Basic (For the “Never-heard-of-it” Role-player)

This the basic of the basic information about the dragons of Pern and Thread.

1. The world is Pern with different species found on it. There are humans who also live on this planet with creatures called Dragons. The dragonriders are the main force of protecting this planet from Thread.

2. The dragons are laid in clutches of eggs. Dragon eggs are ovoid, with predominantly cream-colored shells marbled in soft colors. The egss are a meter long. The golden eggs are easier to detect, as they are ten to twenty percent bigger than the others and tend to be more gold in hue. Queen dragons are Gold, they are the largest, and only females Impress them. The Queen's rider becomes the leader of the Weyr, the place where the dragons and their riders live, after her first Mating Flight.

3. The bronze dragon who mates with the Queen, his rider becomes the Weyrleader, which means the male leader of the Weyr. The female is the Weyrwoman. They rule jointly. Like Alpha Male and Alpha Female

4. Impression is what occurs when a Candidate, or young (10 - 18 years, or 'Turns' on Pern) male or female, is on the sands when a Dragon hatches. The dragons choose their riders. Once the dragon has chosen, they both feel a strong, unbreakable love for each other that endures through all. Once they are a Bonded Pair, they can speak telepathically. They also, to a degree, feel each others' pain and emotion.

5. The Red Star is a rogue planet that Rukbat, Pern's sun, picked up. It moves in a very erratic, elliptical orbit. That means that only once every 200 years or so the Red Star passes close enough for its trail to intercept Pern's atmosphere. The trail of the Red Star contains millions of little ovoid objects. When the ovoids enter the atmosphere, they break open into a whole lot of little silver 'Threads'. 1 Thread per Ovoid.

6. These 'Threads' devour all carbon-based matter. Anything living, even plants. If it does get to a plant, it will 'Burrow' into the ground, making a writhing, silvery mass, until it runs out of organic matter and turns all charred and black. By then the plants are already dead. The dragonriders and their dragons go Flame the Thread from the sky, saving the humans and their homes, lands, and the other living creatures from being destroyed.

7. The dragons can breathe fire after ingesting a substance called 'Firestone', a Phosphine-bearing rock. The rock is easily obtainable on the surface of volcanic terrain.The dragons swallow this Firestone to their second stomach, where it is stored while it turns into a gas (We believe hydrogen) Then they breathe it out, and it ignites on contact with oxygen.

8. The dragons are ranked as follows, lowest first.

Green - female or male riders, female dragon.
Blue - male riders, male dragon
Brown - male riders, male dragon
Bronze - male riders, male dragon
Queen (Gold) - female riders, female dragon

There is usually only one Queen egg per Clutch. The Queens are the only dragons that can lay eggs.

A candidate is Searched for a weyr before each hatching, after a bronze has flown a queen (usually) and the eggs have been sitting in the hatching grounds of a weyr for a while. The hatching grounds at most weyrs are a sandy area with some kind of heating system that keeps the sands very hot, which helps the eggs develop easier.

When the eggs are about to hatch EVERY dragon on Pern will start a sort of deep-throated Hum. At this time all candidates for the hatching are to be dressed in the bleach white candidates robes and standing in the hatching sands.

When a dragon hatches, it will browse through the ranks of candidates until he finds HIS or HER rider and Impresses him or her. A dragon will always know who is its rider. No one knows why or how a dragon chooses who it impresses.

Once the dragon has impressed, the rider and dragon are capable of telepathic communications. A rider can usually only hear his dragon, while the dragons can talk with any of the other dragons telepathically. There are a few exceptions to this though. Such as the Benden Weyr Weyrwoman, Lessa, who is HAD or Hears-All-Dragons, Brekke, and Aramina, who shows up in a few books, including the Renegades of Pern.

There are 5 types of dragons:

Female Dragons:
-Green-lowest ranking dragon overall
-Gold-Highest ranking female, and highest ranking dragon overall

Male dragons:
-Bronze-Highest ranking male dragon, second highest ranking dragon overall
-Brown- second highest ranking male, third highest ranking dragon overall
-blue- third highest ranking male, fourth highest ranking dragon overall

Bronze and Queen riders are capable of becoming Weyrleaders, while browns are most likely to be wingseconds in threadfighting Wings.

The dragons of Pern have the ability to travel incredibly far distances almost instantly by going "between." they also have the ability to go forward (though this has rarely happens and is INCREDIBLY dangerous, and rightfully prohibited), and backward in time (this is also dangerous and prohibited as well) by going "between."

Going "between" is a nonspace, a postulatum. "Between" is the journey from one to another without crossing the space between. Or as some will see it, as teleporting

A dragon will not survive its a rider dies, it will suicide by going "between" . But if a dragon dies, the rider can live, he just may go insane. An example of this is when Brekke's queen, Wirenth was killed. She almost lost her mind.

On Pern every 200 years (known as Turns) there is a period of 50 years where Thread falls from the sky. The Thread isn't falling continuously, but every once in a while, in a pattern that is familiar; so the dragons and their riders know when it is coming.


The Origins of Pern


The Origins of Pern

In the constellation known as Sagittarius the Archer, positioned at -41 degrees right ascendancy 19'25" two hundred light-years from the Sol system, there is a forth-magnitude blue-white star designated as Alpha Sagittarius. The Arab astronomers who discovered it called it Rukbat Al-Rami, or "the Archer's Knee." Throughout Earth's history, it has also been called Al Rami, Ruchbar ur Ranich, Rucba, Rukbah, and Rukbar, all referring to the ancient Arabic tale that gave the constellation its name.

Circling the star Rukbat are five planets, two asteroid belts, a rogue planet on an eccentric orbit captured by the gravity well in recent millennia, and an Oort cloud at the perimeter of the stellar system.

The Oort cloud is composed of smaller particles than expected of such a body, as Oort clouds are usually nebulous collections of stone and ice chunks--comets.

The first and second planets are too small to sustain human life. The fourth, which has a cluster of little moons, and the fifth, a dark world, are too far away from Rukbat for comfortable existence; they are separated from the sun and from each other by two asteroid belts, which significantly cuts down on the sunlight they receive.

ON the third planet, among seas of liquid water, heavy volcanic and plate-tectonic activity caused the earliest single land mass to re-form into three continents over the last hundred million years. One continent is gigantic taking up more than half of the available landmass. The second, somewhat smaller and resembling a dragon in flight looking back over its shoulder, is approximately the size of Earth's Eurasian landmass. The last, very small, barren continent is isolated on the other side of the world in the middle of an ocean five thousand miles wide. The planet's diameter is approximately sixty-five hundred miles.


The EEC Exploration

In order to designate a planet as a potential site for colonization, the Exploration and Evaluation Corps was required to locate at least five identifiable landing sites, potable water, breathable air devoid of methanes or cyanides, and ensure that no sentient life form already existed there. The Rukbat system was at the extreme reach of the exploration circuit, but it seemed promising.

A Charter was drawn up between he group of colonists and the Council of the Federated Sentient Planets. Six-thousand twenty-three people signed the Pern Charter, giving them rights to certain numbers of stake acres. Three ships, under the command of Admiral Paul Benden, a hero of the Nathi War, spent fifteen years crossing from Earth to the Rukbat system. The Yokohama Held the same number of people, both awake and in deep-sleep, as the Buenos Aires and the smaller Bahrain combined.

One more sentient life-form joined the humans' exodus to Pern: Twenty-five dolphins, all volunteers, slept in the cryogenic chambers. Like the humans, they were eager to explore new seas, and they had no objection to be put to work rounding up specimens of native creatures for the human marine biologists.

The chosen landing site, named Landing, was on the volcanic plateau in the Southern Continent behind an extinct cone of enormous size with three small cones in a line pointing away from it to the southwest. The large volcano was named Mount Garben, in honor of a senator who had been of service in expediting the FSP's approval of the colony.

After all the cargo had been brought down, the two smaller ships were completely gutted. Everything usable was taken, from bolts to the fuel tanks strapped alongside the cargo bulk. In time, the Yokohama was the only ship with functional machinery left aboard. The communications receiver and the voice-activated computer which had guided the ships to Pern were not taken down to the surface. Nothing was left of the Dawn Sisters, as the orbiting ships came to be called in later centuries, but the spheres and vanes [that made up the bodies.]

Until the eighth year of the colony, the stakeholds prospered.

And then...


Thread!

The EEC team had noticed the eccentric planet on its irregular circuit through the plane of the ecliptic. The team noted in its report that the planet must have been captured by the gravity well of Rukbat, and was unable to escape from the orbit. They judged that its period of revolution was somewhat over two hundred years.

The face of the rogue planet seemed to be made up of formations of heavy gases that changed only rarely under tornadic winds of lighter gases that ripped across the surface. The team assumed severe tectonic conditions underneath the gases because of the tremendous and irregular pull the rogue suffered from Rukbat.

Though they had seen other worlds stripped bare by unknown agencies thought to have to do with those system's Oort clouds, the EEC team considered that they had too little time and data to determine the cause of the curious overlapping circles of the denuded earth and stone on the thrid planet. One of the team cited the theory of "space viruses" propounded by Hoyle and Wickramansingh, a theory that some considered to be discredited by scientists on Ceti III. But the idea of a mass extinction seemed unlikely, judging by the speed at which the ground vegetation was regenerating. Observing that where the circles touched one another, they stopped expanding, the team judged it to be the work of a local fungus. No blame was accorded to the wandering planet next out from the sun.

The tragedy of the events in the colony's eighth year was that the colonists knew that the rogue planet was dragging Oort material after it, and they knew that Pern would pass through the contrail again and again. If the Oort Cloud had been composed of large particles and chunks, as was the case in other stellar systems with which the FSP were more familiar, it would have produced a showy meteor shower as the particles entered Pern's atmosphere, not the decimation by Thread that befell. It was not until the Pass began that the biologists understood why they found no plants older than a few centuries, and why those that existed grew up very quickly. The biosphere was not depauperate but survivalist.

As it was, the colony was completely taken by surprise. Hundreds of people died in the First Fall. Nothing was left of the hapless victims but whatever pieces of metal they had been wearing. Many victims were burned and scarred by Thread before their dragonets (firelizards) flamed the remains or drove the victims into the water to kill the mycorrhizoid.


The Dragons of Pern

Colors, Rank, Size, & Impressibility -[2010]


Green: 20-25 meters
Blue: 25-30
Brown: 30-35
Bronze: 35-38
Gold: 38-42 (Although Ramoth, largest Queen ever hatched, was 45 meters long, about the size of an L 1011 jet!)

An L1011 Jet

Dragons are matched to you by your personality, generally, although there are exceptions, and often a dragon will have some quality the rider doesn't, like patience or observancy. In general, greens = passionate, temperamental, enthusiastic, blues = firm, calm, balanced, browns = heroic (meaning, eager to save the day), patient, kind, bronzes = strong, calm, leaders, golds = impatient, bold, impetuous, leader, sometimes a bit self-centered.


The Dragons

Females
Greens - non-clutching (because they chew firestone, but even if they didn't and they clutched, few of their eggs would hatch, and they couldn't produce anything higher than a brown, and that's rare), agile, dexterous, the best threadfighters because they duck and weave, and get patches larger dragons can't reach. Greens are also rather moody and temperamental, and very sexually active. Lowest ranking, smallest.

Golds - clutching, leads the Weyrwoman, mates with Bronzes, used to not fight Thread at all, but now use hand-held flamethrowers in the 'Queen's Wing' and fly low to ground to catch what others miss, because Queens who want to clutch can't chew firestone. Highest ranking, largest.

Males

Blues - The best threadfighter out of the males. Usually a calm, well-centered dragon who knows himself and his rider. Not usually very smart, but very warm-hearted and eager-please. Almost always has only good intentions. Lowest ranking male, fourth ranking dragon, smallest male, second smallest dragon.

Browns - Browns are very dedicated, and mostly only browns lead the Wings. They are loyal, dedicated, calm and trustworthy, and also very intelligent. A few browns have been known to fly Queens, if big/fast enough, but it's rare. Third largest dragon, second largest male, third highest-ranking dragon, second highest-ranking male.

Bronzes - Bronzes are the largest male dragons. They mate with Queens to balance out the Queens' impetuous, impulsive personality, making sure that spur-of-the-moment decisions don't go awry, and that the Queen stays calm and able to make full use of her enormous intelligence during all situations, rather than let emotion overcome her. Highest ranking male, second highest ranking dragon, biggest male, second biggest dragon (usually, there have been known to be bronzes bigger than queens).

The wings of the fully-evolved dragon are approximately three-fourths the length of the entire dragon, who will run from twenty-five to forty meters long. The tip-to-tip wingspan, including the breadth of the shoulders, is therefore one and two-thirds the length of the dragon.


Dragonrider Ranks

Weyrwoman – The female rider of the Weyr’s senior Queen dragon.

Weyrleader – The male rider of the bronze dragon who has flown the weyr’s senior Queen dragon.

Wingleader – A bronzerider who has proven his worth and now commands a fighting Wing of Dragons.

Wingsecond – A bronze or Brownrider who has been chosen to be second in command to a fighting Wing of dragon.

Dragonrider – A rider ascends to this rank after successfully completing his weyrling training.

Weyrlingmaster – The brown or bluerider chosen by his seniors to train the new weyrling pairs.

Weyrling – A young person who has impressed a dragonet during a hatching but has not completed his/her training. This term is also used for the young dragon.

Hatchings

A hatching occurs after a queen dragon in a weyr has been flown by a bronze dragon and she has laid her eggs, after 3 months of internal gestation, in the Hatching Sands. The clutch is usually laid throughout the period of 2 to 4 days. A fertile queen can lay an excess of 60 eggs at a time, but 30 to 40 eggs are considered large clutches. An infertile queen can lay as few as 10 eggs.

Infant dragons don’t develop their color until 15 days after conception. And due to the copper-based make-up of the dragons, the yolk is bright green.

After a process of about 35 days of hardening, the eggs with begin hatching. At this time, all dragons in the vicinity will start a deep-throated hum. The candidates in the weyr will get dressed in their bleach white candidates robes and head to the sands, where they will stand barefoot until every egg is hatched.

Candidates are chosen by a process called Search. Most of the Oldtime Weyrs only found their candidates by searching through the children already living in the weyr, but recently, more weyrs have been choosing to Search nearby Holds and Crafthalls for their candidates. A dragon will usually tell by instinct which child is best suited for Impression.

During the hatching itself, once a dragon has broken shell, it will stumble across the sands until it finds the child that it “knows” to be its rider. Once the child is chosen Impression takes place, and the dragon’s and child’s minds are linked by a deep bond that allows them to both communicate telepathically and feel each other’s emotions and pain. It is this aspect of the bond that leads to the human partner being taken over by sexual instinct during the time that his/her dragon goes into mating flight.



Draconic Cousins


Fire-Lizards

The Firelizard is indigenous to Pern. They are small, dragon-like creatures about 2ft long, although size varies with coloration as with full-sized dragons. They have six limbs: four legs and two wings. Evolved to fight Thread in order to protect their own existence, they can breathe fire by chewing a phosphine bearing rock (the same firestone that dragons chew) to sear thread from the sky. Unlike dragons, firelizards regurgitate masses of sand after they flame, which is the remains of the phosphine rock. Dragons were engineered to excrete the waste with the other bodily wastes that they produce.

They are telepathic, can go between, come in varied colors and seem to object to being studied by scientists. However, their telepathy is limited to images and feelings, unlike the dragons' complex communications. It was discovered that fire-lizards can be bonded to humans as pets and protectors. Fire-lizards Impress to anyone who offers them food when they are born, usually meat. However, unlike dragons, a person may have multiple firelizards. Often they are regarded as a nuisance, such as by Weyrleaders F'lar and Lessa of Benden. Although Impression work as it does with dragons, some of the lower ranking and thus less intelligent and more temperamental dragons, such as blues and greens, will leave their new 'owners' and turn wild.

Originally discovered by Sorka Hanrahan and Sean Connell during First Landing. DNA from fire-lizards was manipulated to produce full size fire-breathing dragons who could fight thread on a much larger scale than the fire lizards. They are known as flitts, fire-lizards and dragonets, and they are distant cousins of the modern dragon. Dragonets are also self-sufficient. They can fly almost immediately after hatching, and hunt for themselves after their first meal. A group of dragonets, called a 'fair', can predict not only firelizard births but also those of humans and other animals, such as canines. They do so by a deep-throated humming, like that of the dragons at Hatchings.

The flitt has the same basic anatomy as a dragon, although they originally had a tri-dactyl claw. When the dragons were engineered, they were made with a pentatadactly claw for more maneuverability. A firelizard's back feet are equipped with thee claw-toes, but their front claws are arranged in more of a pincer shape, with one longer talon on the front and two behind it, allowing for the hunting of fish and other small sea creatures. Dragonets, too, have eyes that change color with emotion, as well as the dragons' triple set of eyelids. Just like dragons, rather than having ears dragonets receive audio signals from their headknobs.

The dragonet is warm-blooded and, like dragons, their ichor is dark green. Rather than bones, firelizards have a system of light, flexible plates. They also have an immense lung capacity - when inflated, the dragonet's chest will swell to twice its normal size. Unlike dragons, firelizard's hide is glossy but not metallic. Dragonets can live for a very long time (if dragons have this same ability, it is unknown because they die when their Rider does.) In fact, a fifty-year-old dragonet looks almost exactly the say as a one-year-old. Some dragonets have been known to live for centuries. Over time, one fertile female dragonet could repopulate the planet.

A newly hatched dragonet is only a few inches long, but at full-grown, the average flitt is the length of a woman's arm from nosetip to tailtip.


Watchwhers

Watch-whers are related to dragons through the fact that they were bioengineered through a similar process as the dragons. Whereas the dragons were a successful experiment, the watch-whers were an unsuccessful one. Both were created from Fire-lizard genes, however, so abilities such as going between, telepathy, and even flight are shared.

A watch-wher is basically a small misshapen dragon. The body, full grown, is about the size of a large herdbeast. They come in the same colors as dragons. Unlike dragons, however, their skin is not smooth feeling, but instead bumpy with muscles. They have 2-toed feet, and very small wings, and are overall very gnarled looking.

The most exceptional quality of these creatures, however, is their eyes, which, contrary to popular believe, see heat, not light. The eyes are incredibly large, but still change color in the classic draconic fashion.

These creatures also have heightened senses of smell, which make them excellent as both “watch dogs” and watchguards for mining camps, as they can smell bad air far easier than their human counterparts.

Watch-whers are impressed along the same lines as firelizards, in that the first person to feed them is usually the one they bond to. They cannot speak, however, so a distinct “language” has to be taught to the pair by eachother. As mentioned before, watch-whers can go between, but are limited to being able to “see” where they are going. This is a problem, as the whers see heat, not light, so very few whers have been known to go between because its bonded partner cannot give it coordinates. Also, whers have the ability to change who they are bonded to, and their name is based upon the person they are bonded to, as well as the strength of the bond and always ends in “sk”.

An example of this would be if a man named Baren impressed a wher. If it was a weak bond, the whers name would be Bask. If it were a somewhat stronger bond it would be named Barsk. And a very strong bond might be Barensk.


Thread

The Origin of Thread

Thread originates from a distant Oort Cloud in the Rukbat System of planets. The Red Star, a foreign planet pulled into an erratic and elliptical orbit by the sun, Rukbat, passes through this cloud and drags tiny thread ovoids in its gravitational trail. Every 200 years, the Red Star passes close enough to Pern for the contents of its trail to be pulled into the atmosphere of Pern. The once dormant round ovoids then transform, due to the heat from entering the atmosphere, into long silvery threads and fall through the skies of the planet to devour and carbon-based material. The only things impervious to its insatiable hunger are water, stone, and metal.


Threadfighting Tactics

Terms:
Wing: A grouping of 12 (smallest) to 30 (largest) dragonriders in formation during Threadfall.
Flight: A grouping of Wings, usually 3, that fight thread in larger groups during Threadfall.
Casualty: A person or dragon either killed OR injured at all during a Threadfall, resulting in his/her inability to Fly.
Every Threadfall is different--there is always one best way to fly against it--and a Weyrleader is lax if he is not always striving to perfect his Weyr's ability to meet each Threadfall with as much flame and as few casualties as possible. Wind and the time through the Pass have the greatest effects on Threadfall; rain has the next greatest effect.

"Rain! Let it rain thick and heavy and drown the Thread while we drink in the Weyr!" dragonriders often wish.

The severe wings and rain of a cold front are the dragonriders' greatest weather threat: With turbulent air low down and unknown up-and-down-drafts, only the most experienced riders can hope to fight well, and only the foolhardy can expect to return unscathed. As the Pass of the Red Star comes closer, the frequency of Threadfalls increases until they occur at the rate of once every fourteen hours un bands across the planet, giving weary dragonriders no rest.

To meet the thread of Thread combined with foul weather, the Weyrleader must use planning, teamwork, and long practiced formations. Casualties play a role in how a Weyr weathers the Pass, but training is decisive. Training is carried out at all times by the full Weyr. *skipping a little unneeded text here*

The Wing may be arrayed in any number of different ways: into a straight line; stacked by Wingseconds into three lines; in a forward vee or backward vee; flying upward or downward or level. Each different position and angle of flight entails different advantages and dangers. Every rider is expected to know how to fly faultlessly in every possible Wing formations. The Wing drills until it can go between, while climbing or diving and turning in any direction, and come out of between in the same formation it started with. *skipping more*

The consensus among modern dragonriders is that one must "gauge the Fall and gauge the wind." Thread can fall thickly, in sheets, or it can fall in splotches or in any combination of the above configurations. The wind influences the Threadfall, and worse, if there is severe turbulence, can fling Thread onto a dragon or throw a dragon into Thread. Dragons are fantastically strong, but a thirty- to forty-knot wind will keep a dragon straining hard just to stay on station. The blues and greens are worked over the hardest by the high wings, the browns and bronzes having more strength and stamina. However, all dragons suffer in high winds.

In truly sever turbulence a dragon could be driven away from Thread in one instance and blown right into it the next. In that case all that saves dragons and their riders from complete catastrophe is the ability to go between. In such Falls, many Weyrleaders choose to send up one Flight at a time, arrayed in three Wings flying upward or downward vee formations, and change Flights several times through the Fall.

Calmer weather allows the Weyrleader more latitude: he may choose to send two Flights to make a leisurely Fall, one Flight to rest his other Flights, or all Flights with the hope of minimizing casualties. Still, trick gusts and flutters may make Fall in a calm wind dangerous, and Thread must always be gauged separate of wind. Otherwise the Weyrleader may choose the wrong tactic, flying the tiring Wings on line formation above the looser three-vees formation.

The Dragon Riders of Pern Series and everything related to it is © Anne McCaffrey.