Concentrated Wealth - Two birds with one stone

[Andor]

Ever notice how when you have two problems they can solve each other?

The designing a goverment for D&D thread got me to wondering abou those adventuring family dynasties and why the world seems to be chock full of wealth loaded crypts, dungeons, lost cities etc... Instead of dominated by a few hideously powerful dynasties of families that load the kids down with disproportionate wealth (meaning magical power) and send them off to rocket up to high levels by wasting a load of goblins with Aunt Betty's necklace of fireballs.

And then I wondered 'And where do dragons get all their gold and loot anyway?' Ohhhhh. Heh heh heh.

So when Billy Bob, son of Kongor the Exsanguinator grabs his dad's kit and goes off to slay CR appropriate monsters he gets ambushed by a CR inappropriate dragon who's looking to redecorate the lair.

Perhaps a lot of those lairs and dungeons are built by civic commities looking to divest the wealth of dead adventurers before Darkscale the Dispeptic does to them what Smaug did to the Lonely Mountain. Or not, but it may well at this point be well known in the adventuring community that when you retire and you no longer have the rest of the group to watch your back it's an excellent idea to divest yourself of all the shiny glowy loot before the wyrms come calling. So junior may get a sword +1 or the family Haversack but he's not gonna get Stormbringer.

An interesting side effect of adding this into your world construction is that it implies the proprietor of Crazy Vaclav's Magic Emporium is either REALLY powerful, or he has a deal with the dragons (all of them?), or he keeps little stock on hand and mostly knows people who have stuff or can do commisions.

Anyone want to kick this idea around?

 

[Andor]

What? Not one person likes this idea? Well... Where do Dragons get all their loot then?

 

[Tonguez]

IMC Bishnagar is the largest city in the world being sited on the crossroads of the North-South Gold/Diamond/Salt routes and the East-West Spice/Silk routes and is ruled by a great wyrm of the same name.
Now the Dragon Bishnagar accepts the wealth of adventurers along with the tax and tribute of his citizens and visiting merchants and stores this in his hoard beneath the city. In exchange Dragon Marques are issued being Exchange Notes which can be used as currency

 

[Evilhalfling]

Dragons should not exist in a vacum. If the dragon only kills adventures for loot they will have a few dozen ability enchancing magic items. a pile of magical weapons and armor and very few coins. In order to compile a typical horde the dragon needs to take over entire existing communities (and then have enough servants to gather it and possibly transport the goods to its lair.) Or have a distribution network that can resell the items as was suggested earlier.

A third method would be getting loot as forced tribute or protection money, probably from unorganized humanoid tribes (which would be a lot less likely to hire adventures)
the dragon would have to be supremely arrogant to try this with humans, it would not be a good method for getting to the next age catagory.

The last dragons I used were part of a BBEG complex that included giants, sorcerers, human priests and a devil with class levels. The dragons tended to have all the bulk coins and less useful magic items (including lots of low quality magic weapons.) The lesser dragon had copper and the more garish of the collected jewlery. These dragons got most of thier hoards as payment or bribes by the more organized BBEGs.

I did once base an adventure on finding the bodies (and personal loot) of a scattered previous adventuring company, and finding out the reasons for thier deaths in the wilderness.
But randomly rolled treasure is far more common.

 

[kigmatzomat]

IMC, dragon hordes (piles of coin, art & such) are actually side effects of dragons deciding that he feels like eating the oxen currently pulling a merchant caravan. To avoid leaving any obvious marks, he hauls all the loot (including the stuff they don't care about) away. Many dragons come to appreciate certain aspects of treasure (coin is pretty & impresses the squishy races and art has its own intrinsic value regardless of species, though I expect draconic tastes in art may be obscure)

My dragon hordes are full of silks, exotic woods, metal ingots, and in some cases entire wagons still full of lashed-down cargo. It's much more interesting to have four wagons worth of mercantile loot than 500lbs of coin.