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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Estlor" data-source="post: 2721126" data-attributes="member: 7261">Everyone assumes, and I can't say incorrectly, that a fight with a dragon automatically equals going at it sword and spell to claw and breath in the dragon's environment in a winner-take-all situation.  That's a stirring visual from fantasy, be it Bilbo and the dwarves in the Hobbit or Ashram and his cronies in Record of Lodoss War.  But let me tell you about the most memorable dragon fight a party of mine ever had.I had a couple of new players in the party so I was going against type and DMing in the Forgotten Realms.  (Normally I DM Mystara fairly exclusively, but I figured with two newbs I'd use a setting my other two players were very familiar with, that way they could help with setting questions.)  I had the party set up as confidants of a minor noble forging a domain of his own up in the Silver Marches.  They were doing a cross-country run around Anuroch (and please forgive me, I don't have place names memorized for FR like I do the Known World) and were going through that big forest where there's kind of a war between the elves and the druid brewing.  Anyway, they decided the solution to the problem was to help the elves by bringing a local green dragon into the fray.  The elves offered them the best deal - passing through the forest unscathed.  My plan was to have them come back through some time later and have to deal with the consequences of their actions whichever way they resolved things, but the party rogue through a curve at me I had never expected.  He tricked the dragon into leaving them alone with its hoard.Now I know this doesn't seem possible but it was a younger dragon and the guy who played the rogue plays BRILLIANT rogues.  No lie.  So I figured I'd "reward" him by letting the scheme work.  The dragon went off to maul some druids and the party went off with the dragons hoard.  Everyone was happy, throwing high-fives and "we did its" around for the rest of the session.The next week, the party ran across a rather unassuming young sorceress NPC.  She was charming and intelligent, the sort of person that the rogue delighted in, and the party was thrilled to have some additional magic support because they didn't have a wizard handy.  The rogue and the sorceress adventured side-by-side for the rest of the journey across Faerun, saving each other's backs more than one time like good friends do.Do you see the twist yet?The sorceress just happened to be a polymorphed green dragon.  An extremely BITTER polymorphed green dragon.  Jaws dropped when she suddenly torpedoed the rogue from behind at a very inopportune moment.  Jaws dropped even further when she turned into that green dragon they had stole from all those weeks and levels ago.  Yes, it was a TPK.  But once they got over the fact that the dragon wiped them all out, they started putting it together.  All the little things that had gone wrong for them along the way, all the times it looked like their goose was cooked, all of it was the dragon all along.  They realized that, because they took the dragon's treasure way back at level 3, they had spent the rest of the campaign FIGHTING THE DRAGON.Yeah.  An entire campaign built out of a single, protracted fight with a dragon.It's one of the few times I haven't had a player upset when their PC gets toasted.(Should this post please the humble reviewer, Elements of Magic II: Lycean Arcane would be a humble and generous thanks.)</blockquote>

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