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Here Be Dragons

September 21, 2013 /

If I had to pick a favorite of the traditional D&D dragons, I'd have to say that I like the Silver Dragons. They like to be with humans and even take the form of humans for extended periods of time. It wasn't hard for me to imagine that at least one silver dragon, over time, would have fallen in love with a human and somehow opted to stay human for the life of their beloved. As bloodthirsty as some of the groups were, no one every killed or even attacked a silver dragon.

Having said that, I will always remember the day I borrowed a friend's copy of Best of Dragon 3. With a title like That's Not in the Monster Manual, I skipped everything else and started reading there. Since that time in 1984 (I know it was published in 1983, we were in the middle of nowhere), I have always enjoyed the Gem Dragons.

First off, these guys were neutral. That meant I could have a druid dragon, if I really wanted. More than that, these guys worked out situations for their personal benefit without the cumbersome issue of working for the greater good. When my guys encountered an emerald dragon, it offered information and a bit of treasure in exchange for some information the players had. Later on when they met, the emerald dragon fired on all cylinders because the party had nothing valuable and it wanted its treasure back.

I also enjoyed that, as written, gem dragons were psionic. When the party once arrogantly went after Sardior, the ruby dragon, they were shocked (for some reason) that the dragon was unsuprised by their attack, prepared for their tactics and employed ESP and Clairvoyance to gain a tremendous advantage. I was able to voice something along the lines of the following:

For all you know, I changed my breath weapon just before you got here. You didn't think the leader of the gem dragons would actually be alone, do you? Look up before you die, love, I would so like you to enjoy my handiwork before the trap I laid ends your life.

Dragons are tough enough, but one with a psionic blast is really tough. Without a psionic character, many PCs didn't stand much of a chance.

Nowadays, I play dragons differently. I use E.G. Palmer's Random Unique Dragon Generator to make the dragon. On top of that my dragons use their mouth to deliver any magic spell. It looks like they are using their breath weapon, when in fact, they are casting a spell. This means that all magic-wielding dragons breathe fire, but only because it is a common spell among dragons. When you think about dragons delivering spells like their breath weapons, you can easily come up with some fairly nasty spells that have limited to no use to human Magic-Users.

I also take out an old monster entry from 1984 about Striped Dragons that I wrote. Sometimes the striped dragon looks like a striped dragon, other times it looked more or less like one of its parents. Regardless of its ancestry, though, a striped dragon always had the breath weapon of each parent.

Before signing off for the night, here are some other thoughts on dragons.

  • How Dragons Are Born explains why dragons are so longed lived.
  • Granite and Thunder dragons were created as an alternative to the chromatic or metallic species.
  • One day, I'll even stat the three pearl dragons I mentioned in the Drakkangraal series of posts.

Just for fun, put a dragon you made with the Random Unique Dragon Generator in the comments. I'm curious what we come up with.

Somehow It All Comes Back to the Giants

September 20, 2013 /

As a DM, I loved to provide players the opportunity to play just about anything. In many ways, I think like the gentleman behind this post about his 52 core races.

Because of that, I didn't have many humanoids as monsters. Whenever the random encounter tables would give me something like Bandits, I'd substitute orcs, gnolls, kobolds or ogres, depending on the level of party. Outside of that, I'd have to defer to the world's most interesting DM:

I don't often use humanoids as mosnters, but when I do, I use giants.

When I say use giants, I mean all of them ranging from the Hill Giants to Titans and a few extra ones in-between. To create a surprise for one of my groups, I developed a Swamp Giant. (It was the only place I could think of that didn't have one in the Monster books until the Fog Giant and Mountain Giant appeared in our Fiend Folio.)

Once we got the MMII with the fomorian, firbolg and verbeeg, I realized that I didn't need to define them by their climate. After that, giants with various names appeared in my adventures that were more like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk than anything else. Nothing I enjoyed more than having the big bad turn out to be an evil, intelligent giant.

Anything bigger than a Hill Giant couldn't be softened up much by a dozen henchmen. Anything smarter than an ogre presented an actual challenge: the giant would send ogres with an ogre mage to soften the party up. More powerful ones would send Hill Giants. I even had a magic-slinging Fire Giant use a Storm Giant he had blackmailed as a body guard.

What do you mean the Storm Giant wasn't the one terrorizing the area and threatening the local baron?

So, for your viewing pleasure, I present the original Swamp Giant and his sidekick, a giant nutria and muskrat. The Giant Bain Red Racoon was on the back, but the stats are not complete.

swampgiant

Call Them What You Will They Are Not Elementals

September 19, 2013 /

Sometime ago, I wrote a series of articles about creatures meant to replace elementals. I have nothing against elementals, it was just a thought experiment more than anything. Unaware of the Forgotten Realms for 4e, I called them primordials. Not wishing to interfere with Mr. Greenwood, et al, I'll thought I'd call them astrals for right now. That, of course, creates issues with Wartune.

Right.

Externals? No. Cruxals? No. Outsiders? Six categories of no. Planars? Maybe.

For now, we'll call them Samatalans.

The first one I wrote about were reskinned elementals with details added to explain how they could survive on our world. From there, they became more abstract. Here's a handy list of the traditional elements:

Here's a list of the non-traditional elements:

I didn't include the ice cream elemental, nor the creatures from the plane of letters, but you get the idea.

My favorite from the first list, is the Fire Samatalans. I always like Fire Elementals and would enjoy using these sugar-fearing creatures in any future campaign.

My favorites from the second list of non-traditional elementals, are either to Men of Iron and Stone or the Manus and Pria.

The Men of Iron and Stone, or Menois, are fun visually. They have these floating plates of metal that they can control to their advantage. These plates float on their bodies as if they lay on a sea of stone that appears to be solid and liquid at the same time.

The Manus and Pria are like a Cleric Elemental or something. Creatures make their own children using alchemy in the name of their god. The alchemical creation is not an aberration, but an aim at perfection. The children do not curse their creators, nor do they worship them. I guess they present existential ideas more than anything else.

Hopefully, I'm back on the bandwagon. See you tomorrow.

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