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Post by Admin Pete on Apr 1, 2016 11:34:58 GMT -5
Editing and splitting this thread to keep it more on topic proved to be trickier than I thought it would be; however all the pieces are now where they hopefully should be. The Admin IMC adult dragons range from 5-12 Hit Dice in size and Ancient Dragons can be up to 4 Hit Dice larger Dragon Breed | Number Appearing | Armor Class | Move in Inches
| Hit Dice
| % In Lair
| Type or Amount of Treasure
| Alignment
| Black Dragon
| 1-4
| 2
| 9/24
| 6 - 8
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Blue Dragon
| 1-4
| 1
| 9/27
| 8 - 10
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Brass Dragon
| 1-4
| 2
| 9/24
| 6-8
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Bronze Dragon
| 1-4
| 1
| 9/27
| 8-10
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Copper Dragon
| 1-4
| 2
| 9/24
| 7-9
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Golden Dragon
| 1-4
| 0
| 12/36
| 10-12
| 60%
| Type H
| Lawful
| Green Dragon
| 1-4
| 2
| 9/27
| 7-9
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Red Dragon*
| 1-4
| 1
| 9/30
| 9-12
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Mottled Dragon
| 1-4
| 3
| 9/21
| 5-7
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Gray Dragon
| 1-4
| 0
| 12/32
| 10-12
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| Silver Dragon
| 1-4
| 1
| 9/30
| 9-11
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
| White Dragon
| 1-4
| 3
| 9/21
| 5-7
| 60%
| Type H
| Chaotic
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*Please note that the Red Dragon is viciously EVIL and will never keep a bargain and will always seek to kill once they have the advantage. Here is a list of Dragon types that I found for FYI: Color - 20Amber Black Blue Brown Chromatic Ebony Green Gray Indigo Maroon Orange Pink Prismatic Purple Rainbow Red Scarlet Tan White Yellow Metals - 18Adamantite Aluminum Brass Bronze Copper Electrum Gold Lead Magnesium Mercury Mithril Silver Platinum Steel Tin Titanium Tungsten Zinc Ferrous - 5Cobalt Chromium Gruaghlothor Iron Nickel Gems - 10Amethyst Crystal Emerald Jacinth Jade Pearl Quartz Ruby Sapphire Topaz Oriental - 8Carp Celestial Coiled Earth River Sea Spirit Typhoon Other - 25Aquatic Astral Chameleon Cloud Cobra Crimson Deep Dzalmaus Energy Forest Fang Fire Gorynych Ichthyodrake Mist Obsidian Quazar Salt Sand Shadow Sodium Spiked Stone War Were-Dragon Land - 3Arack Night Scintillating Undead - 9Dracolich Dragon Skeleton Dragon Zombie Dragon Wraith Dragon Wight Dragon Mummy Dragon Spectre Dragon Vampire Dragotha Dragonets - 8Dragonet Draken Faerie Fire Drake Ice Lizard Mini-dragon Phase Psuedo- Drakes - 4Crystal Demon Faerie Shadow
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Post by Admin Pete on Apr 1, 2016 11:40:07 GMT -5
From Frank Mentzer's Aquaria:
Moth Dragons: a weird hybrid with moth-wings; fully the size of 'the usual' dragons. No breath, teeny legs; rely on battering (with wings) when fighting. Semi-intelligent, not very dangerous.
Emphita: think of their cousins the Couatls. Feathered snakey dragons, magical flight, often spellcasters, flame breath, constricting tail. Rarely engage, however; run away to fight another day.
Serpent Dragons: related to constrictors (extreme strength), poisonous bite, tiny vestigial wings, also breathe poison gas. Usually low INT but occasionally higher, slight chance of spells (Verbal only).
Roo Dragons: marsupial hybrids of only about 10' height, which can kick and box something fierce and, if cornered, and can breath a small cloud of obscuring & poison gas so they can make their getaway. Animal intelligence & no spells, vegetarian, can't fly, but formidible when cornered. Usually found in lite woods and nearby plains.
Also this one:
And the following by J. Franklin Mentzer and (c) Purebread Company Inc., may be used/repeated/copied/developed if credit is given:
Quote:
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Post by captaincrumbcake on Apr 1, 2016 13:34:54 GMT -5
I'm very tired of dragons, generally, of late. Their codification and boxed-in cookie-cutterness is (and has been) a great disservice. I'm working on a re-invisioned species of Dragon; perhaps more, dino-ish.
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Post by robkuntz on Apr 1, 2016 14:05:18 GMT -5
I was tired of them after year 1. But that also included just about every generic knock-off from myth, legend, folk tale and speculative literature. My WoK is, for the most part, all new stuff. But we must keep some wyrms crawling about. And those skeletons too, don't yah know...?
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Post by Admin Pete on Apr 1, 2016 14:47:16 GMT -5
I on the other hand have always loved dragons and that is also why I am always striving to come up with a unique vision of dragons and why I tweak things from time to time to keep it fresh. I am not using the list above. You can see what I am doing down in my campaign section and I have quite a bit more to post there. However, the above list is a place for some to start to imagine something unique.
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Post by Admin Pete on Apr 2, 2016 0:47:41 GMT -5
This thread diverged into a discussion that needed its own thread and you can find that discussion at It started with Talking about Dragons up in General Discussion - while this thread continues on specifically about Dragons.
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Post by hengest on Apr 17, 2016 19:26:47 GMT -5
I dig wyrms. The Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer has a wall described as "wyrmlicum fah" (with worm-forms marked) which is variously interpreted as:
-decorated with carvings of dragons -worm-eaten (i.e. marked with the holes they make) -marked with intricate (vermiform, wiggly?) runes
I love this. To me this is everything a dragon should represent -- dragon-form, collapse and ruin, beautifully encoded information.
I want to see a dragon as a god on earth that may not even recognize its own value to humans. One to whom its great intelligence is just a byproduct of the unfathomable workings of its dragony spirit. One that causes destruction without even noticing. Maybe a kind of resident "Visitor" as in the Strugatski's "Roadside Picnic", in which immensely powerful alien artifacts are suspected to be simply trash left behind by visitors of unfathomable purpose.
While it would be difficult to RP such a being, it might be interesting to try to imagine one and see how its doings would interact with those of local humanoids.
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Post by tetramorph on Apr 18, 2016 16:24:39 GMT -5
To me this is everything a dragon should represent -- dragon-form, collapse and ruin, beautifully encoded information. I want to see a dragon as a god on earth that may not even recognize its own value to humans. One to whom its great intelligence is just a byproduct of the unfathomable workings of its dragony spirit. One that causes destruction without even noticing. Maybe a kind of resident "Visitor" as in the Strugatski's "Roadside Picnic", in which immensely powerful alien artifacts are suspected to be simply trash left behind by visitors of unfathomable purpose. While it would be difficult to RP such a being, it might be interesting to try to imagine one and see how its doings would interact with those of local humanoids. This is so cool and inspiring, Zondervan! I usually role play my wyrms more like Smaug or Chrysophylax Dives: prideful, swollen, avaricious, unctuous, and easily duped through flattery. You have given me a knew direction to go!
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Post by hengest on Apr 18, 2016 16:28:50 GMT -5
There's so much in that dragony look, with their cat-ish reptilianness! So many directions. Smaug is a plenty cool dragon, but surely he's only the beginning.
Hope to see some of your (and everyone's) work on dragons.
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Post by tetramorph on Apr 18, 2016 16:32:15 GMT -5
Well, yes, hengest. And we shouldn't forget Glaurung, who fits your description more than Smaug.
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Post by hengest on Apr 18, 2016 17:35:03 GMT -5
I completely forgot Glaurung. And I call myself a Tolkien fan...
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Post by Deleted on May 5, 2016 9:16:21 GMT -5
I've never been able to pull it off myself, but I'd like to see a dragon whose description, personality and even statistics are simply beyond verbal or visual comprehension. A lot of the mythic descriptions either gloss over the details or use ambiguous word play to describe dragons (the 'twilight-harmer' and 'naked hate-dragon, taken up in fire' from Beowulf are some fun examples), which is a practice which could be used to great effect, if I can ever get it right. Weird Lovecraftian monsters are treated this way all the time, and I'd like to capture that fear through ever-shifting descriptions, the worm with one head but multiple heads, now it's a centipede but now it has no legs, freely exchanging serpent-like descriptions with horse-like ones and even humanoid monster descriptions more befitting of Grendel, its body burning in fire but it poisons everything it touches, and no matter where you look it seems to be staring you in the face, unblinking. The point being that the characters themselves have to resort to mental metaphor to comprehend the dragon's physical nature.
For whatever reason, with a Lovecraftian monstrosity that sort of description is fine, but with a dragon it just seems to confuse players.
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Post by hengest on May 5, 2016 11:46:57 GMT -5
A lot of the mythic descriptions either gloss over the details or use ambiguous word play to describe dragons (the 'twilight-harmer' and 'naked hate-dragon, taken up in fire' from Beowulf are some fun examples), which is a practice which could be used to great effect, if I can ever get it right. Weird Lovecraftian monsters are treated this way all the time, and I'd like to capture that fear through ever-shifting descriptions, the worm with one head but multiple heads, now it's a centipede but now it has no legs, freely exchanging serpent-like descriptions with horse-like ones and even humanoid monster descriptions more befitting of Grendel, its body burning in fire but it poisons everything it touches, and no matter where you look it seems to be staring you in the face, unblinking. The point being that the characters themselves have to resort to mental metaphor to comprehend the dragon's physical nature. For whatever reason, with a Lovecraftian monstrosity that sort of description is fine, but with a dragon it just seems to confuse players. I like the suggestion that the compound epithets in Beowulf are descriptions of "mental metaphor" because the creature is just too much or too outside of human reality to be comprehended directly (or at least as directly as other things). I don't think I could get this right, ever, but maybe players get confused because they know what a dragon is and they're not prepared for it to be something else, especially a confusing something else. I follow this thread with great interest and keep taking notes for my own work-up of dragons, but it never goes anywhere. I think if I go for anything, it's going to be some version of what @starbeard described, but (or maybe this is what he intended) completely outside of combat. Not a god, but too large and landmass-like to even be converted down into the abstraction of combat and HP. 'Intellectual creatures', to steal from the Thomists, but with a body that isn't theirs so much as it is evidence of them (this one's for you, tetramorph ). The encounter with it would be a one-time thing, an unexpected and almost incomprehensible "peak experience" for the characters, maybe as they near the endgame (could always join a monastery instead of becoming a Lord...). I doubt I could ever make this work well enough not to have it be a silly caricature of itself, but it's keeping me thinking, so that's not all bad. This whole thread, but especially @starbeard 's post with its suggestion of something perceivable but not definable, is starting to remind me of Tom Shippey's passage in The Road to Middle-Earth about...well, I see I quoted it in another thread back in October, so here's the link if anyone wants it.
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Post by robkuntz on May 5, 2016 15:03:23 GMT -5
Yes, An epiphanous creature. They are much like that in my campaign: legends. Their stories, past, present or future, are not so easily dealt with as another mere D&D monster that has more HD to cleave through to bring said legend down.
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2016 23:11:28 GMT -5
Once again, play an intelligent monster intelligently. Why would a magic using dragon not have 'Magic Mouth" spells all over the place to wake him up? Or any intelligent dragon use its impressiveness to dominate some tribes of gnolls to act as guards for the outer gates of the lair? Et cetera.
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Post by Deleted on May 9, 2016 16:16:03 GMT -5
Hengest: Yes, that's the gist of what I meant.
A couple of the things I enjoy most about ancient and especially medieval literature are the mundane but unique ways in which things outside of normal experience get described, and at the other end of the spectrum the lack of description entirely for things outside of normal experience. To take Beowulf as an example again, a number of the kennings and epithets used for the dragon, Grendel or Grendel's Mother are unique, and appear nowhere outside of Beowulf; at the same time, I think the only real description of the dragon (by our terms) is that it has a tail and a head, flies, comes out of the water, poisons or scathes things and is in some way consumed in fire. Grendel's description is even worse: after over two hundred years of scholarship, we still don't really know what the heck he's even supposed to be.
Then there's the allegorical level, which I also enjoy. Beowulf's dragon being consumed in fire sits well with the growing popularity of theological discussions on hellfire in Anglo-Saxon England, and it could be that it was an allegorical device to make the dragon representative of something other than the dragon itself. Elsewhere, in what would become part of the Arthurian cycle, the duel between the red and white dragons gets interpreted by Merlin (or whomever) as a foreshadowing of the wars between Wales and England. They rip up the country, cause fear and death across the whole land at the sound of their shrieks, but their entire existence is as an omen. It's not far off from they way you put it: 'a body that isn't theirs so much as evidence of them'.
I've only recently gotten into occasionally running Call of Cthulhu, and it's rejuvenated my creativity. I like having monsters where the players don't want to know more about them, for the sake of their PCs. The less they comprehend, the better. They also feel a genuine awe for the real monstrous creatures, who are in many ways more like avatars than monsters. I'd like to get some of that back into fantasy gaming.
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Post by robkuntz on May 9, 2016 16:29:16 GMT -5
Yes. We might not know what/who Grendel is, but we can always guess: A monstrous version of the Berserker is my own take. But, as noted, it's anyone's guess.
Starbeard noted: "They also feel a genuine awe for the real monstrous creatures, who are in many ways more like avatars than monsters. I'd like to get some of that back into fantasy gaming."
Back to the UNKNOWN; it's been lost in the shuffling of images and detailed, plug-n-play monster compendiums now for how long?
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Post by Admin Pete on May 9, 2016 22:05:22 GMT -5
Yes. We might not know what/who Grendel is, but we can always guess: A monstrous version of the Berserker is my own take. But, as noted, it's anyone's guess. Starbeard noted: "They also feel a genuine awe for the real monstrous creatures, who are in many ways more like avatars than monsters. I'd like to get some of that back into fantasy gaming." Back to the UNKNOWN; it's been lost in the shuffling of images and detailed, plug-n-play monster compendiums now for how long? The UNKNOWN: I like creating new one of a kind monsters on the fly in the heat of the game and creating new one of a kind magical items also on the fly. I like to surprise myself as well as the players. I like weird and strange and odd. I like creating things the players are afraid to touch and afraid to learn more about. I like it when the players turn and run. Sometimes they run from things that are not dangerous, sometimes they fail to run from things that are not as harmless as they first appear. My players embrace the UNKNOWN - sometimes they scream and sometimes they laugh.
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2016 17:35:04 GMT -5
Isn't it weird that a Large Spider can kill a character with a single hit/saving throw and a Green Dragon uses poison gas and inflicts numerical damage saving throw or not? I've never thought that made sense.
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Post by tetramorph on May 24, 2016 6:46:28 GMT -5
Isn't it weird that a Large Spider can kill a character with a single hit/saving throw and a Green Dragon uses poison gas and inflicts numerical damage saving throw or not? I've never thought that made sense. Do you mean the 1e giant spider? Because there is no description of how a spider is supposed to work in OD&D. I suppose you could make it up to make more sense to you.
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Post by Deleted on May 24, 2016 7:31:52 GMT -5
I'm not the first to dabble in 1E around here or over there - after all the Monster Manual was used with OD&D for a time; in fact, I questioned how to use a beholder in OD&D one time and was told by someone who was there "back in the Day" to defer to the Monster Manual for usage in OD&D ... but, if we are being guided ever so gently back to OD&D land; Purple Worms have a poisonous sting. Should poisons, in general, have a numerical set of damage or is it save/Die. I think this is relevant to dragons because the Green Dragon breathes Poison Gas ... Should one assume, from what was written, that all poison in dice damage? Oh, I know I could run it however I want, I'm just entertaining the idea of two ways of doing it ... Save vs Breath Weapon or die puts a healthy fear back into the players concerning Dragons, just saying ...
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Post by robkuntz on May 24, 2016 8:55:13 GMT -5
I'm not the first to dabble in 1E around here or over there - after all the Monster Manual was used with OD&D for a time; in fact, I questioned how to use a beholder in OD&D one time and was told by someone who was there "back in the Day" to defer to the Monster Manual for usage in OD&D ... but, if we are being guided ever so gently back to OD&D land; Purple Worms have a poisonous sting. Should poisons, in general, have a numerical set of damage or is it save/Die. I think this is relevant to dragons because the Green Dragon breathes Poison Gas ... Should one assume, from what was written, that all poison in dice damage? Oh, I know I could run it however I want, I'm just entertaining the idea of two ways of doing it ... Save vs Breath Weapon or die puts a healthy fear back into the players concerning Dragons, just saying ... page 18, OD&D Supplement 1, back-references Giant Spider, poison and webs, though they were covered in D&D as published, under "Insect or Animal" I think. Another scaling thing, depending on what one would term "giant".
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Post by tetramorph on May 24, 2016 12:24:32 GMT -5
JMiskimen, what if you did a giant poisonous thing like a chimera breath weapon: just always 3d6, regardless of creatures relative HD (as per Dragon's). I like the idea because it makes them scary for low lvl PCs but less so as you level up. Heck, maybe one could apply this to poisons in general and roll a d4 or something to determine the d6 potency of any given potion. Low levels would still likely die, but high levels would probably be able to shake it off.
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Post by Deleted on May 26, 2016 11:55:03 GMT -5
I've been thinking about this a little bit in the past week. How scary should a dragon be stat-wise? In any edition of D&D, dragons become less scary as the characters level up. Is there a way to make a monster that's just as scary to ten 10th level PCs as it is to one 1st level PC?
Continuing to harp on "the literature," we usually say dragons in D&D are more powerful than those from myth and legend, because those tend to be slain by a single courageous warrior who may not have much experience, and in D&D it usually takes a team of experienced PCs to take one down. But then again, even though dragons are taken down in single combat in the stories, it's usually after they've laid waste to the countryside, devoured all of the knights in the castle and generally paralyzed the whole of the kingdom in fear. This kind of dragon should be just as lethal to a small army as it is to a single plucky shepherd, but by the same token the single shepherd should still have that one chance to strike the fatal blow.
Maybe the only way to handle that in OD&D is to give dragons save vs death attacks, and any attacks made against them also have a chance to inflict a save vs death on the dragon.
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Post by Mighty Darci on Oct 10, 2016 16:37:52 GMT -5
I love dragons!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 10, 2016 23:38:02 GMT -5
Me too, if they're cooked right! They taste just like Saxon!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 11, 2016 4:47:13 GMT -5
I have always preferred the wing, when lightly battered with paprika.
I just successfully introduced a dragon into my weekly Basic/Expert D&D game. The players have begun wandering nearby wilderness to reach dungeons outside of town, and the wilderness encounter tables in that version can be very brutal. Hills have something like a 25% chance of running into a dragon every encounter.
Sure enough, the first encounter rolled up as a dragon. My solution was to treat it as scenery. 'A huge, trailing ball of smoke and flame high above, rolling aimlessly through the sky as if it were tossed about like a serpentine kite in the wind; at times the smoke and flame form almost into the shape of a wing or a tail, as clouds often do.'
Their man-at-arms, a local, pointed from a cowering position and explained, 'Hide! It's the Dragon!'
The players were suitably awed and terrified that this wasn't just a dragon, but THE Dragon. From now on, whenever they encounter a dragon, it will be The Dragon, and it will ignore them as frightened ants on the ground 90% of the time. It's lair is now marked on my map.
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Post by Mighty Darci on Oct 11, 2016 7:07:23 GMT -5
Me too, if they're cooked right! They taste just like Saxon! I always thought they tasted like chicken or pork chops, depending on the species.
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Post by Mighty Darci on Oct 11, 2016 7:08:00 GMT -5
I have always preferred the wing, when lightly battered with paprika. I just successfully introduced a dragon into my weekly Basic/Expert D&D game. The players have begun wandering nearby wilderness to reach dungeons outside of town, and the wilderness encounter tables in that version can be very brutal. Hills have something like a 25% chance of running into a dragon every encounter. Sure enough, the first encounter rolled up as a dragon. My solution was to treat it as scenery. 'A huge, trailing ball of smoke and flame high above, rolling aimlessly through the sky as if it were tossed about like a serpentine kite in the wind; at times the smoke and flame form almost into the shape of a wing or a tail, as clouds often do.' Their man-at-arms, a local, pointed from a cowering position and explained, 'Hide! It's the Dragon!' The players were suitably awed and terrified that this wasn't just a dragon, but THE Dragon. From now on, whenever they encounter a dragon, it will be The Dragon, and it will ignore them as frightened ants on the ground 90% of the time. It's lair is now marked on my map. That is just awesome!
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Post by The Archivist on May 20, 2017 20:08:44 GMT -5
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