Memorable Dragons

[freebfrost]

Have you ever fought a Dragon?
How large / old, and what color? (Betting mostly reds, and mostly in the upper age ranges)
Was the encounter built up or was it a surprise?
Was the dragon a cheif villian or a minion?
Did you win?

From a DM's perspective, one of my groups' greatest enemies turned out to be the dragon Flame from Dungeon #1. I adapted him for a few adventures by specifically turning him blue. That's right, he was a red dragon but with blue scales.

All the party's scouting and information gathering prepared them for facing a blue dragon - even up to the point of specifically using lightning protection scrolls for their final combat. And the best part? In the first round of combat Flame used his breath weapon, and the party was up in arms because clearly the dragon's lair was filled with flammable gas that it's lightning breath accidentally ignited!

It wasn't until Flame breathed fire again that the realization set in.

 

[Evilhalfling]

in 2nd ed the players stormed a red dragons mountian, and finally confronted the beast -
evards tentecals held it in place and the hasted paladin and ranger beat it to 5 hp in 2 rounds

The ranger was up and I suggested she was near the ear and it might be a good place to aim arrows. - a natural 20 and the party cheered as the dragon died quickly. I played up the last shot to avoid an anticlimax, and it was celebrated. The CN player secretly hired a tribe of stone giants to retrieve the dragons corpse for armor.

a few months later the party heard that the nation was being invaded by Giants and a great dragon in a chartiot. thousands of peasents fled their homes, creating a great refugee problem, and the Party was asked to go stop the invasion. This was when the player finally admitted what he had done.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Some good stories so far.

The Zardozan dragon is an intresting story, Robert Ranting. I also took my name from that movie. I would suggest though, that the movie is not as bad as Plan 9 from Outer Space.

I like the twist of making the Red Dragon cosmetically blue. It does sound like most of the stories are of fights where the players had some idea that they were about to fight a dragon.

I wonder how often players end up fighting a dragon when they were completely unprepared for it, however.

I think that if I were to customize dragons in any signifigant way, it would be to separate the age and size from one another, so that I could have a draconic villian gain in power with the players.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Zweihänder]

I actually have another dragon to tell a story about. Kind of. Are half-dragons okay? If not, I'll keep this one to myself.

 

[DM_Jeff]

Second Edition days, circa 1997, Forgotten Realms. True Story.

The Unlikely Company goes adventuring in the north. AS a DM I knew of a multitude of plots up there, including the Zhentarim spy dragon Hrondalbar and his human female rider & consort. I made up a random encounter chart for the party, using a d30 for the entries. I put that encounter, worst one of all, as #30.

First day into the north, and I ask one player Scott to roll a d30. He rolls a 30. I smile for a few seconds, end everyone starts getting nervous. "Roll it once more" I asked. He did, and promptly rolled another 30. "Well, it's fate" I said, and began desribing the flight in of the dragon, who they knew of, and knew it wouldn't let them...known foes of the Zhentarim...escape alive. So begins the battle.

It doesn't take long. With a well-place fireball in the second round, one of the players takes out his consort-rider. I decided that triggered the dracorage thing Forgotten Realms used to make 2nd Edition Dragons a real pain in the butt. DOUBLE claw, claw, wing, wing, bite, tail slap, etc. etc. round after round, and in a few more rounds the 10 NPCs the group spent the whole past session and interviewing were slaughtered and half the regular party was in negatives. My wife's resilient diviner Moondown was alive only through a demonpact.

The female consort had a staff of power, IIRC, and one player, Phil, knew what to do. His Bard Torren ran, grabbed the staff as thrown by his wife's barely living character Tallia, and taunted the dragon. It bit him full and hard, dropping him to single digits in one bite. Torren then snapped the staff while in the dragon's mouth. I paused. The table paused. A full horrid 10-20 seconds of silence as all eyes went wide, and I made a horrible squishy-explosion sound and described Torren, and the dragon's head and neck, "visiting the Planescape setting by way of DEATH".

Needless, this story has been retold about 500 times in the intervening years and no doubt gets more glorious as time goes on, but it certainly counts as our group's memorable dragon encounter.

-DM Jeff

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

One of the very first 1e campaigns I ever played in involved a huge ancient red dragon guarding one of Asmodeus' storehouses in Hell. I was playing an anti-Paladin, and one of the class abilities was an innate charm ability. After discussing several plans, my character just strides up to the dragon, spews forth a stream of sickening flattery, and I watch in glee as the DM rolls a 1 on the saving throw. I've never seen a d20 shatter since then (and it was a Gamescience "High Impact" die).

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I actually have another dragon to tell a story about. Kind of. Are half-dragons okay? If not, I'll keep this one to myself.

I am of an open mind on this, as long as the story is better then "this one time, we fought a half dragon, and it was kewl". If you can top that go ahead.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[demiurge1138]

My party of Planescapers had ended up in Greyhawk City by way of the Infinite Staircase, and were delighted to hear rumor of a dragon threatening to burn down a nearby village. They needed a dragon's femur for item-crafting, you see. So they proceeded to the village, got some information about the dragon (it was a young red that looked rather... off) and set towards its lair in the Cairn Hills.

So after a few days of trekking through the hills and forests, the terrain gets rougher, the hills become more like mountains, and the party is soon riding along a rough trail in parallel to a fast moving river. They turn the corner and see a wooden bridge hanging precariously over the rapids. And a huge thorny tree. And impaled on this tree, still alive and faintly moaning and thrashing, are a few deer, a couple of goblins, and a human woman.

And then they hear the sound of huge leathery wings.

They dive into hiding. The horses are panicking, and only a well placed wild empathy keeps them quiet. They peer through the undergrowth and see the impressions of dragon feet in the earth on the far side of the bridge. They see the woman being delicately lifted from the tree. They see her bitten savagely in half. But they do not see the dragon landing, lifting, or biting.

And then, the feeding stops. And it grows quiet. And splinters start to form along the bridge, as if clawed paws were padding across it.

The players and characters both freak out.

The monk thinks quickly and releases the horses, which go stampeding down the trail. The wings begin to flap again, and gouts of flame pierce the forest as the invisible dragon tries to catch its meal. The party races over the bridge, which swings wildly.

And the wings come back. And a gout of flame incinerates the bridge. With the two slower party members on it.

Fortunately, the dragon's turning radius isn't very good, and through luck, skill and a lot of action points being spent, the falling, burnt party members manage to catch a rope and get pulled up to the far side just before the dragon comes back to gobble them up.

And then the party runs. There's a hole in the roots of the feeding tree, leading to a series of goblin warrens. They're not ready yet to fight the dragon, let alone an invisible one in rough terrain. They hear jaws snapping violently just as they're turning the tight, cramped crawlspace, and feel the heat of dragonbreath searing the earth behind them.

Unfortunately, when they actually met the dragon in a head-on, fully prepared confrontation, they killed it with only minimal difficulty. But they still talk about the bridge and the river and the tree.

Demiurge out.

 

[Zweihänder]

I am of an open mind on this, as long as the story is better then "this one time, we fought a half dragon, and it was kewl". If you can top that go ahead.

END COMMUNICATION

Alright, then. In this one campaign that I ran (the same one as with the White Dragon), the bigbad was a half-orc, half-Black Dragon named Serecc the Conquerer. Unlike most half-Dragons, his mother (an Orc sorceress of legendary power) actually forced herself upon a polymorphed dragon (normally, of course, it would be the other way around). Anyway, Serecc was first known as a solid entity after a rather large quest wherein the PCs sought out a few specific relics to complete a ritual which would undo a field of temporal storms that a mummy named Azar Keth had wrought. Following their completion of the ritual, a detachment of Serecc's army (under the command of one of his four elite generals, a Wild Elf Psychic Warrior named Ahalya) moved in and occupied the city. The party dealt with them rather handily, and then set fire to the town. As they fled, they heard Serecc (who arrived at the town moments after they escaped into the brush) release a soul-shattering roar. They would later find out that this was because Ahalya was his adopted daughter.

The party's home base was on a demiplane, connected to the Material Plane by a few doorways that acted as Gates. About 1/3 of the way through the campaign, this demiplane (a Psionics academy, actually) was invaded by Serecc. Their headmaster was slaughtered before their eyes (decapitated with a single swing of Serecc's claws, thanks to his 32 STR), because he would not reveal the location of the Artifact which held the demiplane together: the dread Annulus. He basically tore his way through the academy searching for it, and, eventually, found it. As he claimed it, the demiplane began to destabilize, and everyone decided to cheese it. Serecc was not to keen on that happening, and ended up killing the party's cleric. The cleric, Squall, had almost made it to one of the Gates, when Serecc just hauled off and threw his spear (the Guurgal, from Weapons of Legacy) right through Squall's head. His brain was kind of... missing. A majority of the student body was melted by Serecc's breath weapon over the next few moments, but the party managed to escape, and took Squall's body with them.

Serecc would have been the final boss, but... I kind of achieved a TPK in the boss fight immediately before Serecc. It was a pair of Elf Sorceresses, one Sorc/Rog/Asn, and the other Sorc/Ftr/Eld, and the fight lasted over 3 hours. That was amusing, but not strictly relevant. In the end, Serecc spread a final darkness over the land, and all life was extinguished. He escaped this fate by means of Asmodeus, Lord of the Ninth Circle of Hell, who promoted Serecc to Lord of the Third, and removed him from the Material Plane just as the wave of death started to spread.

The players were kind of mad...

 

[ThirdWizard]

Well, every encounter with a dragon has been memoriable, but the more narrow "because they were a dragon" not being applicable, that narrows it down considerably.

I can think of two or two and a half.

The first was a shadow dragon in Pandemonium back in 2e. The PCs had to steal something from its hoard and it could wipe the floor with them easily, so they had to sneak in, get the item, and sneak out. While there, they kind of woke it up and barely escaped by usinga tunnel to narrow for it to follow, though it gave them a good breath weapon hit for their trouble. They plan to go back eventually.

The other is one and a half. The PCs have fought the dragon's offspring, two young green dragons, and commanders of a large group of kobolds and reptillian ogres. The PCs fought the twin dragons in quite the battle before finally winning the battle. (The pair is, by the way, now a pair of animated skeletons.)

The PCs have to go to where mommy is eventually, and they are quite hesitant. She knows the PCs were the ones responsible for the death of her children, and she will not be forgiving. I expect that session to be quite memorable.