How to get and befriend your very own protodragon in five easy steps.
- By Spruggl Megapuddle, In the Name of Team Triple S
Step One: Preparation
First, we need a place for the eggs to keep them warm until hatching time. The easiest way is to capture an abandoned dragon nest, cause everything the eggs need is already there. Just make sure the nest is really abandoned, otherwise you need to fight a very angry protodragon! To keep it more secret and save, I placed a tent over the nest and to keep the eggs warm, I used a modified Djaradin Jar.
Step Two: Get the Eggs!
In order to get the eggs, you first need to find an inhabited nest, preferred with eggs that are close to hatching time. With a big group you can try to kill the mother dragon, but this is very risky. We preferred to sneak in and steal the eggs right under the nose of the dragons. However, you need to make sure the dragon will not find you.
After we used an earth totem to keep the dragon temporarily unable to follow us, we got into the water and jumped right into a waterfall (this time we used parachutes). With this method, the mother dragon is unable to smell us. After you waited a long time behind the waterfall, you need to sneak beyond the other dragons to get to your own nest. The dragons are busy defending their own eggs and will not attack you unless you get too close, so watch your steps!
Step Three: Hatching time
From a wandering Shal’dorei I learned that duck fledglings follow the first person they see when they hatch, cause it is usually their mother. My theory was that this can be applied to protodragon whelps as well. While this theory turned out to be false, we had a backup plan and used steel chains to stop the whelps from escaping.
Step Four: Animal Education
Since we don’t want to have a flying, fire breathing Blitzy, we need to parent the whelps with the overall rule that they need to know we are the boss. We applied basic conditioning, namely positive and negative reinforcement. We used a bag of tasty meat snacks to reward the whelps for good behavior. We also used a shocking collar to get them a painful electroshock whenever they tried to bite us.
While the collar is already effective on level 3/10, I used level 7/10 for faster results. Since I don’t want to use the collar forever, I made a specific hand gesture whenever I shocked the dragon. After a while, the dragon was even scared when I used the hand gesture without shocking it. The conditioning was a great success and after a while the dragon obeyed even without wearing a shocking collar at all, simply when I used the hand gesture.
To form a positive bound with the dragon, I used an advise from Letzy Leverwrench and went hunting together with the drake. First, I shot rabbits and the whelp ate it, then I just injured the rabbit so the whelp could hunt the rabbit easily. After a while, it was possible to command the whelp on what to hunt and the instincts of the dragon did the rest. Hunting together with the dragon is very effective since you need to get them food anyway, so you can as well bounding with it in the process.
Step Five: Rapid Growing and Fast Aging
While protodragons grow very fast and eat meat twice their own weight a day, we don’t want to wait until they grow into adulthood. Therefore, we combined our expertise on alchemy, shamanism&engineering as well as felmagic to increase the growing and aging process on the dragon whelps.
Spruggl Megapuddle used the skrog toe to extract the essence of giant growth of the sea giant and made a powerful elixir of giant growth with it. She combined it with the kidneys of hornfrogs, which contains drakonid essence, to make the effect permanent.
Squint used an old fel ritual to increase the growing and aging of the whelps, a method which was already used by orcs prior to the first war to fast-age their own children. (Details in the Squint Report)
Sparque constructed a hydro-chronometer to manipulate the whelps with time essence. One of the ingredient he used was a bronze dragon heart. (Details in the Sparque Report)
The combined methods were at least partially successful. Subject One grew rapidly as expected. However, it degenerated in the process and is a lot weaker (and uglier) than a normal protodragon. We stopped the process after two thirds of the planed growing process to not kill it. Now we need to figure out how to optimize the growing process and will do further experiments on Subject One.
Step Five-Point-Five: How to get a bronze dragon heart
To construct the hydro-chronometer, we needed a bronze dragon heart. Since we didn’t want to hunt a bronze dragon for various reasons, we went to the experts in dragon hunting: The Djaradin. We used a Primalist coverage, since they seem to be allies. First the Djaradin barely took notice from us, but I got their attention when I claimed that we are far better dragon hunters then they are. We got them into a betting: The group that is able to bring the bigger dragon head will win.
While we are very bad dragon hunters, we are very clever goblins and cheated to trick the Djaradin. We hunted a small dragon whelp and used the reverse function of the portable shrinking ray (which I normally use to shrink my lab) to enlarge the dragon head twenty times. It looked a bit weird, but after several nearby grenade impacts it was close to a burned giant dragon head. The Djaradin were very surprised about our victory, but they provided us a fresh bronze dragon heart two days after as reward.
