MonkeyWrench
Explorer
I had my council take place in the cloud mansion of the gold dragon delegate; the place was staffed with contsructs and lesser celestials.
I'm thinking about having them spot the dwarves with their captured cultist on the way.
Exactly!The core problems seem to be:
* How do you make the scene fun for the players?
* How do you communicate what the Dragons want, without a really mechanical 'go up to NPC, hit use, and then listen to canned speech'?
* How do you make it more than just a long walk to a simple conversation?
* How do the NPCs' requests become more than just 'make Persuasion roll'?
I really like this.For all of these, it seems to me that you almost want to have the Dragons first meet the players collectively, setting out the basic thoughts of the council, then have them each withdraw to a separate 'room', with further conversations between the players and each Dragon at that point. When you're not trying to juggle 5 or more NPCs in the same conversation, it should be much easier to then have their desires and personalities come through. Contests of skill and morality, like the Copper Dragon mentioned above, also appeal; perhaps the Brass (are they the warlike ones?) wants a demonstration that the players can win the battle, through the medium of a chess game or whatever, while the Gold will interrogate the party in a word association game to see how they view the world (and thus learn their morality). Ideally, I'd want this to be a full session by itself, so that it assumed the importance that suggests, and I'd also want enough encounters on the way to get there to make the whole thing feel like an ordeal.
It's an interesting idea, but I'd be wary of using it in this campaign, considering that the final battle takes place in a dragon graveyard (the Well of Dragons).For the meeting place, I'd be tempted by a Dragon Graveyard. Could be contrary to expectations (instead of lofty palaces and harps, they get arid wind and the buzzing of flies), and might help to add a serious tone to affairs. An implicit question - 'why risk joining our revered ancestors on your behalf'? - that would make the players think. It might be a bit too heavy though, and risk setting the Good Dragons in the role of antagonists in the players' minds.
Maybe cut the Thay chapter (also suffers from lack of space) entirely and put the whole page count into the Dragon Council, doing a robust job on it? One well-done highlight of the campaign, instead of two anemic under-formed ideas competing for limited resources.If I had it to do over, I'd try to squeeze two more pages for this chapter out of somewhere else--I think two pages would just about do it justice--though I have no idea off the top of my head where they'd come from.