Dragons: for a being named after them, our own games rarely feature them. Here's a way to highlight one of them that you can use right out of the box!
Dragonslaying is a particularly common hobby for our archetypal adventuring groups. Not common enough, if you ask me. Too often, regardless of your edition, it becomes an exercise in fiddly bits: scads of spells, unique powers, multiple rolls, complex math. When it’s not too fiddly, it’s often too simplistic: massive dragons go down the same way every other monster does. Okay, it might have slightly more hit points or a tougher AC, but roll high enough, and it’ll go down just the same. A dragon flies too fast to catch up with, or dies from some death magic.
So what I’m going to do here is take one monster, and put it through its paces to design an encounter that you’d be proud to run out-of-the-box. With the complexity and depth that befits a massive, central creature, but also with all the details right where you need them. So come on along, and I’ll put you through the paces. I’ll be doing this in 4e because of math, but the basic principles can apply to any edition.
A Brief Mythopoetry
In most of my mythopoetry articles, I’m interested basically in two things: what the strong themes of the creature are, and how to bring them out in the mechanics of the game. This is the first step in designing any meaningful encounter for me: I need to understand what I want to come across in this particular moment, with this creature.
For a white dragon, the main themes I’m identifying have to do with its bestial, animalistic mentality in combination with its ability to move over ice, and its ability to call up vicious winter weather. This is a creature who represents the primal fury of a blizzard, the savage, howling wind and the bitter, biting cold. This gives me three basic elements to work with:
I’ll want to make sure these things appear in play, that the PC’s interact with them, to convey the effect of a dragon that is at home in the wintery wastelands, wields weather like a weapon, and enjoys the thrill of the hunt.
The scale of this thing should be huge. It’s supposed to be a major, epic encounter, so not only will it be with a big creature, it’ll be big in terms of resources. Let us use the “4 Elements” to make this encounter TREMENDOUS: worth, say, 5 regular 4e D&D encounters, an entire day’s encounters in one big battle.
This means I’ll need to key in ways for the PC’s to spend healing surges and recover encounter powers, as if they’re taking up to 5 short rests, and I think I may have a way to do that. This is also independent of the thing’s level. Lets set this at Level 4, just to put it snugly in Heroic tier.
Stat The Scene
We know we want this encounter to be about the battlefield, too: the howling blizzard and the slick glacier. So we’ll just set it there: it takes place on a precarious, cracking glacier that overhangs a cliff, during a wild blizzard that is controlled by the dragon.
If I was to box-text it…
The biting wind tears at your clothing, sucking the heat from your body and ripping it to shreds. Flakes of ice and snow blow against you, coating you in heavy, wet drifts. The snow generated by the blizzard doesn’t stay long on the icy surface you carefully tread on, skittering over it and tumbling down the frequent cracks and crevasses. Some of these openings are big enough to swallow you up, and though you tread carefully on the uneven ice, you know that your ledge is a precarious one: one wrong move will drop you hundreds of feet, beyond sight of this land, and to your ultimate doom. Your legs are unsteady beneath you, the wind shakes you in your armor, and you can see, once in a while, through the howling gale, a pale blue reptilian eye, staring at you, hungry.
That’s all well and good, but how does this stuff actually matter in play? Well, we don’t want PC’s to die randomly from falling off of cliffs, but we do want falling off of cliffs to be a real and present danger, one that the party needs to actually deal with on a round-to-round basis. We’re using the rules for fighting colossal creatures, so we don’t need to worry about specific squares – the battlefield is going to be abstract, theater-of-the-mind style. So let’s say this:
Rule #1: Slipping and Sliding
At the end of a character’s turn, where that character moved their maximum speed (or more) during the this round, Icy Terrain makes a Reflex attack (+7), targeting that character. On a hit, the character falls pone, and must spend a Healing Surge to avoid falling to their death. If you are out of healing surges, take your Surge Value in damage instead (this cannot be reduced in any way). If you cannot spend your Surge Value in HP, you fall to your death.
The glacier does contain zones where the traction isn’t so bad, and the cracks are not so frequent. In order to find these zones, you must make a DC 16 skill check as a standard action. Success means you can move without becoming a target for the Icy Terrain. Skills such as Nature, Athletics, and Acrobatics are especially relevant. If you are trained in one of these relevant skills, and make 4 checks, you don’t have to make any more checks: you’ve found a safe enough zone that you can move without trouble. A character not trained in one of the relevant skills can find the zone, too, but it takes them 6 checks. A character can also make checks on their turn to count as a success for another character (ie: a character can make a check to find themselves safe ground, or to help someone else find safe ground), even after they’ve found safe ground.
Once every party member overcomes the Icy Terrain, the party has found common ground, and each party member gains the benefits of a Short Rest.
The slightly abstract nature of 4e’s HP works in our favor, here. We say: “Die or spend a surge” to represent hanging on by your nails, skidding to a sudden stop, or anchoring yourself briefly with your blade. It’s a cost, an effort, but not really a wound or an injury. It exhausts you, but it doesn’t kill you…unless you run out of surges.
In the math, this is roughly equivalent to “getting hit.” So what we have here is a monster: it attacks the players, and deals damage (that damage is a healing surge, but it works out roughly the same). It has a particularly nasty little special ability: when it kills a PC, that PC doesn’t get death saves. They’re just dead. Maybe if you were feeling generous the rest of the party could find the body afterwards.
Because this is essentially a monster, we want the PC’s to be able to overcome it, to “kill” it: thus, the skill checks. As a standard action, they’re essentially an “attack,” with “striker” characters being those trained in the particularly relevant skills. Because each character needs to “slay” their own Icy Terrain, this essentially counts as one monster per PC, IE: one full encounter. Thus, when no one is worried about it anymore, the party gains benefits as if they had overcome an encounter. This represents the rush and flood of victory, a huge achievement that gives the party the ability to keep soldiering on: they no longer have to worry about falling to their deaths at all. This also encourages characters to help each other, and to spend time on this, rather than just trying to ignore it.
We can use the same general idea to represent the blizzard:
Rule #2: Sound and Fury
At the end of a character’s turn, the Howling Blizzard makes a Fortitude attack (+7), targeting any one character. If the character is resistant to Cold damage, they get a +2 bonus to defenses against this attack. On a hit, the character is blinded until the end of their next turn, and loses a healing surge. If you can’t lose a surge, you take damage equal to your Surge Value. If this reduces you to 0 hp, you begin dying of exposure.
The blizzard is an effect a character can learn to shrug off. Doing this involves making a DC 16 skill check as a standard action. Success means you cannot be a target for the Howling Blizzard until the end of your next turn. Skills such as Nature, Endurance, and Perception are especially relevant. If you are trained in one of these relevant skills, and make 4 checks, you don’t have to make any more checks: you’ve learned to work with the blizzard, anticipating its movements. A character not trained in one of the relevant skills can develop this, too, but it takes them 6 checks. A character can also make checks on their turn to count as a success for another character (ie: a character can make a check to learn to negotiate the blizzard, or to help another character do the same), even after they’ve learned to shelter themselves from the blizzard.
Once every party member overcomes the Howling Blizzard, the clouds part, revealing a shimmering sun that reflects off the ice in a diamond sparkle, and each party member gains the benefits of a Short Rest.
Only the Beginning
I’ve run out of word-count a bit sooner than expected, so I’ll have to stat out the dragon itself (and the associated “animalistic savagery”) some other time. Still, I promised you a complete day’s worth of dragon all in one combat, and I’m here to deliver. You’ve got 2 encounters above and, with a standard LV4 4e white dragon as a solo, you’ve got 3, so here’s a quick-and-dirty way to get two more:
Rule #3: Bloodied Environment
When the white dragon becomes bloodied and uses its breath weapon again, it creates another Howling Blizzard and another Icy Terrain. If the previous versions of these exist, the characters can be attacked by more than one.
…which should send the fight out with a bang, if the characters have been lax in getting rid of the environmental effects. Now they may attack twice per round!
There is obviously more to follow next week. For now, what do you think about this? Would you ever use an encounter like this in your games? What would you improve? What works really well? Let me know down in the comments!
Dragonslaying is a particularly common hobby for our archetypal adventuring groups. Not common enough, if you ask me. Too often, regardless of your edition, it becomes an exercise in fiddly bits: scads of spells, unique powers, multiple rolls, complex math. When it’s not too fiddly, it’s often too simplistic: massive dragons go down the same way every other monster does. Okay, it might have slightly more hit points or a tougher AC, but roll high enough, and it’ll go down just the same. A dragon flies too fast to catch up with, or dies from some death magic.
So what I’m going to do here is take one monster, and put it through its paces to design an encounter that you’d be proud to run out-of-the-box. With the complexity and depth that befits a massive, central creature, but also with all the details right where you need them. So come on along, and I’ll put you through the paces. I’ll be doing this in 4e because of math, but the basic principles can apply to any edition.
A Brief Mythopoetry
In most of my mythopoetry articles, I’m interested basically in two things: what the strong themes of the creature are, and how to bring them out in the mechanics of the game. This is the first step in designing any meaningful encounter for me: I need to understand what I want to come across in this particular moment, with this creature.
For a white dragon, the main themes I’m identifying have to do with its bestial, animalistic mentality in combination with its ability to move over ice, and its ability to call up vicious winter weather. This is a creature who represents the primal fury of a blizzard, the savage, howling wind and the bitter, biting cold. This gives me three basic elements to work with:
- An animalistic, savage, predatory mindset
- A wild blizzard, with howling winds and driving snow
- A precarious glacier, slick and steep-sided, where one could slip and fall and slide just a few feet…and into a gap that drops them to their doom.
I’ll want to make sure these things appear in play, that the PC’s interact with them, to convey the effect of a dragon that is at home in the wintery wastelands, wields weather like a weapon, and enjoys the thrill of the hunt.
The scale of this thing should be huge. It’s supposed to be a major, epic encounter, so not only will it be with a big creature, it’ll be big in terms of resources. Let us use the “4 Elements” to make this encounter TREMENDOUS: worth, say, 5 regular 4e D&D encounters, an entire day’s encounters in one big battle.
This means I’ll need to key in ways for the PC’s to spend healing surges and recover encounter powers, as if they’re taking up to 5 short rests, and I think I may have a way to do that. This is also independent of the thing’s level. Lets set this at Level 4, just to put it snugly in Heroic tier.
We know we want this encounter to be about the battlefield, too: the howling blizzard and the slick glacier. So we’ll just set it there: it takes place on a precarious, cracking glacier that overhangs a cliff, during a wild blizzard that is controlled by the dragon.
If I was to box-text it…
The biting wind tears at your clothing, sucking the heat from your body and ripping it to shreds. Flakes of ice and snow blow against you, coating you in heavy, wet drifts. The snow generated by the blizzard doesn’t stay long on the icy surface you carefully tread on, skittering over it and tumbling down the frequent cracks and crevasses. Some of these openings are big enough to swallow you up, and though you tread carefully on the uneven ice, you know that your ledge is a precarious one: one wrong move will drop you hundreds of feet, beyond sight of this land, and to your ultimate doom. Your legs are unsteady beneath you, the wind shakes you in your armor, and you can see, once in a while, through the howling gale, a pale blue reptilian eye, staring at you, hungry.
That’s all well and good, but how does this stuff actually matter in play? Well, we don’t want PC’s to die randomly from falling off of cliffs, but we do want falling off of cliffs to be a real and present danger, one that the party needs to actually deal with on a round-to-round basis. We’re using the rules for fighting colossal creatures, so we don’t need to worry about specific squares – the battlefield is going to be abstract, theater-of-the-mind style. So let’s say this:
Rule #1: Slipping and Sliding
At the end of a character’s turn, where that character moved their maximum speed (or more) during the this round, Icy Terrain makes a Reflex attack (+7), targeting that character. On a hit, the character falls pone, and must spend a Healing Surge to avoid falling to their death. If you are out of healing surges, take your Surge Value in damage instead (this cannot be reduced in any way). If you cannot spend your Surge Value in HP, you fall to your death.
The glacier does contain zones where the traction isn’t so bad, and the cracks are not so frequent. In order to find these zones, you must make a DC 16 skill check as a standard action. Success means you can move without becoming a target for the Icy Terrain. Skills such as Nature, Athletics, and Acrobatics are especially relevant. If you are trained in one of these relevant skills, and make 4 checks, you don’t have to make any more checks: you’ve found a safe enough zone that you can move without trouble. A character not trained in one of the relevant skills can find the zone, too, but it takes them 6 checks. A character can also make checks on their turn to count as a success for another character (ie: a character can make a check to find themselves safe ground, or to help someone else find safe ground), even after they’ve found safe ground.
Once every party member overcomes the Icy Terrain, the party has found common ground, and each party member gains the benefits of a Short Rest.
The slightly abstract nature of 4e’s HP works in our favor, here. We say: “Die or spend a surge” to represent hanging on by your nails, skidding to a sudden stop, or anchoring yourself briefly with your blade. It’s a cost, an effort, but not really a wound or an injury. It exhausts you, but it doesn’t kill you…unless you run out of surges.
In the math, this is roughly equivalent to “getting hit.” So what we have here is a monster: it attacks the players, and deals damage (that damage is a healing surge, but it works out roughly the same). It has a particularly nasty little special ability: when it kills a PC, that PC doesn’t get death saves. They’re just dead. Maybe if you were feeling generous the rest of the party could find the body afterwards.
Because this is essentially a monster, we want the PC’s to be able to overcome it, to “kill” it: thus, the skill checks. As a standard action, they’re essentially an “attack,” with “striker” characters being those trained in the particularly relevant skills. Because each character needs to “slay” their own Icy Terrain, this essentially counts as one monster per PC, IE: one full encounter. Thus, when no one is worried about it anymore, the party gains benefits as if they had overcome an encounter. This represents the rush and flood of victory, a huge achievement that gives the party the ability to keep soldiering on: they no longer have to worry about falling to their deaths at all. This also encourages characters to help each other, and to spend time on this, rather than just trying to ignore it.
We can use the same general idea to represent the blizzard:
Rule #2: Sound and Fury
At the end of a character’s turn, the Howling Blizzard makes a Fortitude attack (+7), targeting any one character. If the character is resistant to Cold damage, they get a +2 bonus to defenses against this attack. On a hit, the character is blinded until the end of their next turn, and loses a healing surge. If you can’t lose a surge, you take damage equal to your Surge Value. If this reduces you to 0 hp, you begin dying of exposure.
The blizzard is an effect a character can learn to shrug off. Doing this involves making a DC 16 skill check as a standard action. Success means you cannot be a target for the Howling Blizzard until the end of your next turn. Skills such as Nature, Endurance, and Perception are especially relevant. If you are trained in one of these relevant skills, and make 4 checks, you don’t have to make any more checks: you’ve learned to work with the blizzard, anticipating its movements. A character not trained in one of the relevant skills can develop this, too, but it takes them 6 checks. A character can also make checks on their turn to count as a success for another character (ie: a character can make a check to learn to negotiate the blizzard, or to help another character do the same), even after they’ve learned to shelter themselves from the blizzard.
Once every party member overcomes the Howling Blizzard, the clouds part, revealing a shimmering sun that reflects off the ice in a diamond sparkle, and each party member gains the benefits of a Short Rest.
Only the Beginning
I’ve run out of word-count a bit sooner than expected, so I’ll have to stat out the dragon itself (and the associated “animalistic savagery”) some other time. Still, I promised you a complete day’s worth of dragon all in one combat, and I’m here to deliver. You’ve got 2 encounters above and, with a standard LV4 4e white dragon as a solo, you’ve got 3, so here’s a quick-and-dirty way to get two more:
Rule #3: Bloodied Environment
When the white dragon becomes bloodied and uses its breath weapon again, it creates another Howling Blizzard and another Icy Terrain. If the previous versions of these exist, the characters can be attacked by more than one.
…which should send the fight out with a bang, if the characters have been lax in getting rid of the environmental effects. Now they may attack twice per round!
There is obviously more to follow next week. For now, what do you think about this? Would you ever use an encounter like this in your games? What would you improve? What works really well? Let me know down in the comments!
