Dragon Ecology
Hatching
Dragons hatch from eggs laid in remote areas, hidden by their mother.
They hatch in small broods 2-6. They will immediately leave the nest and seek out food. They grow very quickly shedding their skin once a week until they reach juvenile size.
Juvenile
They will chose a lair and a hunting ground. They are natural hoarders and their lairs will be filled with treasures, bones from kills, and shiny objects. Dragons do not have sentience at this stage of their development. They will continue to grow rapidly molting once a month until they are adult sized and begin flying.
Young Adult
Generally at this point they will need a larger lair and will establish a new hunting territory. They will also have a more keen interest in treasures that are valuable gems and metals. This is a compulsion, not a sentient choice. As they reach full adulthood a process of becoming sentient will occur. They will enter a hibernation state for at least a year. This is a dangerous time for dragons many will not survive this metamorphosis.
Adulthood and sentience
When they wake they will not recall anything of their youth, and will have the innate ability to speak the draconic language. They will feel compelled to defend their lair and treasure. They will have a voracious appetite for learning and within the first year of sentience will be able to learn the same amount of information as an entire childhood other species require. Dragons have no love for their younger kin, they do not see wyrmling dragons as children any more than a human sees a squirrel as a young version of themselves.
Procreation
When mating occurs it is violent and the dragons involved revert to a state of animal intelligence during the mating time. They will copulate and the female will hide her eggs somewhere and then this "spawning" mindset vanishes and neither parents will even recall the events of courtship, copulation nor even laying the eggs. The female will have lost almost a year of memory as she carries the eggs, lays them and protects them until they are ready to hatch. Shortly after they hatch she will return to her lair (away from the eggs) and sleep for at least a few weeks. When she awakens she will have no memory of the location of the hatchlings.
Dragons affect on civilization
Dragon eggs and wild non sentient dragons are a dangerous problem for sentient humanoids. It is common for even small villages to have the means to hunt and kill a small dragon. Larger cities will have guilds and mercenary troops who specialize in dragon hunting.
Sentient Dragons
Sentient dragons do recognize their connection to the wyrmlings and non-sentient flying adult dragons. They have no empathy or compassion for these savage animals. Instead they see these feral versions of themselves as problematic. They could become competition for food and territory, they also cause the humanoids to specialize in dragon slaying. Sentient dragons are very rare, and very powerful. They do not wreak havoc on a whim, they can become very powerful spell casters. These magical creatures do not die naturally and this may explain why the Tomb King, the first sentient undead...was a dragon. They do sleep as they grow, sometimes for decades at a time. molting and eventually awakening to a completely changed world.
Bassilisk competition
Bassilisk covet dragon lairs and it is not uncommon for them to follow a dragon back to its lair and wait for it to sleep. The bassilisk will petrify the dragon and take over their lair. Young adult dragons sleeping before sentience are especially prone to this end. All dragons of all ages naturally hate Bassilisks and will kill them on site. Some dragon hunting companies attempt to use bassilisks to hunt dragons. It is not uncommon to discover a dragon lair occupied by a draconic statue.
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