Talk:Dungeonomicon (3.5e Sourcebook)/Bionomicon

Double rate

Dragons reproduce very rapidly. Dragons have (2-5) eggs a year when they are between Juvenile and either Ancient or vary old. 1950 years three eggs a year 5850 children for a dragon couple over the course of their life. So a community of dragons would ruffly double their number every year, they are undisturbed. Which begs the question how do they have enough money for a hordes, the college tuition alone would drive nations broke. That is in the dragons interest to have children for safety both from other monsters and from adventurers.

Why are there so few dragons? There are fewer dragons in the forgotten realms(267) than a single dragon couple would have in their life time. Dragons are hard to kill the lowest cr is 2, they survive in many climates, and they can fight and survive on their own within minutes of birth. To keep a community of 10 mating age dragons in check adventurers would need to kill 30 dragons a year.

Dragons are a intelligent species, that has huge life spans, a possible explanation is that the majority of the dragons that were on the planet have secluded them selves for several hundred years to build up number before returning to reclaim the planet. There return would be a true Apocalypse more dragons than humans on modern day earth.

Another explanation would be dating problems, as races grow smarter and more powerful they are more discriminating about who they have kids with. So dragons spend hundreds of years looking for the right mate and this slows their growth.

A final possibility is that some percentage (like 80%) of the eggs never survive to become adults, which would make dragons much more protective of children because they are so rare.