All good suggestions. My top picks would probably go like this...
4. since the coral drake has already been introduced, maybe there has been a sudden uptake in the numbers of/attacks by these creatures recently...under the command of a black dragon moving into the territory or after some treasure of the mermen's city...or a blue, if you make your blue's to be the oceanic creatures they really should be...or any/one of the oceanic asian dragons (though I don't believe these are generally evil in disposition, iirc. But your game, your monster.)
That made me think of other Dragons. Which do you all think would be a better Dragon for this particular setting:
I figure whichever humanoids the PCs will be encountering will either be working for the dragon, have the dragon working for them. Or, I guess there's always the possibility that the Dragon and some of its kin are a completely different faction in this ecosystem and considers the other two its enemies. Hmm, all things to think about! At any rate, which particular dragon do you think would be best here?
By the way, the PCs' ship is anchored to a large coral reef which lays beneath an area of the world much like our Bermuda Triangle. An area where shipwrecks are extremely common and many of them disappear without a trace or word sent about them being in danger before disappearing. My original idea was simply that the Merfolk in the area were the cause of this, but now that the PCs have decided they want to ally with the Merfolk, I don't mind switching my idea on the fly so that the Merfolks are just trying to survive in this coral reef while someone else is the cause for the derelict ships above.
Of course, since it
is a coral reef, there's real-life dangers within like sharks, eels, rays, etc. One of my PCs is a Necromancer who has a large number of
bloody skeletons under his control, which means that the sharks in the area are going to be much more aggressive than they normally would be toward the group.
In addition to the coral reef, the area is also home to a graveyard of ships, so I'm planning on giving some aquatic undead humanoids as well. Undead crewmen and women who died with their ships and their bodies+souls have not been able to pass on from protecting their vessels.
Maybe these Merfolk believe its their mission to protect these derelict ships from the other aquatic races? I dunno, keep giving me some ideas! I'm loving it!
Man, when my PCs captured one of the Merfolk in their initial encounter and began talking with him, they really opened up a whole new can of worms! I guess it helped the the Paladin of the party rolled unimaginably high on his Diplomacy. Even though it was just after a combat, he brought the Merfolk Rogue from Hostile to Friendly. Was a DC of 26... He rolled a 43.
By the way, to anyone else thinking of doing something like this, give it a second thought. Playing DND on 2D battlemap makes the 3D nature of swimming quite difficult to run. We've resorted to using dice and putting them underneath each creature/PC to indicate how much squares beneath the surface they are. Once they get down to the bottom, we'll switch this and use the dice to show how many squares off the surface they're swimming. Each PC thought ahead and does have a means to survive underwater, be it a Ring of Water Breathing (from the 3.5 Planar Handbook)1, an Everbreath Mask (from Sunken Empires)2, to regular spells being cast, so they don't have to worry about drowning. I didn't want to deal with that aspect of their game. It would really suck if the thing that killed you wan't a monster or something but simply running out of air.
Thanks a lot again!
PS, I apologize that that was a little long and rambling... Had a bout of insomnia last night so I'm not quite as coherent as I normally am...
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Footnotes:
1 Ring of Water Breathing - Planar Handbook pg unknown, book info:
http://goo.gl/BF4kYu & item info:
http://goo.gl/kGSTu7
2 Everbreath Mask - Sunken Empires pg 51, book info:
http://goo.gl/hQAtpd
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