The Dragon
Space Dragon
The space dragon is a creature that can exist in hard vacuum. It resembles the dragon of ancient legend in many regards, but it does not have wings or breathe fire. It eats by basking in the radiation that drifts through space and, like dragons of legend, spends huge expanses of time hibernating – hundreds of years sometimes – while it recharges it‘s batteries.
Often a spaceship on it‘s way between the planets of the game universe will blunder into what it at first takes to be a swarm of meteorites, but then the meteorites start to move. Dragons encountered in this way are highly likely to believe themselves to be under attack from the unlucky spaceship, and will swarm around it ripping and tearing at the external surfaces, and potentially doing a lot of damage.
The diamond hard claws and teeth of the space dragons are easily hard enough to tear their way inside the spaceship and might have to be hunted and subdued by the players, who would have to track the monster through the rooms and corridors of the starship.
Space dragons use their claws and teeth only to excavate lairs in asteroids, their sustenance coming directly from the ambient energy of space. This means that anything they have come into contact with and devoured might get caught in one of the strange internal organs of the beast without being digested. It is possible that ancient artifacts from the earliest times of the game universe can be preserved their as treasure.