Wednesday, January 28, 2009

A Dragon debate.

I think it's time to mull over the point and purpose of dragons in my Classic game; now, while we're still happily in Red Box territory and before they get to be actual threats.

More to the point, I think I want to replace the old traditionals with a different set of dragons. It might not make a lot of difference aside from flavour; it might make a great deal of difference, I can't really guess right now. But differentiating dragons by something other than colour (elements? biomes? resemblance to other beasts? number of limbs ...?) would make a nice change.

As I skim through my posts here on the ol' blog, it seems to me that -- even though not all of these critters and widgets have seen my game yet, not by a long shot -- they seem to have some thread in common. So, says I, why not work on some dragons to go with that not-quite-articulated theme?


Another small point I've been debating is giving dragons some more obviously related or derived critters associated with them, and also writing up a generic "hatchling" or "dragonet" that happens to be more suitable for low-level parties.

I've been rather taken by the idea that dragons spawn much more than is normally assumed, but only the best and brightest and strongest live long enough to become a true (adult) dragon -- maybe some kind of nifty metamorphosis in involved. Maybe it's almost impossible to guess what type of adult dragon a dragonet will ultimately become, or it's easy to confuse identification ...

Hell, maybe the dragonet gets to make its own decision on the matter, or the metamorphosis is determined by the most frequent environment it lived in.

The flipside of this is the notion of some kind of humanoid servitors or dragon-derived race that doesn't necessarily involve spawning from corrupted eggs (a la draconians) -- although unfertilized eggs, now that could be interesting depending on how one explained it -- or convoluted magical rituals. This one requires more thought.

If I have a few ideas over the weekend, maybe next week will be dragon week ...

1 comment:

Jack Badelaire said...

Neat. I'll be sure to keep poking my head through the door here to see what you come up with.