dragon biology and the common adventurer

[alsih2o]

i used to work at a place that sold reptiles and amphibians exclusively, i still make shed cages for them from terra cotta (herp owners, email me and i will tell you how to make your herp happier during shed with stuff you can easily do) and liquids thread got me to sketching some dragons and i started to wonder about the molt.

do dragons shed?

magically? (this leads me cool places, shedding old magicks like a skin)

is it restorative?

are they more vulnerable when they do?(many normal herp are near blind and quite touchy during their molt)

would dragon molt be valuable? as a spell component? as mild protection from various exposure problems?

is their a.c. lower right after? higher?

has anyone decided this for their dragons? does b.a.d.d. have anything to say on it?

 

[alsih2o]

it also interests me that many chelonians (turtles) have their gender determined by the temperature the egg was exposed to. i believe that cooler=female and warmer=male, but it has been along time since i worked with turtle eggs directly.

what about a global warming or cooling that is so minor that humans have as yet to notice making 300-500 years worth of dragons all the same gender? it seems like something that could be spread over the entirety of a campaign, especially towards the point (epic) where heroes could do something about it

thoughts?

 

[Aeolius]

it also interests me that many chelonians (turtles) have their gender determined by the temperature the egg was exposed to. i believe that cooler=female and warmer=male, but it has been along time since i worked with turtle eggs directly.

That was one of the more interesting theories I read, regarding the extinction of the dinosaurs. A meteor hits the earth, the resulting ash cloud lowers the global temperature and viola! Only girl dinosaurs are born, in the next batch.

 

[Prince Atom]

I would presume that dragons, like all scaley creatures, shed as they outgrow their skins. They don't have soft skins like mammals (which stretch) or heavily armored skins like insects (which stretch and the armor plates separate. Ever seen a very full honey ant?). They may have a specific area of their lairs or territories where they go to scratch and scratch and shed, or they may not.

I remember how neat it was as a kid to find an old snake skin out in the fields. Finding something a thousand times bigger would probably not be very pleasant.

They may be nearly blind when they molt, but they do have blindsight and various other senses to compensate. They will be very, very touchy (Bahamut has bad days too, y'know).

I'd say you'd need the whole skin to make dragonscale armor, but the shed may be valuable in various abjuration spells, and may even provide something like Protection from Elements (say, cold resistance 5).

Now I've started having inspirations about a dragon's shedding place and various encounters therein....

TWK
The Muse has struck again.

 

[Richards]

I remember there was a cool "Arcane Lore" article in Dragon back in the 2E days dealing with draconic spells. (I'm thinking it might have been written by Lloyd Brown III, but my memory's kind of fuzzy there. And now that I think about it, it was a series of articles over a couple of years. I don't recall the issue numbers, but it would have been the June issue in any case, so you could count backwards by 12s until you hit the issue in question.) In any case, one of the draconic spells brought a dragon's previously-shed skin to a semblance of life so it could act as a lair guardian for the dragon.

Johnathan

 

[CRGreathouse]

I like the idea of dragons shedding.

 

[Moe Ronalds]

I think that'd be great for a halloween costume. You just crawl inside the dragon's skin, let out a fake roar, spit out some alchemist's fire and viola!

 

[Severion]

Can't remember the source but i recal reading somewhere that dragons only molt when they hybernate between age categories, the skin forms into a large gem or ore of the appropriate type worth 1000 gp x the old age category. Something like that any way.