Designing and Using Dragons [Fantasy]

[Frost]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I was just wondering how people design and use dragons for their campaigns? Are dragons usually a monster-of-the-week for your PCs, the Big Bad, or something in between?

I prefer running low fantasy, with a few heroic fantasy elements thrown in, so I tend to treat them as animals rather than characters.

Having said that I don't usually treat them as monster-of-the-week fodder (that is what human mooks or non-violent antagonists are for), dragons tend to be significant both in terms of how difficult they are to deal with and what they represent. Since I came back to running fantasy campaigns dragons have become a sort of shorthand for wilderness and chaos. Encountering a dragon tends to be a portent of other plot events or a tool for something bigger.

Physically my current treatment of dragons somewhat take after versions from early western myths i.e. snakes with limbs although I have adopted the distinction between larger flightless species (drakes) and smaller flying species (wyverns).

Drakes are typically forrest or swamp dwelling ambush predators weighing in between 400 and 2500 lb with most being somewhere toward the upper part of that range. Most show more or less canine levels of intelligence (IQ 4) although I have dropped a smart (IQ6) drake on my players.

Wyverns range between 90lb and the high hundreds and show similar behaviour to ground feeding birds of prey although there have been cases where I had them acting like chasers. Tend to high intelligence (IQ 5 or 6). Wyverns have no prefered habitat and live anywhere large concentrations of humans aren't except glaciers and high mountains.

Both varieties are thick skinned (DR 1 or 2) and venomous with poisoned fangs and spurs on the rear legs.