Dragonomicon: Dracolich Mongrel

[Fallen Seraph]

Yeah I don't see what is wrong with the name either:

Draco = Dragon

Lich = Undead being with some manner of intellect

Mongrel = It is a mix of various Dragons

So thus we have a Dracolich Mongrel. A intelligent being who was grafted together by various dragon parts but it is under the control of some dominant being, still has intellect but it is simply in essentially slavery.

If they had simply called it a I dunno Dracoskeleton Mongrel or Dracogolem Mongrel. Then it wouldn't fit the fluff because such beings don't have a sentience to them.

 

[munkeywrench]

I'm digging this new monster! I can already imagine the setup for an adventure:

A two-bit necromancer, tired of being the loser among his peers, decides that he's going to go get himself a dracolich to make them all jealous. There's just a few hangups:
1) He doesn't have the funds to go out an buy the expensive components needed for the ritual.
2) Even if he did have all the stuff he needs, he still doesn't know how to cast the lich ritual correctly.
3) Regardless of the two reasons above, he'd still have to con a dragon into participating and a CHA score of 7 ain't gonna cut it.

So what does he do? Improvise! He gathers together a bunch of dragon remains and hammers together a workable frame. For the phylactery, he just picks a part of the frame that looks the most expensive and draws onto it the proper runes. For the dracolich ritual, he fills in the gaps with parts of resurrection rituals. Not perfect, but good enough.

As the ritual is performed, the bones that make up the frame convulse violently. The resurrection portions of the patchwork ritual begin to bring back the souls of all the dragons whose remains make up the monstrosity. It isn't working though. Only bits and pieces of each soul are being brought back and placed into the skeletal frame. The dracolich portions of the ritual kick in and the bits and pieces of soul are hideously compacted together inside the makeshift phylactery. The ritual then ends in a bright flash of necrotic light.

The necromancer beholds his creation. It roars and writhes with anguish and hatred, but follows orders and seems unable to bring itself to suicide. Not quite perfect, but good enough. A few more of these and kings will be bowing to him by the end of the month. Sure, it's not REALLY a true dracolich, but whose going to argue with him when he's sitting on a mountain of treasure surrounded by beautiful women?


--All that from a paragraph of fluff

 

[Phaezen]

Munkeywrench - nice idea, could make for an entertaining adventure. There are some interesting and varied adventure ideas coming off this thread.

I will have to find the quote, but I believe Mike Mearls has said that fourth edition was designed to be easy for DM's and players to reskin classes and monsters to suit thier needs, th eseries of articles on the wotc website about converting 3e characters certainly seems to bear this out, as do threads like this.

Fourth Edition - Refluff, Reskin, Repurpose

Phaezen

 

[ProfessorCirno]

This isn't "bad content." This is "content you and Cirno don't like." "You don't like it" /= "universally agreed upon and scientifically-proven bad content." I like it just fine. You not liking is perfectly acceptable, but it gets awfully tiring seeing the same people jump into every thread about 4e and make the same complaints.

I don't like the Red Sox. But I don't make a point of going on Red Sox message boards and saying they suck. Life's too short.

Except the vast majority of things people here are bringing up are things they're MAKING up. Plus, this isn't the 4e forums. If you want 4e and only 4e, get the hell out of here, go to the 4e forums and stop harassing others.

To use your analogy, it would be if Red Sox players were on General Baseball Forums, talking about all the times they won fictional games that ever existed, and when you correct them, they tell you to leave the Red Sox forums and call you a troll.

It's this perception of "EVERYTHING IS THE 4e FORUMS, NO FINDING FLAWS" that's damaging this website the most, and I've seen a lot of good posters give up and leave because of it.

 

[WhatGravitas]

Except the vast majority of things people here are bringing up are things they're MAKING up. Plus, this isn't the 4e forums. If you want 4e and only 4e, get the hell out of here, go to the 4e forums and stop harassing others.

To use your analogy, it would be if Red Sox players were on General Baseball Forums, talking about all the times they won fictional games that ever existed, and when you correct them, they tell you to leave the Red Sox forums and call you a troll.

Your analogy is flawed, we're not talking about measurable facts, we're talking about fiction. Being evocative and inspiring is also a quality in fiction, i.e. bringing people to think about it and making people have ideas expanding on what is given. Especially when there's some convergence, i.e. people having similar ideas.

It's this perception of "EVERYTHING IS THE 4e FORUMS, NO FINDING FLAWS" that's damaging this website the most, and I've seen a lot of good posters give up and leave because of it.

See, the problem is: 4E has flaws, definitively. But seriously, in this thread, people are mainly arguing about the use of the word lich!

Say the fluff there is sparse and I'll agree with you - 4E has pretty sparse monster fluff (whether you mind it or not depends on your propensity to homebrew). But that the word "lich" is used incorrectly?

That's what turned me off the 4E threads - that discussions devolve into arguments about very minor points - while I don't mind more general threads like Stalker0's discussion about the flaws of the power system - because these are more general and applicable to 4E as a whole than discussion the use of "lich".

Cheers, LT.

 

[jensun]

It's this perception of "EVERYTHING IS THE 4e FORUMS, NO FINDING FLAWS" that's damaging this website the most, and I've seen a lot of good posters give up and leave because of it.

Except you didnt find flaws, you jumped up and down shouting "I hate it" like you do in every 4e thread.

Its that sort of behaviour, on both sides of the fence, which seems to be causing the most damage.

 

[garyh]

Except the vast majority of things people here are bringing up are things they're MAKING up. Plus, this isn't the 4e forums. If you want 4e and only 4e, get the hell out of here, go to the 4e forums and stop harassing others.

It's this perception of "EVERYTHING IS THE 4e FORUMS, NO FINDING FLAWS" that's damaging this website the most, and I've seen a lot of good posters give up and leave because of it.

I'm harassing people? Yeah, that's rich. I'm not the one that threadcraps EVERY 4e conversation, finding fault with EVERYTHING.

A monster inspiring people with adventure ideas is a GOOD THING. I don't see how you can complain about that, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this point.

Except you didnt find flaws, you jumped up and down shouting "I hate it" like you do in every 4e thread.

Its that sort of behaviour, on both sides of the fence, which seems to be causing the most damage.

This.

 

[Phaezen]

Except the vast majority of things people here are bringing up are things they're MAKING up. Plus, this isn't the 4e forums. If you want 4e and only 4e, get the hell out of here, go to the 4e forums and stop harassing others.

Of course it is stuff we are making up. This is a game about making stuff up. We are also making stuff up based on the fluff of the article that counters you complaint that the fluff is bland. The whole concept of this dragon is evocative to some of us. The ideas that are being brought up can be used in all editions of the game.

A direct question to you ProfessorCirno, how would you use the Dracolich Mongrel concept in your campaign?

Say the fluff there is sparse and I'll agree with you - 4E has pretty sparse monster fluff (whether you mind it or not depends on your propensity to homebrew). But that the word "lich" is used incorrectly?

That's what turned me off the 4E threads - that discussions devolve into arguments about very minor points - while I don't mind more general threads like Stalker0's discussion about the flaws of the power system - because these are more general and applicable to 4E as a whole than discussion the use of "lich".

the fluff is fairly sparse, especially if you compare it to second and third edition. However, with every monster entry there is enough teasers to show the history, common knowledge and misconceptions and typical tactics of the monster in question.

Take the Orc entry for example, in 2 paragraphs of fluff and 4 knowledge checks there is actually quite a lot of detail packed in about orc culture, settlements, habits. I cound about 14 points of detail about orcs in that brief section, allowing me to build a campaign around orcish raiders.

The roper has less 5 or 6, but even so it is enough, giving basic tactics and motivations for working with other races.

The Mongrel Dracolich article gives us the following to work with:

• It is created by a ritual from the remains of several dragons.
• Never by choice of the dragons involved.
• The dragon/s hate thier mockery of life, but due to the nature of the ritual that creates it, the Mongrel cannot end its own existance.
• It will not flee and will fight until destroyed.
• It's Phylactery is built into its skeleton
• It is the size of a large horse and is clearly constructed from remains of different dragons.

What else do you need to know?

The dracolich entry in the monster manual fills in some of the blanks, mentioning for example that some dracolichs are created unwillingly. A dracolich created in such a way is controlled though its phylactery and the phylactery is destroyed when the dragon is destroyed.

Phaezen

 

[Shadeydm]

I guess to me calling that thing a lich or dracolich makes about as much sense to me as filing off the word orc from their MM entry and calling them plains giants. Sure I can make up a paragraph of fluff to try and justify it but that really doesn't make it any better IMO.

 

[Imp]

• It is created by a ritual from the remains of several dragons.
• Never by choice of the dragons involved.
• The dragon/s hate thier mockery of life, but due to the nature of the ritual that creates it, the Mongrel cannot end its own existance.
• It will not flee and will fight until destroyed.
• It's Phylactery is built into its skeleton
• It is the size of a large horse and is clearly constructed from remains of different dragons.

Here are my problems – and my issue is not that the content is "wrong" somehow, but that it's insubstantial:

- items one and six are redundant
- items three and four are traits common to most all undead; if you're taking an approach that relies on the DM bringing outside knowledge or preconceptions, then what you bring to the descriptions you provide had better qualify those preconceptions
- item five makes the existence of the phylactery pretty pointless
- leaving item two which tells you a little, I guess; and knowing it's made from several dragons tells you a bit.

Like I said I have read much longer monster descriptions that were just as empty so I don't think the solution is "more fluff" – it's just that the sum total of this monster is "undead dragon grunt" and I suspect you could get as much out of the monster entry if the descriptive text were excised and all you had to go on was the statblock and the picture.

Munkeywrench has written up a nice story but it works the same with any other powerful-but-not-uber undead slotted in for the dracolich mongrel.