The premier draw of the Pern fandom... the dragons. If you take out the dragonkin and the Impressions, you have very little left of Pern that’s fun to RP, honestly. And certainly the Pern community has long traditions of making the most out of the magic of the bond and the brilliance of draconic mindmates -- something I hope Dragonfly Dreams will provide a new perspective on.
Dragons come in five colors and twoish sexes. Gender is... thorny. (Sexuality is thorny, also.) More on those elsewhere. Greens, blues, browns, bronzes, and golds ascend in size and in rarity -- generally no more than three or four golds live in a Weyr at a time, while the greens are hundreds-strong. As you may have noticed from the words used, two of the dragon ranks are different than the others: golds and bronzes have hides with a noticeable sheen.
Golds are the only dragons that lay eggs, and this means they get to be in charge, usually. They are also the only dragons who cannot digest firestone, the mineral that dragons have to chew to breathe fire. (Dragonfly Dreams will remain agnostic to the debate over whether greens who abstain from chewing can clutch. What it might mean to be a clutcher and spend months Sands-bound will be a thought offered to every egg to ponder.) Eggs are laid following Flights, which are strenuous mating contests that demand skill and stamina and wit from all participants -- mating does not imply any further relationship, however.
At Dragonfly Dreams, every dragon is a fully sapient and intelligent being capable of a full array of emotions, relationships, hopes, fears, dreams, and possessed of full individuality that mingles with but does not rely on the sapience and intelligence of the bonded human. No exceptions. (If you have questions about this statement, please PM me.) Furthermore, all dragons are assumed to have memories enough to form a full sense of self and any relationships they find pleasing. Any stereotypes about draconic memories are due to human misunderstandings about what is important for a dragon to remember.
Dragons cheat. They don’t actually fly via wing-power, and they absolutely don’t talk in human languages with their big carnivore snouts. (They bugle and trumpet. Like elk!) Nope, they use brain magic. Dragons are telepaths, empaths, and telekinetics -- and honestly, the whole fire-breathing thing could be pyrokinetically-augmented.
To communicate, dragons share their thoughts telepathically. They use the language they learned in the egg to do so; they can send images and general sensations as well, but pure language is generally more efficient. They also share emotions the same way.
A special psychic talent some dragons have (usually blues and greens) is the Searchgift. This allows the dragon to test whether a youth has the suitability to bond a dragon with only the briefest and lightest touch of mind to mind.
Dragons lift themselves and their passengers with telekinesis while making flap-flaps with their wings. This ability is a big secret; Pern doesn’t know enough about aeronautics to know dragons cheat, and the dragons generally don’t know it themselves (though some suspect). After all, “a dragon can carry what they think they can carry.”
They don’t generally have to carry it very far -- another ability dragons have is to access a dimension/interstitial plane called between. A purely empty place with no air, light, or heat, dragons can briefly jaunt there to skip long distances and teleport to their destinations.
The most important person in any dragon’s life is their bonded partner, a human they chose from the candidates provided for their clutch. Candidates are aged from about 15 to about 25. Rarely, dragonets eschew provided candidates and pick from the spectators. ... less rarely, a dragonet finds no match and casts themselves between in sorrow. A dragonrider, once picked, cannot renege, though they must consent for the bond to cement.
Other important relationships for a dragon can include their clutchmates, a position similar to but not identical to sibling relationships, their colleagues within their Wing (Threadfighting organizational unit; platoon), their romantic and/or sexual partners, and of course their buddies. (Dragons don’t do kinship the way humans do; their genetic makeup is extremely resistant to inbreeding because of their reliance on golds as the sole egg-layers. At any given time, the vast majority of dragons in a Weyr will be the children or grandchildren of a single living gold! Don’t think about it too hard or it gets icky.) Any or all of these may be independent of their rider’s relationships, but the attraction of like to like cannot often be denied, and often dragons who become involved with each other lead their riders to do so as well, or vice versa.
Flights, as roughly outlined above, involve one dragon Rising and leading others who Chase. Who does the Rising and when is of continuous debate and tremendous gossip; in canon, it’s always the girls in green and gold. Goldflights are big deals because they make eggs; greenflights (probably) don’t result in eggs but are fun affairs regardless. Rising is a biological and psychological imperative that can only be denied with extreme will; Risers who do not wish to mate can Fly “dry”, in other words letting out their urge to do so somewhere far away from Chasers. Technically, there is only one winner for Flights, who gets written up as the sire when applicable... but sexual play might continue on the ground, or between non-winning Chasers.
Firelizards, the creatures from which dragons were engineered, are still kind of around. We won’t be seeing much of them but they might make a cameo. Same with whers, non-flying nocturnal “ugly” dragons, which will not feature heavily but may show up in a prompt or two. Everyone’s sort of aware that these three creatures are related somehow, but the exact relationship has been lost... most consider whers to be discount-rate dragons at best, active menaces at worst. (They occasionally go wild, form packs, and prey on livestock... kind of like direwolves? They’re like horse-sized but carnivorous and arguably smarter than you so you don’t wanna tangle with them.)