Backstory: It was an ancient dragon, a sovereign of mountain and sky, whose avarice led it not to gold, but to a hidden, subterranean cavern brimming with a strange, phosphorescent fungus. Believing it to be a source of untold power, the dragon devoured it. The parasite was the Ophiocordyceps Tyrannus—a sentient, primordial fungus that had lain dormant for eons, waiting for a vessel of immense strength.

The agony of the transformation lasted for a century. The dragon's fire was extinguished, replaced by a fungal blight. Its mind was shattered and reforged. Now, the dragon is gone, and only the Blightdrake remains. It is a flying engine of infection, a corrupted king whose only desire is to see its "kingdom"—the entire world—remade in its own blighted, fungal image.

Physical Description

The Blightdrake is a perversion of a noble dragon's form, a walking ecological disaster.

• Body and Hide: What were once majestic, jewel-hard scales are now cracked, peeling, and overgrown with thick, grey fungal plates that look like petrified wood. A sickly, yellow-green bioluminescence seeps from the cracks, pulsing in time with its corrupted heart. Its underbelly is soft and spongy, resembling a mass of puffball mushrooms, and it occasionally vents clouds of spores with every breath.

• Head and Maw: Its skull is elongated and skeletal. The flesh has peeled back from its jaws, which can unhinge and split into four insect-like mandibles to better disgorge its payload. Its eyes are gone, the sockets filled with glowing, fungal spheres that pulse with an eerie light. It senses its surroundings through a combination of thermal vision and the parasite's ability to "taste" the air for living organisms.

• Wings: The leathery membranes of its wings are tattered and torn, laced with a thick webbing of dark mycelium that seems to hold them together. It can still achieve flight, but it is clumsy and unnervingly silent, the fungal webs absorbing the sound of its wingbeats.

• Breath Weapon - The Spore Torrent: The Blightdrake no longer breathes fire. Instead, it exhales a massive, choking torrent of infectious spores. This cloud is a mutagenic agent; smaller creatures are transformed almost instantly into shambling fungal puppets, while larger, more resilient victims begin the agonizing process of becoming a Blighted host.

• The Blighted Thagomizer: Its powerful tail does not end in spikes, but in a huge, pulsating fungal pod, like a morbid fruit. This pod is covered in hollow, needle-like spines that can pump gallons of mutagenic slurry into a victim, a landscape, or even a water source, corrupting it from within.