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@j-a-penrose @steward-of-the-pen @evelyn Thanks for the vote of confidence! And excellent questions @writercatherine . My thoughts on those working with dragons is that while they might be seen as elite, how much depends really on the social context; a farmer who gets a new drake might be the talk of the town, like some guy who gets a new tractor/car/prize horse. On the other hand, one historical character I have in mind is one of the chief lieutenants for the local “conqueror”-type character (assuming we go with such an idea), and the lieutenant is the pilot/partner for a Great Dragon that acts as a air superiority platform via weather control.

I was thinking of maybe expanding the drake size range so we could have proper flying cavalry, but I also had a thought the other day and some corresponding questions:

In Lord of the Rings, you have the “ordinary” fantasy and the “Extraordinary” fantasy. By the former I mean things like dwarfs, hobbits, orcs, trolls, and to a degree some elves. Things that, while different from our world, John Doe of Arda wouldn’t really think out of the, well, ordinary. On the other hand, you have things that even they would be taken aback at; Galadriel/Elrond/Glorfindel/etc., the Nazgul, the Rings of Power, the Istari, etc. Coincidentally, these things are also remnants of the past that is the Silmarillion. Here’s my idea: what if for the “ordinary” fantasy we had Steampunk as our aesthetic/genre, and for the “extraordinary fantasy” we had things that had their roots in Sci-fi? Ie, for the former we’d have the clockwork/steampunk drakes and dragonlings- like the farmer example above. And for the latter, the main vision of those would be the Great Dragons (for example, instead of Galadriel looking in her mirror we have an oracle Great Dragon that is the hub mind for a network of still-active surveillance satellites), but also:

a) we could use that as an excuse to work in some other stuff, such as a guy finding a suit of power armor and becoming a folk hero or a guy falling in a sealed pit of nanomachines and coming out with vampiric powers,

b) it wouldn’t violate the Steampunk genre being the main genre because the inhabitants of the world would still understand it in Steampunk terms; to use the oracle example above, nobody except him would know that he has satellite imagery (Except him and he’s not telling), but everyone else would just know him as an oracle. Kinda like how in the LotR series only Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, Saruman and co are in on the main plot such as how Sauron’s a Maia and whatnot. Finally,

c) The sci-fi stuff would be common enough that if we wanted to write in something that’s normal for the setting we have a tool we could use to justify it, yet rare enough so that it’d still be legendary but also if someone didn’t want to deal with it at all it wouldn’t be surprising.

So my questions I’d like to add to the docket are:

1. Are we okay with the steampunk dragons being mechanical in nature?

2. If so, are we okay with the backstory as I pitched above (i.e., having their origin in sci-fi)?

3. If we’re okay with the sci-fi influence for the Great Dragons, do we want to possibly include other aspects of sci-fi to a lesser extent?

@silverclaw-bonnetfolly I know you were mentioning something about organic dragons- what’re your thoughts? Maybe there are organic dragons about that in the Old Age acted as bioinspiration for them?