Alerad
Explorer
This is a straight copy-paste of the "How do you use giants in your game?" thread where I answered. But then I thought I did something similar with dragons, I would share here.
For our second or third campaign, which turned into a 3-4 year project and we went from 1st to 15th or 16th level, we had dragons at some point. Again, as with the giants in my first campaign, I opted for an unorthodox solution.
We didn't introduce dragons at first. It was supposed to be a low-magic few magic items gritty realism world, so such creatures had no business there. My character was a Japanese or Chinease warrior ("Zanthian" to be exact, an imaginary country we had), Zanthian noble (same as Waterdavian) barbarian - he was a refined noble the entire time, except in combat he went into an Emptiness or Void state of mind, which we treated as Rage.
We were visiting his hometown (rotating DM-s) and I literally designed one encounter after the dragon fight scene in 47 ronin. The party just killed an evil necromancer, who was a brother of the good high level cleric. Well, they didn't expect they both have a niece who didn't know the entire story except the party killed one of her uncles, so she lured them to a remote location.
It turns out the 5 Zanthian noble families stole, bought or traded the secret of dragonkind at the dawn of their nation. Unlike the natural dragons (chromatic), the metallic dragons are only five. Only one reincarnation manifests in a family and the size of the dragon depends on how long that person has been aware that he or she is the incarnate, and how long has trained to control the dragon form.
She was the Gold dragon, the their house, Wu, was the most powerful and in charge of religion in the city. I suppose they bought the secret in gold.
Another house had the Silver dragon, and they were negotiators. I suppose they bought it in silver.
The house of naval trade were half-thieves, half-pirates and had the Copper dragon. They got it really cheap!
My character was from the military family (barbarians!) and they had the Bronze dragon. So I suppose their ancestor won the secret by force and military strategy!
I think we swapped the last dragons for Mercury! Needless to say that house were politicians and schemers. They were the last to obtain the secret of the dragonkind, obviously!
We later had fun in PeiPei's kitchen, a pocket dimension where PeiPei, the Uranium dragon was locked away for being too dangerous!
How do you use dragons in your games?
For our second or third campaign, which turned into a 3-4 year project and we went from 1st to 15th or 16th level, we had dragons at some point. Again, as with the giants in my first campaign, I opted for an unorthodox solution.
We didn't introduce dragons at first. It was supposed to be a low-magic few magic items gritty realism world, so such creatures had no business there. My character was a Japanese or Chinease warrior ("Zanthian" to be exact, an imaginary country we had), Zanthian noble (same as Waterdavian) barbarian - he was a refined noble the entire time, except in combat he went into an Emptiness or Void state of mind, which we treated as Rage.
We were visiting his hometown (rotating DM-s) and I literally designed one encounter after the dragon fight scene in 47 ronin. The party just killed an evil necromancer, who was a brother of the good high level cleric. Well, they didn't expect they both have a niece who didn't know the entire story except the party killed one of her uncles, so she lured them to a remote location.
It turns out the 5 Zanthian noble families stole, bought or traded the secret of dragonkind at the dawn of their nation. Unlike the natural dragons (chromatic), the metallic dragons are only five. Only one reincarnation manifests in a family and the size of the dragon depends on how long that person has been aware that he or she is the incarnate, and how long has trained to control the dragon form.
She was the Gold dragon, the their house, Wu, was the most powerful and in charge of religion in the city. I suppose they bought the secret in gold.
Another house had the Silver dragon, and they were negotiators. I suppose they bought it in silver.
The house of naval trade were half-thieves, half-pirates and had the Copper dragon. They got it really cheap!
My character was from the military family (barbarians!) and they had the Bronze dragon. So I suppose their ancestor won the secret by force and military strategy!
I think we swapped the last dragons for Mercury! Needless to say that house were politicians and schemers. They were the last to obtain the secret of the dragonkind, obviously!
We later had fun in PeiPei's kitchen, a pocket dimension where PeiPei, the Uranium dragon was locked away for being too dangerous!
How do you use dragons in your games?