Ancient beyond measure and mighty as legend, dragons awe, frighten, and inspire other ancestries the world over. To some cultures, dragons are the very symbol of power. To others, the heralds of rulership. But to dragons, it is simply who they are. This simple truth colors the relationship between dragons and other ancestries at a fundamental level. But not all dragons live like those in the pages of human storybooks, sleeping in a cavern full of treasure until some foolhardy adventurer dares to challenge them for their hoard. Sometimes the adventurer is the dragon!

Dragons are beings of magic, suffused with so much power that it is sometimes difficult for other ancestries to recognize just how much of a dragon’s arsenal depends on it. Even the greenest adventurer is likely to realize that a dragon’s special breath weapon might be magical, along with the dragon’s innate magical spells. But much of a dragon’s magic is subtler, with dragons using magic for fundamental biological processes like a fish swims and breathes water. For instance, the incredible resilience that builds up in a dragon’s scales arises from the constant flow of magic through the scales, growing their strength over time. This same principle applies to the rest of a dragon’s body, causing dragons to become more and more powerful as time goes on, unlike other creatures that grow to a physical peak and then decline past that point. Furthermore, dragons use extreme amounts of magic in order to fly. Normally a creature of a dragon’s size and mass wouldn’t be able to stay aloft through the use of wings. Dragons, on the other hand, augment their wings with significant magical expenditures, allowing them to not only fly despite their mass, but also to fly extremely quickly.

The magical potential of a dragon is vast, and by using those magical pathways over and over again, day after day, year after year, century after century, dragons become inordinately powerful. But the process is slow. And wherever delayed gratification exists, so too will there always be impatient innovators seeking to find a way to achieve a goal faster and more easily. Most such efforts were either doomed to failure or produced dragons who quickly grew to immense power through unique and completely unreproducible means involving specific external factors. But the ritual known as lux aeterna stands out from all the others. Shrouded in mystery, the ritual has more conflicting stories purporting to describe its origin than there are opinions about proper hoard organization at a draconic moot.

While only some dragons know how to perform the ritual, all know its effects, both in terms of the incredible benefits it can offer a dragon, and the price the dragon must pay. The lux aeterna ritual is designed with several ingenious features, using a mix of physical transmutation, energy modulation reminiscent of the magic used to tap into ley lines, time magic, and spiritual magic, altering both the physical and metaphysical self. Despite the many deeply advanced magical techniques needed to create the ritual in the first place, it is deceptively simple for any dragon to learn the secrets to perform the ritual, even without a secondary caster. The best way to visualize the effect of the ritual is that the recipient, either the dragon casting the ritual or a willing participant dragon, attempts to reach out across time and fate and drag all of the magic that would run through their bodies’ pathways in a lifetime through themselves all at once. If this seems incredibly dangerous and likely to have significant side effects and costs, that’s because it is. But the rewards can be just as great.

If all goes according to plan, the magical pathways in the dragon’s body permanently change, becoming slightly less efficient in some of their usual functions in the short term in exchange for greatly increasing the pathways’ speed and capacity to learn and grow over time. Growth in power that might take an ordinary dragon centuries or millennia can happen across the space of just a few years, or even faster if the dragon participates in escalating stressful situations that flex their pathways to the limit. Additionally, a successful lux aeterna ritual flushes so many centuries of raw potentiality through the dragon’s system that the process heals the dragon of all ailments, even life-threatening conditions. The dragon can also choose to use another dragon, or even a non-dragon, as a conduit for the energy, granting that creature the same benefit of being fully healed, and potentially increasing the creature’s longevity if it wasn’t a dragon. The conduit becomes metaphysically linked to the dragon through sharing the entirety of the dragon’s former potential across the dragon’s lifespan, which can have a variety of unusual side effects, such as adopting some of each other’s mannerisms or an uncanny increased likelihood they run into each other again at random throughout their lives. Some dragons who are wary of the lux aeterna ritual claim that it shortens a dragon’s natural lifespan, but there’s been no way to prove this claim. It just seems intuitive to some that it must, since it’s pulling power from your future, so doesn’t that mean it must be at the expense of that future? Proponents of the ritual point to the lack of evidence, or to examples of dragons who have lived to become ancient after performing the ritual with no apparent issues. It is true that many dragons who receive the benefits of the ritual (known as aeternal dragons) die young, but the confounding factor is that the ritual incentivizes those dragons to take risky actions in order to gain power quickly, and it’s been impossible to disentangle those two facts.

If you want to play a powerful character from a proud and ancient ancestry, who has found a unique perspective among other ancestries that your peers might call lesser, you should play a dragon.

You Might...

• Hoard treasure in various forms, whether it be material wealth, knowledge, or allies.
• Rush to challenge yourself so you can grow your magic and gain greater power.
• Either hew to traditional draconic battle with claws, jaws, and scales or choose to employ weapons and armor like other adventurers.

Others Probably...

• Don’t understand the difference between you and a dragon who hasn’t performed the lux aeterna ritual.
• Worry that you might try to eat them or confiscate their treasure for your hoard.
• Treat you with great respect and awe and expect you to be extremely powerful.

Physical Description

Aeternal dragons look mostly similar to dragons of the same heritage who haven’t performed the lux aeterna ritual. However, there are telltale signs, especially to creatures who can sense the flow of magic. An aeternal dragon’s magic is weakened substantially at the moment of the ritual but becomes an unstoppable force, growing rapidly and adapting to every experience, and this is visible to those who can see magic’s flow. Even to others, there are signs. For one thing, a larger dragon shrinks down to around the size of an orc after the ritual, and it requires practice and exerted effort to grow further. This means that while adventurers can usually guess a dragon’s strength based on the dragon’s size, an aeternal dragon might be much more powerful than their size suggests, as well as older, smarter, and more emotionally mature. An aeternal dragon’s scales also very slightly reflect the new magical flow, in coloration patterns that are similar to but not identical to the dragon’s coloration before the ritual. Noticing such a subtle difference, however, requires an incredibly keen eye, deep familiarity with the dragon’s old scale coloration, or in most cases both. Of course, since aeternal dragons sometimes use armor and weapons, a practice nearly universally abhorred by traditionalist dragons, the dragon’s equipment can sometimes be the most obvious clue to an aeternal dragon’s identity at a glance.

Some heritages are harder to distinguish than others, however. For instance, harlequin dragons’ scale reflection is almost impossible to notice without extensive analysis, and so aeternal harlequin dragons who choose to remain at a smaller size can often pass as younger traditionalists. This potentially allows an extremely powerful aeternal harlequin dragon to pretend to be a weak traditionalist dragon, causing their foes to drastically underestimate them.

Society

Aeternal dragons haven’t established a society of their own, and so they often take part in the society of other dragons, or of shorter-lived ancestries, enjoying both as long as they can find acceptance, but never quite fitting into either perfectly. The exact reception they receive from traditionalist dragons depends on the specifics of the dragon’s community and varies by heritage (see pages 12-21), though it’s almost never exactly the same as it was before the ritual. Traditionalists of many dragon heritages react with disapproval, disappointment, or outright hostility. A rare few traditionalist dragons don’t treat their aeternal kith or kin any differently than before, or work to understand the differences between aeternal and traditionalist dragons and act with tolerance. Regardless of the situation with other dragons, aeternal dragons feel a special kinship with other aeternal dragons.

Interactions with humanoids and their ilk are even more varied depending on the dragon’s attitude and ability to blend in with a humanoid shape. Nonetheless, while the separation is not always a bad thing, sometimes born out of awe and respect, ultimately a dragon is still considered an “other” compared to even the most well-meaning of humanoid ancestries. In many ways, an adventuring group is where an aeternal dragon can most feel at home, especially among other aeternal dragons. Fellow adventurers of other ancestries might not share an aeternal dragon’s lived experience, but they share a mission, a great power that sets them apart from others, and an ambition to grow stronger.

Alignment and Religion

Aeternal dragons have a much weaker connection to specific alignments than traditionalist dragons of the same heritage, and they can be of any alignment. However, whatever alignment other dragons of their heritage usually possess has likely shaped the aeternal dragon’s perceptions of others and how they might act, so it’s useful to know what that alignment is. This weakened connection is even true for planar dragons, who erode their plane’s influence over their minds and fates, and for void dragons, who cut the link to the void corruption that would normally be able to inevitably consume their reason.

Aeternal dragons who choose to worship a deity most typically worship dragon deities, but they are far more likely than other dragons to resonate with the teachings of a deity popular among other ancestries instead. Their choice of religion fits their new role in life as an aeternal dragon, rather than the preconceived assumptions of traditionalist dragons who share their heritage.

Names

Many aeternal dragons stick with the name they had before the ritual, typically a lengthy name in draconic. However, a growing number have decided to take a new name after their rebirth as an aeternal dragon to signify a fresh start. This is more common for aeternal dragons attempting to abandon their old ties among other dragons, as the new name makes it harder for their past to catch up to them. New names might be equally traditional to the original, but they might also be derived from any number of other means, such as a title gained for a great deed, or even a simple descriptive word in common.

Sample Names

Aishivarenn, Demon’s End, Invincible, Kallizandrex, Lichbane, Mountainshaker, Obsidian, Scribe, Shadow, Varvaxelyndrill

Varying Power Level

The dragons in this book have been carefully designed to give you access to iconic draconic abilities while staying balanced with other PCs who aren’t dragons in the same group, via ancestry feats and class feats from the draconic ravager and dragon mage archetypes. If your group is looking for even more draconic powers, you have a few options.

First, you can use variants to give everyone in the party more feats. The ancestry paragon variant gives twice as many ancestry feats, but you could also consider giving all dragons free archetype for draconic ravager or dragon mage (and all non-dragons a different free archetype). You might also place restrictions on what feats to grant dragons via ancestry paragon or grant the feats at a different rate. For instance, perhaps in your game, dragons gain a specific set of additional feats via ancestry paragon, such as Dragon Breath and the flight feats Empower Wings, Soaring Leap, Channel Wings, Dragon’s Flight.

Second, you can just make dragons more powerful and not care about other PCs. Perhaps everyone is a dragon anyway and you’ve made numerous adjustments to the baseline assumptions of encounters to take that into account. With this option, you can adjust the effects of the lux aeterna ritual in your game and make any of the benefits granted by various dragon feats innate, and even make them available at lower levels. For instance, if your group, and especially the GM, are ready to completely rebuild every encounter and challenge from scratch to take into account kiting tactics from flying creatures with ranged attacks, you could simply grant the dragon PCs flight from level 1. This option is only recommended for experienced groups well-versed in modifying challenges, and requires significantly more work when running a published adventure, as opposed to a homebrew based around the capabilities of dragon PCs.

Dragon Adventurers

Dragon adventurers get their start because of the power and incentive of the lux aeterna ritual, but before that, they were usually… dragons. That doesn’t automatically mean they were leading traditionalist dragon lives before the ritual, as some dragons who eventually go on to use the ritual are avant-garde among their kith and kin even before they become aeternal dragons. Even so, a dragon adventurer from most heritages isn’t especially likely to have a background like barkeep that involves simple living in a settlement. Instead, backgrounds vary greatly based on the dragon’s heritage; for example, wandering cloud dragons are more likely to be nomads while isolated sky dragons are more likely to be hermits. Because of this variance, there are even exceptions to the general rule against backgrounds like barkeep: boisterous indigo dragons, gossipy amber dragons, and their other wild dragon kin actually take to such occupations.

Classes vary among heritages in a similar fashion. For more information about which classes are most common among aeternal dragons of a given heritage and to help build your dragon’s background, check the lore entry for your dragon’s heritage starting on page 81.

Dragon Settlements

Even traditionalist dragons who aren’t fully solitary still live in small family or friend groups. Aeternal dragons are different, and aeternal wild dragons in particular love forming their own settlements and joining settlements with all sorts of other ancestries. Thus, in the Indigo Isles, it’s not unusual to see aeternal wild dragons walking the streets. This in turn draws aeternal dragons of other heritages to such settlements, where the inhabitants understand their situation and simply nod and wave to a dragon walking the streets. Of course, dragons with the ability to assume a humanoid form can join just about any settlement without much problem.

Even beyond mixed settlements like in the Indigo Isles, aeternal dragons have begun to form settlements with mainly or purely aeternal dragons as inhabitants. For instance, lore hunters tell of a secret library city deep in the jungle, inhabited by bronze, green, and occult aeternal dragons.

Star Flight and Time Travel

Outer dragons’ star flight ability is a powerful effect, akin to a less efficient 9th-level teleport or a much slower 10th-level teleport, that can have a major effect on your game. It’s listed as an uncommon 17th-level ancestry feat, but in truth, in most campaigns, it would be disruptive or unhelpful, and in a campaign where the GM and players would want to make use of it, where the whole point is to travel between the stars, it might be more of a mandatory plot device than a power up. In those cases, consider deciding as a group to give star flight to the outer dragon PC for free at a lower level, and allow it to bring more people along. After all, if it’s mandatory for the story you want to tell, the outer dragon PC shouldn’t need to spend a feat for it.

Similarly, legends tell of the most powerful great wyrm time dragons being able to travel through time a limited number of times in their millennialong lifespan. This time travel ability isn’t listed as a feat anywhere in this book. This is because it’s also a plot device, one that’s likely even more disruptive or mandatory than space flight, and one that is strictly limited throughout a dragon’s life and thus would burn a feat slot once expended (or equally problematically, if retraining was allowed, the dragon would just retrain it). Thus, it’s recommended for the GM and players to decide together if they want to add a time travel plotline and just give the ability to the time dragon PC for free when needed. This also allows an element of uncertainty if the time dragon doesn’t know when they’ll receive their next time warp, meaning the PCs might be stranded for a period, or for good, in the other time.