Every dragon starts in a shell.
You hatch three kilometres under a village that has never heard of you. Eat what you can kill and take what it knew. Climb when the dark runs out of teachers.
In development
The world, first
The Surface Flythrough
The atlas opens into all eight daylight reaches. The route stays anchored to the generated map while each finished homeland supplies its own scale, landmarks, people and light.
What you are
A dragon is the world venting
Not a species, not a curse, not something a god made. Deep rock takes on more heat than it can shed. Pressure has to go somewhere, and where it finds a seam it makes a shaft — and in the hot dead-ends at the bottom of those shafts, matter calcifies into clutches.
What hatches is the pressure, wearing a body. Which is why a drake is basalt with vents down its flank and fire in its throat. It is not decorated with fire. It is a chimney that learned to hunt.
What you do
The loop is closed, and it is not about breathing
You cannot stay where you are comfortable, because comfort is what you outgrow. You cannot skip ahead, because the band above eats things you are not yet big enough to kill. And you cannot go back down for long, because something younger is already living there.
- 01
Eat
Everything down here evolved something. Kill it and eat enough of it and the trait transfers — you take the organ.
- 02
Watch
The organ is only half of it. Lie still while something hunts and you learn the timing, the tactic, when to do it. Free, slow, and it needs you close to the thing worth being afraid of.
- 03
Grow
Four stages, fed and irreversible. A hatchling has an adult's wedge muzzle and vertical pupils at half the wingspan. It is not a baby dragon. It is a dragon that is small.
- 04
Outgrow
Past a certain size you are no longer being fed by the band, you are grazing it. And the species run out: once you have watched and eaten your way through all of them, the band has nothing left to give you.
- 05
Climb
So you go up. Not because you are told to — because the map stops paying, and because there is always a clutch behind you coming up the same shaft, and it is hungrier than you are.
The catch
Neither half is the skill
Watching without taking is a dragon that knows exactly what to do and has no organ to do it with. Taking without watching is a dragon carrying a sense it cannot read — heat-sight in an animal that has never seen it used is a headache, not a weapon.
The watching
You gain the behaviour
The timing, the tactic, when to do it. It costs nothing but proximity and repetition, which is the cost, because the things worth watching are the things worth being afraid of.
The taking
You gain the organ
The physical capability. It costs a threshold of biomass, sometimes an enormous one, and every trait you hold costs upkeep afterwards.
Where you go
Three kilometres, five bands, one way up
Each band is a stage of your life, at the size you actually are. Inside them are nineteen reaches, because a band with one ecology is a level and a band with four is somewhere you go back to for the thing you missed.
Daylight
Nothing up here is bigger than you. That stops being a comfort at the walls.
The Undercroft
Someone else cut these. The first straight lines you have ever seen, and the first enemy that plans -- though it goes home at the end of a shift. This is the one band people enter and the only one nobody lives in.
The Middens
Wide, wet, crowded. The first place something hunts you on purpose rather than by accident.
The Warrens
First tunnels. You are the smallest thing here that hunts, and the shellbiters were here before you hatched.
The Ashbed
Where clutches calcify. Too hot to hold anything that could eat you, which is exactly why eggs end up here.
What you become
Every lineage is a route up
Not species picked from a menu. The route explains the anatomy, and the anatomy decides which ground you own once you are out. One surface domain each: a lineage that does not change how a fight is fought is a reskin.
Western Drake
The dry vent — sustained burn
The only lineage that can stay up and stay lit at the same time. Wings arrive late because wings are useless in a tunnel, so it surfaces and flies the same season.
Eastern Lung
The drowned route — waterlung
Born holding what everyone else has to eat eels for. Owns rivers, coasts and anything flooded, and arrives at the surface without being hungry -- which is why it is the only lineage anyone has ever managed to talk to.
Crystal Wyrmling
The mineral seam — stone-softening
Does not use tunnels; makes them. The slowest lineage to the surface and the only one that arrives underneath you, which is what a wall is least ready for.
Thicket Hatchling
The root ways — the small
Soft-shelled, stays small, and is the only lineage that can turn inside standing timber. Its four sparks and a cough are not a weapon -- they are a way to set a forest on fire and let the forest do the work.
And then daylight
At 2.6 metres, starving, and unable to stop
The escalation above ground is not bigger enemies. It is a change in the kind of problem, and it should read in one line each.
A village is food.
The Holdings
Pasture, thatch, livestock, no wall. They scatter, and you learn that you are now the largest fact in anybody's life.
A town is a fight.
The Bell Towns
A square, a militia, and iron in a tower. They do not scatter, and some of them have done this before.
A city is a decision.
The Cities
Walls built by people who have read about you. Engines on the towers, ranging stakes in the fields, and a plan that assumes you are coming. You can leave.
Below, the thing that kills you is bigger than you. Above, it is smaller than you, and there are four hundred of it.
Six peoples hold that ground, and each of them denies a dragon exactly one thing — the air, the breath, the sight, the fire, the room, the sky. No two take the same one, and no place can currently field more than two of them. Who holds what, and what it costs them →
Read it
The Lamp Leans
One animal, from a shell it never decided to leave to the wall of a city that has read about it. Seven parts, and a height in the heading of every one.
The story
It did not hatch. It failed to be contained. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of what it would become.
The films
21 finished sequences: the deep, the reaches, a farm raided, a lifecycle from egg to adult.
The bestiary
Thirteen things that live down there, what each one teaches, and what it is worth to take.
Where this is
In development
This is a world and the production that builds it. There is no playable build yet, and this page is not going to imply otherwise.
What exists today: five lineages modelled, rigged and animated from egg to adult; nineteen reaches, thirteen creatures and six peoples written down and cross-checked; hundreds of world props; and 21 finished films. The ascents, the territorial behaviour, the politics and the playable skills are not yet a simulation.
If you want the engineering, it is in the devlog.