As much as I like Dracthyr I am struggling to come up with a backstory because we know almost nothing about them.
We know they were created ~20,000 years ago by neltharion and then neltharion abandoned them partnering with Malygos to put them in stasis. So they have almost no cultural identity.
Part of the problem is creating a backstory even among that framework is difficult. We have no idea how long they existed and were active before stasis was in mere months? years? decades? centuries? more? We do not know. Do they reproduce/lay eggs naturally? or can they only be created in a lab.
As such I was pondering an alternative to my dracthyr other than being a dracthyr.
But I do not know if it’s feasible/realistic. Yeah, yeah I know some folks walk around claiming to be the bastard son of Amon’thul (hello hercules). But I try to keep my characters within the realm of reality even if it stretched a bit beyond what options the games give me.
A couple ideas I had is that my “dracthyr” is actually a regular dragon who simply take on a draconic humanoid form. This is probably the easiest/least complicated to get away with but of course there is no former examples of this but neither are there anything saying it can’t be done.
Another idea is that my character was a blood elf who siphoned magic from dragons and gained draconic abilities and eventually a draconic form. This has never been seen or done before in lore but we know elves are highly sensitive to mutations and can change their appearance based on the type of magic they absorb or are exposed to.
I also considered a way for my Dracthyr to be a Dracthyr but have an actual backstory is they managed to escape and avoid stasis and thus have been wandering Azeroth for the last ~20k years. But since we don’t know the circumstances of how everything went down this might be explained later as being impossible to have happened.
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Totally understandable. I might be able to help spur some inspiration for you.
This is something that has happened in lore, to a degree. The Dragonsworn would fit that sort of thought. I would recommend reading up on them and see if that is a route you could maybe use.
Beyond that, we are kind of stuck until blizzard releases more on the dracthyr. I think we can infer that they are able to procreate, as Neltharion’s races have been able to in the past. It is a key way to supplement the numbers.
I personally had a plan for my dracthyr as my black dragon had a netherdrake daughter. So that is my story for my dracthyr. But if I were to actually write one fresh, this is how I would do it. I would create a skeleton story. Taking what we do know of the current events and getting the character’s story for that ironed out. There is a lot we can establish just with this.
- Figuring out which of the Weyrns the character would belong to
- How the character feels about the current state of the world
- The character’s opinion on the other aspects, Wrathion/Abyssian, and Neltharion’s fate
- Does the character accept what they are told of Neltharion
- How the character views the mortal races
From there I would create a basic personality. Details can be fleshed when we have them. Backstory can be created and ironed out to match the personality later.
Honestly, I would just remain open to adjusting things as we learn more. Keep it vague, and build details through the expansion.
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I find that in some cases backstory isn’t really that important. While having a storied history can help inform what a character is like it is only aspect of what makes a character and, depending on one’s intent, could end up one of the more extraneous aspects. Unless you’re planning on your Dracthyr’s past factoring heavily into your portrayal of them, I wouldn’t worry overmuch about it and instead focus more on the present and furture. Frankly that seems to be ideal for them anyway.
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Honestly, the way I see it, their lack of Cultural identity arguably IS their cultural identity. They are soldiers, and they trained relentlessly as such, and had very little, if any time for simple leisure; even something as simple as reading for the sake of enjoyment is a new concept to them.
And the fact that we know so little about their history before the stasis is even dealt with via the fact that their memories are established to be very, very disjointed and damaged. They remember very little from before the Stasis, so all that they remember clearly is what we’ve seen as we play as them.
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I agree with Harmarth.
My impression is that most Dracthyr’s memories are in question. Considering how long they were in stasis, I wouldnt be surprised if only a handful could piece together wtf happened before stasis.
I dont recall seeing/hearing much beyond being called back to their weyrns, a big battle, and suddently stasis, so it may also take time to get their memories going.
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These bullet points are a great starting point!
I’m personally leaning on the “start” we are giving with the Forbidden Reach introduction. And agree with Harmarth’s comments about the dracthyr identity is the absence of one.
I found this WoWhead guide helpful to gather my thoughts when making some decisions about who my dracthyr is at the moment of awakening: https://www.wowhead.com/guide/lore/forbidden-reach
I’m looking forward to playing a character who has so many things to discover about themselves and their history!
I actually think this could work. Some of the lore (that we know pre-Dragonflight) around drakonids is that they were once non-dragon races that were blessed with a draconic form as a reward for their devotion: (not sure why I can’t share a link all of a sudden… but look up the Drakonid entry on Wowpedia!)
I think there’s some stuff in there that you could totally bend to suit if that’s a direction you wanted to take. 
And I think as we learn more from the Dragon Isles in a week, I think players who don’t want to play the “amnesia secret solider” that we’re introduced to in the Forbidden Reach will have a better idea of what’s possible!