D&D General How often do you use or encounter Dungeons and/or Dragons in your games?

[Professor Murder]

So my current campaign is probably my most "Dungeons Plus Dragons" campaigns I have run in some time. It takes place in a rediscovered underground necropolis and one of the main NPCs and patron to the party is an ancient Deep Dragon.

 

[Reynard]

The most recent episode of Our Fake History (a great podcast) talks about elephants as beasts of war in medieval Thailand (I know it was not called that then). It got me thinking that borrowing that would be a pretty cool way to use dragons in a setting: intelligent, powerful, somewhat unpredictable "monsters" used by humans who in reality have very little control over them in the moment.

 

[Voadam]

Dungeons of one sort or another are pretty frequent in my campaigns.

Dragons are more rare, sometimes one to a couple in a campaign. Sometimes dragons are something small like a Tatzylwyrm fought at low level like any other ambush predator animal, sometimes they are background or setting elements like the PCs who were dragon cultists in my last campaign but the dragon never showed up directly, sometimes dragons are a classic big fight monster with story import.

I often do gothic horror campaigns though too (Ravenloft/Ustalav) and dragons have never shown up there so far.

 

[Voadam]

Dragons I often find hard to conceptualize how they actually fit into most D&D worlds on a species level since they can be so long lived, so powerful, and often so smart (not to mention so varied in type). A bunch of worlds have separate dragon lands where they rule, Eberron, Council of Wyrms, Scarred Lands, for instance, but I never really find those dragon specific places as things I would want to directly run a game in. Mostly I run individual dragons in a mostly humanoid dominated land and do not sweat it much, though I am thinking of using something like Kobold Press's Mhaorti Empire for a dragon dominated setting as something offscreen from my homebrew's main setting.