dailybestiary:

When the Golarion setting was introduced, it was very
consciously billed as “the best of all possible worlds.”  That Panglossian take might have raised the
eyebrows of the Candide fans out
there, but it did clearly establish the philosophy underpinning Golarion’s
construction: Golarion intended to give you a logical place to set pretty much
every kind of adventure you wanted.  A
Viking setting?  Easy.  Mummy-filled pyramids?  Sure.  But
Golarion kept going places a lot of other settings don’t even attempt: Renaissance
scheming, the French Revolution, mammoth taming, or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks-style sci-fi?  Done, done, done, and done.  

But where were those hoariest of fantasy tropes, the
dragonriders and their loyal dragon steeds?

Turns out, they weren’t on Golarion itself.  But they were
a few planets over, on Triaxus.  And the
dragons were actually dragonkin.  

These Large creatures are smaller and less powerful than
true dragons, but more flexible in game terms.
Their alignments aren’t tied to their color, they can use arms and
armor, and at CR 9 they are powerful PC allies without becoming game-ruining Mary
Steeds.  That makes them ripe for using
in your game, whether you want to keep them on a remote continent or different
planet, sprinkle them sparingly throughout your setting, or go The Full
Dragonlance.  Even to the most jaded
fantasy player, there’s something magical about dragons, especially one you can
call your very own.

When a ranger’s
mother dies, it is her duty to take her place at the side of her mother’s
dragonkin partner.  But a rift between
mother and daughter is what set the young ranger adventuring in the first
place, and the dragonkin still flies in the legion of a lord who the ranger has
distrusted all her life.  The ranger and
her friends must travel to the front lines to befriend the dragonkin and see
what comes next.  If they don’t, the
dragonkin will come looking for her anyway, possibly even becoming an enemy of
the party.

Adventurers drilled
to fear chromatic dragons and revere their metallic cousins are often
caught up short by the wildly divergent alignments of dragonkin.  When good-hearted blue dragonkin scouts cross
the Ambergris Strait in search of fugitives from the deposed Wraithflight,
adventurers might attack them before the blues can make their friendly intentions
known.  Meanwhile, one of the most brutal
members of the Wraithflight, a gold dragonkin commandant, has installed itself
at the right hand of the primarch of Redgate and begun whispering tales of
blood, gold, and righteous fury into the primarch’s ear.

The planet of Tortal
has only known two kinds of dragonkin: the stern whites who serve Gaullin’s Knights
of the Air, protecting that cold land from serf uprisings and the clockwork
Deathless, and the reclusive greens who dwell in jungle observatories along the
equator and are bloodbound to their sorcerer-thralls.  When the greens in three cities collaborate
to open a portal during the Concordance of the Fox, when the red moon darts in
front of the constellation of Lupin the Hunter, dragonkin of all colors come
spilling through the magical gate.  The
resulting draconic, social, and political upheaval will change Tortal
forever—and could send certain adventurers’ careers soaring…

—Distant Worlds 61
& Pathfinder Bestiary 5 98

Dragonkin were created by a special form of transmutation known to the dragons of Vedzeva’s Five-Scale Alliance, but subsequently began breeding true. As such, they only appear in five colors: red, gold, blue, green, and white. They serve the dragons of their shared colors faithfully, but humans of Vedzeva idolize their draconic power and forms.