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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8847548" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The main problem here is, there's very little which has the nearly-universal appeal of dragons. I wasn't kidding when I said that something dragon-like exists in basically every human culture ever. Moreover, the one through line for all of them is "powerful and important and at least kind of reptilian," making the category broad but consistently Kind Of A Big Deal.The only other types of being which come close to the universality of dragons are Giants, Fey, Undead, and Demons/Devils. Almost all cultures have myths about those last two in some sense, the "unquiet dead" and "malign spirits" being incredibly broad categories, but Giants and Fey are a lot harder to call universal, even with intentionally broad definitions. Fey and Undead aren't the best fit because a lot of them are specifically very weak/minor, and Demons/Devils are highly variable. Plus, these categories often blend together; the Japanese word "youkai" is often translated as "demon," but the word encompasses everything from fairy-like spirit beings to souls of the restless dead to powerful malign beings, essentially a blender of Fey, Undead, and Demon/Devil all rolled into one.In other words...there really isn't anything else that quite hits that mix of Universal, Powerful, and Important like Dragons do. Not in mythology at least. That makes any effort at creating an alternative at least somewhat fraught.With my aforementioned cosmology, the four fundamental classes of supernatural beings are Dragons (overall LG, unless fallen), Fey (CG, unless fallen), Giants (overall LE, unless redeemed), and Demons (CE; a redeemed demon becomes something that isn't a demon anymore.) Even then, one must be careful to avoid letting dragons take too wide a place, simply because of how mythically resonant they are.While I did know this about wolfram (it's why the elemental symbol of tungsten is W), I had no idea this was an archaic name for neodymium! I just invented it as a term for an implicitly purple metal (on the notion of "tyrian" purple.) In my semi-fantastical interpretation, wolfram would be green metal in the way gold is yellow and copper is red, and tyrium would be purple. Iron is of course the "black" metal, cobalt is blue, and silver is white.</blockquote>

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