who wish not hunt their prey (or steal it from farms), and yet maintain large amounts of gold. In their Dragonic forms, they might even have a taste for specific minerals, such as gems or even precious metals. Those however are mostly used as spices, as they have no nutricient value for the dragon.

-If a dragon happens to eat a magic item, it may instinctivelly replicate it's effects as if it had used the item in question. This happens for as long as the magic item is in the dragon's body, and it is stored in a ceparate organ, not the stomach. It is unknown what this organ was originally for, but it is implyed that it can analyse anything the dragon eats to prevent it from digesting something without wanting to, such as a lethal potion. Others say it's the same organ that produces the dragon's Breath Weapon. It can caugh up anything stored in that organ anytime it wants as an action.

-Dragons are very teritorial, even against other Dragons. This is the main reason why dragons will rarelly mate with each other, due to trust issues (such as an other dragon mating to steal from it's hoard), as well as ecology issues, as a dragon knows that a balance has to be kept in the eccosystem, or they will have to face starvation. Having more dragons in their area is extreamly hindering to them be it with mates and infant Dragons. After mating, Dragons usually go their separate ways, and perhaps meet once in a wile for a family reunion, with the newborn staying with it's mother. Once the newborn grows to a young form, it must find and conquere it's own Hunting Grounds, either by traveling or by challenging an other Dragon for it. At this stage in life, many Dragons perish, either when challenging a much stronger dragon, or simply by being hunted after hunting in an other Dragon's teritory without it's permission. This is the reason why many dragons are conceved each year, but very few ever reach adulthood, unless they blend into humanoid society to live most of their lives as humanoids. On rare occasions, a dragonic parent may take care of it's child for a little longer, but this is frawn uppon among dragons as a sighn of weakness, both for the parent and the child.

-In the even more rare cases of dragons forming a fammily, it is a strict hierarchy between the strongest among the two dragons (usually, but not always the male one) as the patriarch or matriarch, the second in command being the other partener, and ofsprings being ranked soldiers. This kind of family is mostly a clan in all ways, and sometimes even sells it's services either to other dragons or even humanoids. For an other dragon to join said clan it must be chosen as the mate to one of the ofsprings. All teritories between the dragons are shared, and usually they will conquere teritories from other dragons near theirs.

-Due to the above reasons, and because Dragons are highly sexually active, many, if not most of them choose to reproduce with humanoids or other species, wich explains why there are so many non "true dragons". They may do so by choosing one or more (usually the later) life-long parteners, and allow them free access to their lair, even sometimes to make home there. Others embrace humanoid society, and live most of their lives as humanoids, with fammilies and children who inherit part of their legacy, either in the form of magic, or by having an actuall hybrid apearance. Those offsprings are usually raised in the wilderness rather than society however, as they can betray the Dragon's true nature, something most dragons avoid when embeding themselves in society. As highly proud creatures, dragons in society will usually attain high places as nobles, politicians, court members or even kings. Some will also make use of their innate magical talent to aquire places of court wizards, wile others might even become interested in adventuring.

-Dragons will not easily consider someone a friend, due to their inate paranoia that everyone is out to get their hord. However, a dragon who considers someone a friend will never forget him, even eons after said friend dies.

-As opposed to popular belief, dragons never die of old age. If they are not killed, they simply age till they become Great Wyrms, at which point they ascend to other planes of existance. Many will become valued guardians of the deity they followed in life (usually Behamut or Tiamat) or will start an ever-lasting journey in the astral plane, in order to seek the treasure of knowlage. Others will try to attain godhood. Some will feel a particular calling from an other plane and become infused with it as guardians of that plane. Assended Dragons no longed need food, dring or to breath and share those traits with undead. They also can chose to manifest in a plane they travel to in a non physical form, in the form they had before assention, or in any small or medium form of their choice. Some dragons will simply re-invent their identities when the time of their assention comes, and continue living in the plane they were as before. This however is a well guarded secret among dragon elders, and the reason many dragons chose to become Dracolich.

Those were the basis of a campain I had designed that was all about dragons (including the PCs) and from then on, the default lore I use for Dragonology. I hope it helps you somehow :)

[Hawkstar]

I'm not seeing what the problem is. There are lots of dragons scattered across massive worlds, with near-infinite breeding range, they lay eggs wherever the hell they want, live forever, and have no concerns about inbreeding because they're magically perfect like that.

Every time they start to become a threat, they get smacked down by uppity heroes.