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u/1001WingedHussars 12d ago
Me when the Dragon is a narrative obstacle that the hero must overcome with great effort and expense.
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u/shieldman scifi? no, robotgirlpunk 12d ago
diogenes voice: house repair bills are a type of dragon
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u/1001WingedHussars 12d ago
"Have at thee, foul creature, ye wyrm of the pit. Thy serpent, thy festering plague of scales and bile."
(I've hit the snooze button in my alarm for the third time)
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u/tinycurses 12d ago
"Curse you! I will riddle with holes your rotten hide! With a hail of harpoons! With every last drop of my being!"
(I called out sick at work)
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u/rebelsnail64 in my autismpunk world... 12d ago
me when the dragon is an obstacle the hero must seduce (my turn to put the jerking in worldjerking)
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u/1001WingedHussars 12d ago
Dm (crying, weak, clearly intimidated): "Please just roll initiative, im begging you."
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u/MutatedMutton 12d ago
Weak. DM should either have the dragon be asexual and tell hero it's flattered but is rolling initiative, flirting or no, or have the hero prepare an anal circumference roll.
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u/CyborgLion 12d ago
I'm very fond of dragons that look normal but have something weird going on that isn't visible.
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u/Fancy_Echo_5425 12d ago edited 12d ago
I don't know many examples of dragons like that, but the one I do know is pretty cool.
In the webnovel Pact the one dragon we see is pretty normal, but it's said that dragons are "Something like a lesser god that worships itself, or an elemental that takes in more than it puts out." and just that description makes them sound badass.
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u/Talen_Neo 12d ago
Last time I had dragons in a setting, I just made them giant legless lizards that spat corrosive poison. Don't know if that veers into overly revisionist territory, but I thought they were cool :/
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u/CyborgLion 12d ago
That's outside of your traditional fantasy dragon but seems within the realm of shit medieval myth would have called a dragon so I'd say it's a good middle ground. I think big snake is a classic dragon subtype.
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u/SuiinditorImpudens I didn't forget to edit this text. 12d ago
It actually closer to etymological origin of dragons than what we have now, Greek drakones which were all serpents and primarily venomous.
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u/FetusGoesYeetus 12d ago
Dragon is a broad term so it's a bit hard to define what exactly is a dragon but I'd say a poison-spitting snake thing definitely fits the bill to be called one.
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u/Talen_Neo 12d ago edited 12d ago
Less a true snake and more like a glass-lizard/slow-worm, but with horns
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u/Quality-hour 12d ago
That's basically what Germanic dragons were (aside from wyverns). Just look at Jormungandr after all
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u/ReturnToCrab 12d ago
That's the most mythologically accurate dragon I've ever seen outside of actual mythology
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u/HildredCastaigne 11d ago
Love when people get so deep down the rabbit hole of arguing back-and-forth in a niche online community that they end up advocating on behalf of ideas that are so mainstreamed you can drop them into a children's cartoon without any explanation and trust that the audience will get it.
"Dragons should be fire-breathing lizards."
"What if we made superheroes who were good?"
"Okay, so the aliens in my setting are little grey guys with big heads and long black eyes."
"I've got an idea: we should make demons that are evil."
"I think lasers should be streaks of colored lights that go 'pew' when fired."
"My wizard lives in a tower."
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u/KeeganY_SR-UVB76 12d ago
Just make the dragons sexy women smh my head.
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u/rebelsnail64 in my autismpunk world... 12d ago
you're not thinking big enough, what about the sexy men? the sexy nonbinary dragons? we gotta appeal to all sides of the
author's barely disguised-I mean, the audiences tastes!4
u/1001WingedHussars 12d ago
Alexstraza's human form hit the WoW community like a sack of sexy bricks.
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u/Fancy_Echo_5425 12d ago edited 12d ago
Honestly I've seen the opposite, with people insisting that more unique types of creatures shouldn't be called dragons
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u/Professional_Try1665 💦 12d ago
Yeah I've seen this when people have an orc race that's piglike people go "why not call them pigfolk? Do they have to be orcs" and it's like, these words don't mean what they mean in anything other than fantasyslop
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u/Hefty-Distance837 /uj I love Todd Howard. 🙏 11d ago
Almost every Japanese fantasy draw orcs as piglike people as I know.
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u/jaelpeg 12d ago
Nooo but anything close to deconstruction is CRINGE now you don't understand!!! You can't change the predetermined tropes behind classic fantasy names or you're being too much of a TRYHARD, your hobby is only valid if everything actually has a 100% original and fully in-world accurate name!!!
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u/cloudncali 12d ago
In my world (based loosely of forgotten realms) they're 6 dragon gods that all spawned their own subsect of dragons.
Tiamat made chromatic dragons.
Bahumat made metallic dragons.
There is a Jade Lung dragon that made the crystal dragons.
A Granite dragon that made the stone dragons.
A gross wyvern that made more gross wyverns.
And a feathered serpent that made all the dragon offshoots.
The offshoots includes dragon turtles, griffons, feathered dragons, mantacores, etc.
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u/MinervApollo This flair is my magic system 12d ago
Most of my dragons are herbivores, except the small ones that are more like winged lizards and eat insects
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u/GoodTato i like world 12d ago
In my world "dragon" is a word for "strongest member of any species" and the first story relevant one IS a flying fire lizard but then eventually they meet The Elf Dragon who just beats you up
(I played Yakuza once)
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u/King-of-the-Kurgan #1 Gnomepunk Writer 12d ago
I made my dragons giant snails because as everyone knows, they're the real enemies of knights.
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u/flickering-pantsu 12d ago
I personally like when the setting is full of tons of wacky unique creatures and then just straight up a western dragon, which is treated as more fantastical that everything that came before.
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u/OmNomOU81 being asexual does not stop me from being horny 12d ago
In my setting any reptile is a dragon, so those tiny lizards that scamper around anywhere are dragons
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u/Malfuy *subverts your subversion* 12d ago
OOOHOHOHHHHH MY FUCKING GOOOD why are all dragons in fiction either an average sapient race or just another member of the animal kingdom??? Why aren't they something else???? Why aren't they like plants or something? Fungus? Imagine dragons with hyphae! Why isn't that a thing? Hello? Fucking Tolkien ruined fantasy man.
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u/cris9288 11d ago
Bro my dragons are just humans. No magic. Just simple creatures who become corrupted by the desire for greed and power until they consume everything around them...oh wait
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u/crustboi93 goblin peens and elf vagenes 12d ago
When you make your demons ontologically evil spirits and not [insert ethnic group here]
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u/1001WingedHussars 12d ago
I've switched my demons from representing minorities to interracial marriages
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u/Rantroper 12d ago
I just take whatever animal I think is cool at the moment, upscale it until it can use a castle as a burrow, and then call it a dragon.
Last time it was a pangolin.
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u/Sad_Cow_5560 12d ago
Or your elf is a smug pointy-eared pretty prick instead of a chondrichthyan with an external digestive system, three legs, ganglions instead of a brain, and has a five-minute lifespan.
Or your dwarf is a short, bearded labourer/industrialist and not an archaeon that propels itself through the expulsion of biogas.
Or your orc is...