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Post by Hexenritter Verlag on Feb 5, 2018 3:00:27 GMT -5
Dragons are iconic & I cannot fathom D&D of any flavor; let along any other fantasy RPG without them. That said, the dragons are going to be horrible threats, none of that chromatic, gem or metallic dragon rubbish. Only baby young dragons will be not dire threats in my games. A dragons breath is save or die; on a save you take the traditional numerical damage - maybe they'll survive it, maybe they won't. A natural twenty on a bite attack is it bites you whole if a large wyrm swallowing you whole & its highly corrosive saliva & bile will consume you before you can hack your way out; or if young nearly bites you in half shredding your innards, which cook in its saliva. A natural 20 claw attack will disembowel you & fling you 10-20 yards away or pierces you through & crushes you into the ground. A tail swipe on a natural twenty will knock you 10-20 yards away doing 2-12 HPs damage & a save or be stunned 1d4+1 minutes (basically dragon food). Only a high level group might survive an encounter if they have magical weapons or powerful spells. The basic stats for an adult dragon are used if you have magical weapons/spells or they are unstoppable beasts.
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Post by The Old Ref Himself on Feb 12, 2018 18:36:09 GMT -5
That is a lot of links! Have an Exalt.
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Post by The Archivist on Feb 19, 2018 8:14:27 GMT -5
That is a lot of links! Have an Exalt. Thank you!
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Dragons
Feb 28, 2023 18:15:33 GMT -5
Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:15:33 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 Great list! And will all the games out there, still short list of all the numerous versions that are around now.
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Dragons
Feb 28, 2023 18:17:30 GMT -5
Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:17:30 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:I wish Aquaria had gotten published. Since it is mentioned here is the definition
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Dragons
Feb 28, 2023 18:19:14 GMT -5
Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:19:14 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. captaincrumbcake you are tired of dragons? I never get tired of dragons, but I have never followed the problem you reference either.
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Dragons
Feb 28, 2023 18:20:58 GMT -5
Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:20:58 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...? Wow, tired of them after year 1. Yet we hear so few tales of those days, I never heard that dragons were used that much, but maybe they were.
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Dragons
Feb 28, 2023 18:23:14 GMT -5
Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:23:14 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. I had not thought about that but dragons are rather feline in some ways.
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Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:24:40 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. mao, how about a Lovecraftian dragon?
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Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:27:47 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. Given the stuff you have written over the last few years, I tend to think you could get it right.
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Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:31:13 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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Dragons
Feb 28, 2023 18:33:34 GMT -5
Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:33:34 GMT -5
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.I just love that statement!
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Post by mao on Feb 28, 2023 18:35:34 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. mao , how about a Lovecraftian dragon? This is an amazing idea! Exault for you! def gonna do this for Muk City
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Dragons
Feb 28, 2023 18:35:43 GMT -5
Post by Morose on Feb 28, 2023 18:35:43 GMT -5
Now I have to find time to give this a read.
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