I’ve rolled up what’s at the end of my #dungeon23 megadungeon: A Dragon
In all honesty, my initial reaction was to roll again--I had a lot of really fun weird options on that table, and a Dragon feels like it may have been the most beige entry on the list. Wizards, Devils, and Gods can do some serious unhinged scenery-chewing, legendary monsters like dracula or echidna have their own strange powers and motivations that can be real fun, but what does a dragon have? They have fire breath, which can kill things. They’re big and have hard scales, which makes them hard to kill. Their stereotypical motivation is just material greed. They’re just big strong monsters.
My second result: A Dragon. The dice really wanted me to do this one.
Okay, so what’s interesting about dragons? They’re strong--really strong. What does that mean, for a location to be built around a being that’s so strong nobody can oppose them?
Here’s my take: A dragon is, inherently, a sovereign. Not a fake sovereign, like a human king, who has to carefully maintain the loyalty of the nobility and a military, manufacture consent to be ruled from the peasants, and worry about diplomacy with neighboring societies--a dragon genuinely answers to nobody but themselves. They are royalty, personified--a born absolute monarch.
The thing is, most dungeons are built in a way that limits the strength of their ultimate rulers. If Orcus is at the bottom of your megadungeon, he’s basically trapped down there--he isn’t waltzing up to the upper levels and doing as he pleases. A gigantic whale-sized dragon at the bottom of a dungeon feels trapped and powerless, but a dragon minus their ability to do what they want just becomes a scary but straightforward combat encounter.
I was already considering this, but I think I might use #dungeon23 to make a tiny hex map instead of one 12-level dungeon. The hex component would be pretty small, one month worth of hexes at a maximum, but the ‘one room a day’ work I’d be doing would be for a series of interrelated smaller dungeons, not one gigantic megadungeon. This would let me treat the dragon as the ‘source’ of everything weird going on in the hex, but not lock them away 12-layers deep.
Second take: A dragon is greed made flesh, a creature that wants to hoard valuables and sleep on the pile. They see what others possess and have the natural response: that should be mine. Think of Tolkien’s dragon-sickness. Also, think of normal D&D adventurer types--the motivations are pretty much identical.
Well, let’s see what the next few rolls give us. To decide what direction to take this I’ll make a table of Types of Dragons, trying to get a whole bunch of both Sovereign Power and Bottomless Greed entries, as well as a few wildcard ideas.
What’s the deal with this dragon?
1: The dragon is so powerful and so uninterested in ruling that they create a permanent power vacuum under them.
2: The dragon revels in their position as absolute monarch, and rules a Versailles-analogue with a velvet fist.
3: The dragon is head of a family of dragon-nobility, obsessed with their bloodline.
4: The dragon sleeps on the roof of the old ruler's castle, demanding worship & tribute but leaving the bureaucracy intact.
5: The dragon is bored, and intentionally cultivates strangeness to keep themselves amused
6: The dragon is a metaphor/curse. Anyone who possesses the Golden Apple is transformed by their greed into a dragon.
7: The dragon is a lie, made to prop up the authority of a mortal king.
8: The dragon ate a god, and is now uncontrollably remaking existence in the vision of their subconscious.
9: The dragon is Tiamat. Just go all-in on the generic D&Dism.
10: The dragon is greedy for knowledge, and is a classic mad wizard type on a grander scale.
11: The dragon is greedy for worship, and rages against the gods.
12: The dragon is greedy for reality itself, and gnaws at the roots of the world tree.
13: The dragon is a storm of raw nature magic, and their arrival instantly transformed the city into a forest.
14: The dragon is a seasonal natural disaster, awakening periodically to devour everything built since its last rampage.
15: The dragon is greedy for beauty, and their realm is a great and surreal pleasure-palace.
16: The dragon is a glutton, and their lair is an enormous kitchen and larder.
17: The dragon is greedy for talent, and 'collects' poets, artists, sages, and other exceptional types.
18: The dragon is sick, and their sickness is contagious.
19: The dragon is dead, and the dungeon is their corpse.
20: The dragon is a curse, and the curse can only be broken by resurrecting and killing the dragon again.
I rolled twice, hoping to find a fun intersection between two ideas: 17, 18 -- Talent collection and sickness.
I think this dragon is kidnapping/training artists and talents, then using them to create a sort of giant palace-museum in her honor. However, as a dragon, she has a deeply instrumental understanding of art and tends to ruin any project she injects herself into--sometimes with micromanagement, sometimes by turning around and shattering a sculpture with her tail, and sometimes by granting a ‘blessing’ to an artist that drives them mad and turns them into a monster. That’s her sickness--bad taste.
A few other ideas for fitting her into a larger project as the ‘final boss’:
As a anthrophile, she’s a master of shape-changing and polymorphing magic and spends much of her time in mostly-human form.
She has removed her heart and hidden it in a secret dungeon--until that heart is destroyed she’s functionally immortal. This is to counter the fact that, as a queen, physically getting in the same room with her won’t be all that difficult.
She lays a ton of eggs and has huge numbers of dragon-children, with the express intention of weeding out the vast majority of them. Those who disappoint her are magically crafted into ‘works of art’--monsters, traps, items, etc.
She loves adventurers, and has a special ‘show dungeon’ she enjoys dropping them into so that they may delight her court with their skills.
And that’s it for today! Next time I start thinking about what themes/etc she brings to the project.
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