DragonLineage

About the Game

You are born a dragon. You will die a dragon.

Inside the shell, you dream of things you have never seen. A burning city.
Ground splitting open. Wings blotting out the sky. And at the end, always,
a small human hand.
It is not a dream. It is memory, carried in the blood of the one before you.

The hatchling you wake as is not the monster of the legends.
A few wingbeats that barely clear the treetops. One small fireball.
When a bear comes, you run.
You begin this world as prey, not as its apex.

The sky opens as you grow

• A hatchling can only skim the treetops and cannot leave the valley it was born in.
  
• As you grow, your ceiling rises, and the ridgelines you could never cross come into view.
  
• Only as a full adult does the limit disappear entirely, opening the whole world.

"The world opened up" is not a cutscene here. It is a mechanic.

Death is not an ending. It is a handover.

A dragon that mastered its karma dissolves into motes of light, and that light
returns to an egg of its bloodline. Only an egg the light reaches will hatch —
and only the light of the parent that laid it can open the shell.
Which means a dragon never meets the parent who bore it.

• Carried in blood — color, size, horns, wings, resistances, flight traits.
  These always pass to your heir.
  
• Carried in light — the words you learned, the stones you read, the skills you honed.
  These diminish depending on how you died.
  
• Visible inheritance — when your heir hatches, you are shown what came from
  the father, what came from the mother, what mutated, and what changed
  because of how you lived.

And nothing is undone. The village you burned stays burned. The humans you made
wary stay wary. The prey you hunted out does not come back. Your child lives with it.

Karma is a debt your children pay

Hunting to fill your belly is not a sin in this world. You chase, you kill, you eat.
That is simply how the world turns, and nothing in you darkens.

What stains you is killing people, and killing what you will not eat.

A dragon heavy with karma grows stronger. Larger, fiercer, harder to stop.
But a dragon clouded with it cannot fully dissolve into light. It leaves a corpse behind,
and less of it reaches the next generation.
The path that makes this life powerful is the same path that makes your descendants poor.
That choice decides where eight generations of your bloodline end up.

Records that fade

There was an age when dragons and humans lived side by side. What happened,
and why it ended, is carved into standing stones across thirty regions.

• The carvings below can be read by anyone. They show the land you should head to
  next, so you will never be lost, even knowing not a single word.
  
• The writing above opens up as you learn the language. As a hatchling you make out
  two words. Return grown, and you read a full line. Learn more, and it goes further still.
  
• The oldest and most important records sit in the hardest places to reach.
  
• And the stones weather with every generation. Once a passage is gone, no number of
  heirs will bring it back. Mastering the language will not help — the stone itself is lost.

What you read becomes blood memory and passes safely to your child.
Only what you put off reading disappears.

Fly. Hunt. Live.

• Glide, bank, dive, stall. Flight that reads wind and thermals.
  
• Hunting that means judging the wind and closing the distance before you are noticed.
  
• From hatchling to adult to elder. Every life ends, and your time to act is finite.
  
• Thirty regions, each with a great beast of its own. Not all of them are meant to be killed.
  
• Human settlements, hunters, and a cult that worships the dragon who ended the old world.

This is a single-player game

No servers, no lobbies, no queues. Your bloodline never ends because of someone
else's disconnect, and nobody outgrows you while you sleep.
This world belongs to your family alone.

How harsh death is, is yours to set. By default, dying without leaving an egg
will not wipe out your line. Choose the hardcore setting only if losing everything
is the game you want.