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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NealTS" data-source="post: 3994629" data-attributes="member: 38610">That's the whole crux of the problem, though. You're positing a fully developed human world, complete with noble lineages, allied nation-states, and powerful spellcasters. The dragon, though, is just a giant, fire-breathing dinosaur apparently created ex nihilo that has to show up at the castle gates asking to meet the king! Of course that dragon's going to have a rough time of it!Dragons are both intelligent and (effectively) immortal. A dragon isn't going to sit around his cave staring at his belly button then, once ancient, decide he should go out and take over a kingdom. If our wyrm is prone to scheming, they'll be set up centuries, maybe millenia, in advance. In addition, this is a single dragon's lifetime we're dealing with here. If dragons are as intelligent as they are, they're bound to have a society. At the very least, there is a familial bond between parent and child in dragondom (hence, the stories of people stealing dragon eggs or hatchlings and being roasted for their trouble). Who's to say that (much as in our own society), a dragon doesn't dedicate his life to making the world better for his children (setting plots in motion, molding human societies, etc.) thousands of years in advance?And if we're dealing with time scales of that magnitude, the evolution of our human societies has to be taken into account. Unless we're dealing with one of those (stupid) worlds in which people have been using plate mail and crossbows for the last 10,000 years, eventually, in the far reaches of the past (or a single generation ago, in dragon time), you're going to have human societies that are in no way equipped to deal with Big Daddy Red. A short-sighted dragon would have looked at this apparent "Golden Age" as a time ripe for pillage and plunder, as indeed it was. But dragons aren't short-sighted beasts (or at the very least, not all dragons are, and we only need one here). These early villages weren't just easy sources of sheep, they were vulnerable, malleable societies that any dragon worth his wings would recognize as a potential resource.If your village has been watched over an undying, unkillable, unimaginably wise benefactor since the Bronze Age, you're bound to feel some loyalty to him. Your entire culture is likely to have him as its centerpiece. In fact, you're not likely to be a village anymore. You can dodge the normal vagaries of history blighting you with power struggles and the occasional incompetent heir. Rather, you've been governed by a single genius intelligence since time immemorial. In addition, that little proto-culture has had access to the ultimate weapon of war in the age of the chariot and the phalanx. Your once-humble village is now the center of a sprawling empire.The Empire of the Dragon now gives Big Red infinitely more than he would have gotten stealing sheep and roasting farmhouses. A place to sleep? No dingy cave for this dragon. He would have a massive palace built to his scale, with masterpiece frescos on every wall. A hoard to sleep on? A treasury as large as that of any of his fellows, with more coming in from conquest and taxation every day. Food? He doesn't even have to leave the house anymore. Livestock is herded into his dining room on a daily basis. Security? He lives in the middle of a continent that looks upon him as a god.This is not to say that the dragon has to be a good little wyrm, either. A warrior culture devoted to conquest is no hindrance to a destruction-minded dragon. It is an extension of his being. I'm imagining a campaign of conquistadors from a land that has developed blessedly free of draconic influence being sent to the New World to kill the draconic blood god. Make Montezuma an 80-foot-long firebreather and anyone who's played Civilization IV will be shaking in their boots. And then, assuming the deed is done, you have the mad dash for the boats as the entire society crumbles into chaos around them.And, yes, somewhere along the line, someone could conceivably decide to betray their people and kill the dragon-god. It'd be tough to do, though. They'd have a rough time finding allies, except in the outlying lands that are ripe for conquest, anyway. And good luck sneaking a strike force of foreigners through the 1000 or so miles' worth of territory to reach the capitol, much less getting them into the palace.The "But his minions could betray him!" argument is a little silly, anyway. Anyone's minions could betray them. The noble could decide to betray the dragon, only to be betrayed by his own bodyguard. The human king could be betrayed just as easily as a dragon king, only he's made of old meat and is thus considerably easier to take down. Any society is going to have malcontents wanting their shot at the guy in charge. It's going to have many more that are interested in the status quo that will resist such drastic change.</blockquote>

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