Dragon Age Human
Shanae Maerz
Anyway, I was looking at the "dragonets" page and noticed that the way most people perceive the dragon's ages doesn't really makes sense to me. They seem to be low-balling their age, making them younger than they should be. So I made my own age chart, according to what makes the most sense to me. Would love some opinions!
Anemone is two years old. If we go by the "human years" scale, that would make her 5 - 7 years old, but this doesn't really make sense when you consider how she behaves. Anemone was entirely willing to murder her entire family to become queen of the SeaWings, and she's mature enough to develop crushes and show romantic interest. For me, this would place Anemone at 12 human years AT THE YOUNGEST, but more like 14 years old. Anything younger is just way too young to be ready and willing to rule to Kingdom of the Sea.
Take Darkstalker and Clearsight into consideration as well: At three years old, Darkstalker was pretty much entirely independent and able to hunt for his family. Clearsight dropped out of school and started a full time job for the queen at age 4. These two started a serious relationship at ages 3-4. The way they're written makes them feel like young adults, 16-18 years old, rather than 9-12 like the "human years" scale would put them at.
1 dragon year = 6 human years (at this stage, the dragonet grows very rapidly, developing speech and flight skills. Some tribes, such as the IceWings, SkyWings, and MudWings even begin to learn light battle skills)
7 dragon years = 20 human years (this is when they're considered "biological adults", although humans are considered biological adults at age 18 I believe it's a little later for dragons, just based on their longer lifespan. This is also when their growth rates start slowing down.)
After this point their growth rate starts slowing down dramatically. a 20 year old dragon would be around 30-33 years old, a 30 year old dragon would be about 35-ish. They pretty much "stop aging" (for lack of a better term) at around age 50, but they continue to grow very slowly until they die. a 70 year old dragon wouldn't be that much bigger than a 50 year old, but you could still see the difference in size.
I agree with the point on Anemone. In Ancient Egypt, the whole reason Hatshepsut rose to power is because her stepson, Thutmose III, the next in line to rule, was too young to rule when the current ruler died, and Anemone would have been a couple years older at most, if we went by the most commonly accepted age conversion chart.
The reason I have 6 years = 18 years is because the SilkWings go through their metamorphosis at age 6, which seems to be their transition from adolescence into adulthood (because once they've gone through metamorphosis, they are assigned a partner to have eggs with, and a lifetime career). So Blue, Luna, Cricket, and Sundew are all adults, from my viewpoint.
But, to make sure first before I go ahead, is there any actual way for this to have even been done in the first place: an adult dragon made stuck in a polymorphed form and prevented from turning back into their true one?
If you want there to be a Curse that has entrapped a Dragon in Human Form, then you can invent one. There is no need for RAW to support this--creating curses-as-plot-devices is entirely within your purview as the DM.
Did the dragon come upon a cursed artifact? Were they cursed by some powerful magical ritual? Did a powerful mage hit them with a Bestow Curse that disabled their Shapechange? Did they tick off Bahamut and he cursed them to be stuck as a human? Did they get hit with True Polymorph (not Shapechange...but still puts them in human form)?
If you're dealing with an adult dragon, they are phenomenally wealthy. If you're dealing with an ordinary curse, it can be broken with the 3rd level spell Remove Curse. Breaking a normal curse would simply be a matter of the dragon finding someone who could cast Remove Curse, then throwing gold at them until they did so without asking any questions.
That said, as the DM, you are free to invent new concepts and add them to the world as you wish. If you want this to be a particularly potent curse that requires an Upcast (cast with a higher level spell slot) Remove Curse to break--you can do so...this increases how hard it is for the dragon to find someone able to break the curse--especially while limited by their ability to move around.
You could also make it that Remove Curse simply doesn't work on this. There is some other condition that must be met to break the curse...perhaps they have to find the other half of some artifact, perhaps they have to kill the person who placed the curse, or Bahamut cursed them to learn some humility and they are stuck that way until they come to understand/respect humanity, or some other condition is applied.
Or, perhaps the dragon got stuck in human form a long, long way from civilization and simply hasn't been able to travel far enough as a human to get somewhere with a sufficiently powerful spellcaster. Or they can't actually get to their hoard without the ability to fly -- so they haven't been able to actually go get the money they'd need to pay someone to uncurse them.
There are many 'problems' that we, as DMs, think of that have very simple solutions. So you'll need to think of why the Dragon has not been able to be rid of this curse. If you want it to be more complicated than 'Pop Remove Curse,' then you could even lampshade it a bit--have the dragon remark "You think I didn't try that already?"
As the DM you have full control over your game-world, so you don't need to find an excuse to have your dragon stuck, you can just make up a curse that does what you want it to. The game is just a game, and you're in charge of the rules, so you can make them what you need.
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Can a draconic or pterosaur-like flying creature weighing about 1-1.5 times that of an average human carry a human through the air for a distance of about 10 miles? If not, what atmospheric and/or gravitational parameters could the planet have to allow such a creature to exist? Metabolic requirements and evolutionary plausibility are not an issue. Based on the Quetzalcoatlus Northropi pterosaur, it seems like such a creature could exist on its own, but I'm unsure about whether it could have a rider.
Most earthly birds can carry at most 80% of their own weight, and our old friend the Square-Cube Law says that's much easier for small birds than large ones. The heaviest flying bird currently found is the kori bustard, which at 19kg is less than 1/4 the weight of an average American. They can barely carry their own weight aloft, much less carry anything substantial. Your pterosaur is estimated to be about human-weight, but we have no good information for its potential carrying capacity. Given the aforementioned square-cube issues, almost certainly no pterosaur could support a rider or even carry anything heftier than a toddler. Scientists aren't entirely unanimous on it being able to fly itself.
Since you're opening up unlimited metabolism and evolution, we might be better served looking at hang gliders. Those can carry humans aloft while being easily half the weight of their passengers. Of course they are gliding, not flying, and would need to rely on tall places to jump from and/or implausibly convenient wind currents to get aloft in the first place. That's going to be true for any particularly large flying cargo creature. Also worth noting that carrying their "riders" below their own center of mass is going to be substantially easier than letting them ride on top, with unfortunate consequences to awesome cover art.
Thicker atmosphere helps. Higher wind helps (except when it hurts). Lower gravity helps. Lighter riders help (if you want to keep your mounts close to the same weight as their riders, it's easier if they're both smaller). Turn any combination of those dials far enough and sure, you can have dragonriders without offending physics. All else being equal, an earthly flying creature suddenly finding itself in 50% gravity (but the same atmospheric conditions) could carry its own weight. But its muscles would atrophy over time unless specifically designed or induced to maintain earth-level strength, similar to effects astronauts experience in orbit. And even at full power and half gravity, trying to straddle the neck of a bird or pterosaur-shaped creature with equivalent mass to its rider is about as physically feasible as riding a bike by standing on one end of the handlebars; saddle design will be tricky to say the least.
I know the question handwaved away issues of evolution or natural environment, but it is important to point out that low gravity tends to correlate with thinner atmospheres (thought not always). And an environment that has such dramatically weaker gravity would presumably have a whole host of other changes to its inhabitants and environment, so hopefully our dragon and rider are both relatively recent visitors.
If it's important to stick to familiar circumstances, you have animal-assisted flight on Earth with regular humans as long as you mostly want to glide and DEFINITELY bribed evolution to look the other way; the bone and muscle and metabolism involved would be well outside anything we've got the parts for in our fossil record. And the resulting creature would not be proportioned anything like any animal we've ever seen.
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