Dungeons and Dragons: Hybrid Dragon

A perfect video for coffee time.

Ever thought about running another contest like you did with the Lich Items? 'The most creative Hybrid Dragon?'

panicked Skyrim guard: "Dragons?!"

I am running a campaign where the patriarch of a group of blue dragons wheres the neck and head of a white dragon around him like a scarf, but in actuality has grafted a white dragon's head to himself and can use it as though it were his own.

I had a benevolent Purple Dragon as the High King of a prosperous kingdom located in a volcanic desert region. He inherited his kingdom from his Blue Dragon mother, and she had mated with a Red Dragon who roamed the planet to defend it from extraplanar threats (kinda like Godzilla, in that he wasn’t exactly good, but on the side of having a planet to live on at the least). They ended up being a weird mix of blue and red predilections while also having a bent towards being Lawful Good due to quirks of their own individual personality, and their breath was a badass Radiant Beam of superheated plasma

Ah yes the dragon, it easily hybridizes with any animal except for other dragons of course. This trope is actually pretty common in fantasy like with superheroes not being able to have children that have both parents powers. Just certain things don't combine certain things are dominant. And when you consider dragons hybridizing with any other animal dragons would definitely have this magical dominance that allows them to make this hybrid that shouldn't work work. But when it's with another dragon those two magical energies compete with each other and or cancel each other out. I feel like this is what makes the most sense and really fits the world.

In my homebrew setting, the Metallic and Chromatic dragons are descendants of Gem Dragons, which are descendant from a mighty prismatic dragon. A myth in dragon culture states that a metallic and chromatic dragon of similar abilities can create a gem dragon offspring, and eventually this will lead to the reformation of the Prismatic dragon, which will lead dragon kind to rule again. It’s not a commonly held belief of course, since dragons are too prideful to admit they’ll need help from their opposite side. The only exception to this is Unslaad Tor, who is a Ruby dragon disguised as a red dragon.

I had this idea for a character, an NPC that joins the party. He is the result of a black and green dragon mating. in dragon form, has the size and color of a green dragon (maybe slightly darker green), but the horns and general shape of a black dragon. However, this character is almost always in human form, he favors' mail armor and carries a 2-handed sword on his back, yet casts like a sorcerer. Something seams 'off', about the character, and the ability to cast spells in armor may be the party characters first clue. Any kind of mind reading/telepathy/detection spells may hint at the following :- Whispers from the characters draconic past plague his soul, telling him to control, destroy, and kill. Meanwhile, his sentient mind is telling him to live without torment or evil. He will readily fight for good causes, though sometimes slips into evil methods. he is reaching for the upper planes, while feeling his spirit being dragged to the lower planes. He is searching for a cure for the voices that plague his soul.

For the love of bahumut ( or u guess tiamat ?) Please do a deep dive on the dragon spawn and how they relate to other weird dragon hybrids and mutants.

Yes hybrid dragons are rare; due to the infrequency of interbreeding, the likelihood of favoring one parent's side over the other (whether or not if this is genetic or environmental is unknown), high likelihood of parental rejection of their offspring (either abandoning them or outright killing them). Largely depends on the temperament of the parent raising them or the hybrid's ability to survive on their own.

Bless the GlueStick

None of the purple dragons on here? I still think that would be an epic quest: having to discover where some monstrous hybrids have originated. Finding a series of towers with many powerful mages of several classes attempting to perfect a new race of purple dragons. Held in enchanted chains made by storm giants, 20 pairs of red and blue dragons are muzzled unless fed and forced to mate. Once they have laid eggs, the eggs are taken away to magical incubators, in order to help insure the off spring will live. It would be a nice tale to read about, or even play out as a quest.

What about the old Purple Dragon that was a hybrid of Red and Blue? I imagined those would be a more likely to produce in the event that they did mate, given that there was actual data on it. They sounded like they'd be incredibly OP.

As a DM, I'm definitely going with the 'dragon cross-breeding leads to abominations'. Granted; EXTREMELY powerful abominations, but also invariably insane. Reasoning is that, in my world, dragons are less 'fleshy beings with elemental powers' and more the opposite; 'elemental powers in the guise of fleshy beings'. When the elemental energies they have clash, they clash violently, primordially, explosively. This makes them both absurdly powerful (even by dragon standards) as well as completely insane -and likely to explode. However; there is another way to mess with dragon births. Should a dragon of 'opposite alignment' takes the egg of a dragon, they can 'taint' and 'twist' the unborn dragon. Such a thing is considered extremely vile by even some evil dragons (as they wouldn't want to sully their 'magnificent pure lineage' etc) but it is something that can happen and be a likely story hook. I do provide my players leeway to affect a developing dragon's final alignment, but their alignment WILL be reflected in their appearence. Their scales and body WILL change in accordance to what that dragon TRULY is. You might not get a Red Dragon to go Lawful Good (without extreme shenaniganery like the Deck) but you CAN affect them.

There's also melanism that's like albinism but reversed. There's examples of deer and foxes with this. I think that different kinds should be more possible considering how dragons in strange realms are possible and changed due to their environment like Pandemonium.

The long and short of it is, if you're going to make a half-dragon, then think long and hard about if it is unique or a successful population. Next you must think of a reason why it/they been allowed to exist/propagate by the draconic power(s) in the region. [In the setting I'm working on the yuan-ti are all draconic and that is because the chromatic dragons on my world are more accepting of alliances and consolidating power than they are in the standard power schemes established by the official lore (they all have a bit of blue in them). The draconic hegemony wanted a vast population of thralls and the yuan-ti were more than happy to submit themselves to artificial experimentation (their perverse gods have no influence in this remote world and they badly needed/wanted substitutes). Their ritual to transform humans into tainted ones has been perfected with the help of their masters to produce a random, fiercely loyal chromatic dragonborn. The yuan-ti and their dragonborn servitors are very real threat to the existence of the good-aligned races in the setting even before you get anyway near knocking out the draconic hegemony.] I dig the official hydra half-dragons. New breath weapons and spell toolkits go a long way to making the draconic beasts memorable.

Finally an answer. I guess I'm going with "mad wizard experiment" for my darklord dracolich then. I didn't design him with any particular type of dragon in mind, I was just thinking "death dragon" and designed him based on that, but I have considered making him a hybrid. Either that or I keep his type a mystery, with his current body being frankensteined from other dragon corpses.

remember coming across a pink dragon that has a bubble breath weapon , also heard all 3 dragons referred to as purple (deep, purple and hybrid) all often are found in the underdark also heard the hybrid purples one other reason for their rarity is they often are innately stronger then ether parent so a additional reason why reds and blues likely would avoid mating or letting offspring from such a mating live i also could see dragon types that have more interaction of a friendly nature more likely to create hybrids like metallics are more likely to be friendly with each other then chromatics tend to be with each other or whites that were adopted/mentored by a crystal and taken after their one time guardian might get along with crystals more then their own kind or similar ideas as to what might result in the rare occurrence of a hybrid or half dragons mating with one another of two different types on the rare occurrence they do meet and have kids

Thanks AJ

So, in my homebrew setting, dragons are a bit different, more like Ebberon in the way they act. My twist is that crossbreeding is, relatively, common, due to the circumstances of thier birth. The new egg type is irrelevant to the types that produced it. The actual environment is what dictates what the egg is. So, a White, and a Blue could mate in a primeval forest, and lo, the egg is Green. The one thing is that Cross types are vanishingly rare (chromatic, gem, metallic), as they are true hybrids regardless of environment. The only case the players discovered in lore was called a Purple dragon, just because it was chrome red in color, offspring of a Red and a Silver.