I'm about to use my first dragon(s) in my home campaign, and I thought I'd talk a little about how I'm tricking them out to increase their solo threat.
I've seen the new Hobbit movie. I want them to be unabashed city smashers, eventually, but more than that: I want them to be, well, dragony.
First, the ontology. What is a dragon?
In my campaign, she's a parthenogenic extreme heterozygote; she's color coded for your convenience but it sprang from a mother of a different color.
She's probably native to the prime plane, though the very eldest two are thought to be non-native, if they exist at all and if that's a useful concept in context.
The eggs of dragons hatch as dragonborn nine out of ten times; the dragonborn tend to be of the same color as their dam but aren't always. That tenth time is a stunted wyrmling, a dragonlet which cannot age. One in ten of those wyrmlings remainder (one in a hundred eggs!) is a wyrmling capable of making it to the young adult age; one in a thousand eggs can make it to adult, one in ten thousand eggs is capable of ancient. These odds go down to 1 in 100 when the child would be capable of an elder age than the parent.
So use as many dragons of whatever age category as you'd like; they're unlikely to overwhelm your campaign with numbers.
A dragon is mostly made of meat and mineral-hard scale and ancient bone, though a potent elemental flux suffuses all the tissues of a live dragon, concentrated in her brain and heart.
Any non-dragon creature exposed to an adult dragon's flux (such as by consuming those organs) gains the half-dragon template, at least one mental illness, and possibly other physical mutations.
Dragons eat everything. Their scales harden; they don't usually collect cartloads of copper pieces but instead shed scales continuously, with those scales mostly composed of copper, and trading nearly 1:1 with local coinage. That said, the silver and gold are probably real and stolen.
Okay. Enough of that. Let's talk giant fire breathing turkey. How do you beef up a non-wyrmling dragon?
Wyrmlings are anemic, but intentionally so.
Burning blood: damaging the wyrm spends one of its hit dice, creating a 5' pool of bloody flux adjacent, dealing that die to anyone entering or starting there, of a type of damage the dragon resists. This effect stacks with itself, and in any effect the dragon is immune.
Iron Hide: the dragon has resistance to nonmagical (s/b/p) weapon damage. Anmd her natural attacks count as magical. And she counts as a Siege Monster, dealing double damage against objects.
Chaotic Flux: whenever the dragon's breath weapon recharges at the start of a round, she may get an additional save against one effect she can save against at the end of each round. If this save is successful, the renewed breath weapon is immediately lost again.
More as I think of it
I've seen the new Hobbit movie. I want them to be unabashed city smashers, eventually, but more than that: I want them to be, well, dragony.
First, the ontology. What is a dragon?
In my campaign, she's a parthenogenic extreme heterozygote; she's color coded for your convenience but it sprang from a mother of a different color.
She's probably native to the prime plane, though the very eldest two are thought to be non-native, if they exist at all and if that's a useful concept in context.
The eggs of dragons hatch as dragonborn nine out of ten times; the dragonborn tend to be of the same color as their dam but aren't always. That tenth time is a stunted wyrmling, a dragonlet which cannot age. One in ten of those wyrmlings remainder (one in a hundred eggs!) is a wyrmling capable of making it to the young adult age; one in a thousand eggs can make it to adult, one in ten thousand eggs is capable of ancient. These odds go down to 1 in 100 when the child would be capable of an elder age than the parent.
So use as many dragons of whatever age category as you'd like; they're unlikely to overwhelm your campaign with numbers.
A dragon is mostly made of meat and mineral-hard scale and ancient bone, though a potent elemental flux suffuses all the tissues of a live dragon, concentrated in her brain and heart.
Any non-dragon creature exposed to an adult dragon's flux (such as by consuming those organs) gains the half-dragon template, at least one mental illness, and possibly other physical mutations.
Dragons eat everything. Their scales harden; they don't usually collect cartloads of copper pieces but instead shed scales continuously, with those scales mostly composed of copper, and trading nearly 1:1 with local coinage. That said, the silver and gold are probably real and stolen.
Okay. Enough of that. Let's talk giant fire breathing turkey. How do you beef up a non-wyrmling dragon?
Wyrmlings are anemic, but intentionally so.
Burning blood: damaging the wyrm spends one of its hit dice, creating a 5' pool of bloody flux adjacent, dealing that die to anyone entering or starting there, of a type of damage the dragon resists. This effect stacks with itself, and in any effect the dragon is immune.
Iron Hide: the dragon has resistance to nonmagical (s/b/p) weapon damage. Anmd her natural attacks count as magical. And she counts as a Siege Monster, dealing double damage against objects.
Chaotic Flux: whenever the dragon's breath weapon recharges at the start of a round, she may get an additional save against one effect she can save against at the end of each round. If this save is successful, the renewed breath weapon is immediately lost again.
More as I think of it
