Radiant Dragon

Called star dragons or celestial dragons (a different beast from the eastern celestial dragon), radiants are huge, sinuous serpents with translucent wings and scales of pearly mica and gypsum that sparkle in starlight. Alignment varies: some terrorize space lanes, some help travelers, some rule tiny worlds as capricious god-kings. All are haughty, believing themselves the pinnacle of dragonkind. They speak their own tongue and Common, mimic their listeners' accents, and have a 10% chance (plus 5% per age) of knowing any given language. Standard dragon traits apply, adjusted for space.

Trusting their size, radiants rarely retreat, and usually give a crew the chance to flee, negotiate or grovel first. When it fights, it targets ballistas, catapults and spellcasters; a good dragon silences casters with silence, 15' radius if it can, while a harsher one just kills them. A wing buffet from a young adult or older counts as a 'Ship Shaken' critical and deals 2-20 to everyone within some 200 feet to each side. It can also coil around a ship and crush it for 1-6 hull points a round (wood, ceramic) or 1-4 (stone, metal), while attacking other targets.

Its breath is a volley of glowing force bolts reminiscent of magic missiles. Total damage may go into one bolt or be divided, but no bolt can deal under 2d12+1; a juvenile (age 4) might fire one at 8d12+4, two at 4d12+2 or four at 2d12+1. Bolts can take separate targets and always hit unless dodged with a save vs. breath weapon. Ships take 1 hull point per 10 damage; other objects save vs. spell or are destroyed.

Innate powers: juvenile, restore or corrupt air; young adult, interposing hand; adult, grasping hand; mature adult, shapechange 3/day, gaining the form's abilities, spells included; venerable, a wand-style wall of force; wyrm, forcecage; great wyrm, an indefinite prismatic sphere holding itself and up to 4 similar-size creatures. Radiants rename the hand spells the interposing and grasping claw and accuse a famous human wizard of stealing them. Sages think it was the other way round, but few dispute the point with the dragons.

Too big to be graceful on most worlds, radiants live wholly in space. Mature adults sometimes visit asteroid cities disguised as a known hero, leaving him puzzling over bills from places he never went; some regions call this an honor once divinations such as detect lie confirm it, others a nuisance. Each guards a vast territory, perhaps a planet's whole surrounding space. Families share a parent-hollowed asteroid, and some hollow asteroids now settled by humans were their work. Harming the young earns relentless, inventive revenge, and hippo-headed mercenaries joke that a quick death from a star dragon beats one it has time to plan.

They may hang near fire bodies with wings spread, seemingly storing solar energy like void whales, but a hungry radiant will also empty an asteroid settlement it considers its own. Their priestly power makes them perhaps the only giants that are natural starhelm pilots, moving as a priest of their age level on a major starhelm, at will and tirelessly; some tow wrecks for a reward or a statue, and hatchlings sneak out for joyrides. Whether this ability is innate or bought from the void merchants, who may in turn have learned helm-making from them, nobody knows, and the two races barely speak.

Radiants court the worship of dragon-bodied void folk and lizard men, sneer at humans, elves, halflings and other mammals, and dismiss mind reavers, gazer tyrants and web-eel slavers as evolutionary mistakes; those races hunt them in turn, and great void krakens sometimes attack them. They roam the void between worlds and the flame-sea, carry their own air envelope, and refuse riders, preening off kraken spores. Their priest spells work in any crystal shell where dragons are native; elsewhere only 1st- and 2nd-level spells and their flight remain.