This post is about
dragons. It’s about a lot of things, but to start with it’s about dragons. The
thing is, despite being the iconic
D&D creature (right there in the name and everything), they’re kind of
boring.
 |
| Smarter than the party wizard and he's still just a big bag of XP. |
Of course, part of that
is on the DM—a dragon (and any other NPC) is only as interesting as the DM
makes them, but I feel like the default position of dragons in the D&D
world doesn’t give us a lot to work with. They’re supposed to be solitary, and
they sit on treasure for some reason. I understand that this has its origins in
folklore and fantasy literature, but I feel like this does a disservice to
D&D dragons. It reduces them to monsters
when they should be characters.
Am I making sense? I
very often don’t. From what I’ve seen based on my own experience and reading
about other people’s campaigns online, overarching villains tend to be
humanoids—evil elf wizards and the like. And as soon as the PCs are high enough
level to start kicking serious butt, they go plane shifting to take on demons
and devils. Even at mid-level, Fourth Edition seems to assume we’ll have the
PCs kicking around in the Feywild and the Shadowfell. So despite being the Dragons of Dungeons & Dragons,
dragons amount to one-off adventures. You hack through their minions in their
lair, slay them on their pile of treasure, grab their stuff and then pop back
to the Feywild or wherever for the real adventure.
It seems like a waste.
Dragons are extremely powerful, extremely intelligent
and supposedly ambitious. Why do they all sit around collecting stuff when
they could be out conquering the world? And if dragons banded together they’d
be unstoppable.
Meanwhile, I should confess that I've never really made my own campaign setting, and it's something I've always thought I should at least try. I read about those DMs with binders (it's always binders) full of homebrewed setting lore that makes the Forgotten Realms canon look succinct, and as cool as that sounds (I probably have a warped sense of what "cool" is) I've always just rejiggered the Points of Light setting for my campaigns. So I'm going to at least attempt a proper campaign setting, using the idea of a dragon empire as the jumping-off point.
I will also say that
when I read about Arkhosia in the 4e Points of Light setting, I immediately
thought it would be cooler if instead of being a Dragonborn empire, it was a
full-on Dragon empire. So while I’m trying to forge my own setting in these
posts, I’ll admit that a lot might be borrowed from Points of Light. I may also
be influenced by Chris Perkins’ Iomandra setting. Also also, I haven’t read
Council of Wyrms, but I’ve heard of it
and some of what I come up with for this might have filtered in from my limited
knowledge of that. I realize I’m not the first person to come up with a dragon
empire setting idea, and I’m okay with that. There's probably another zillion that I haven't even heard of. First of all, I’d be interested in
seeing what I do with this broad premise that other people haven’t (if
anything). Also, I see these blog posts as an exercise, not an attempt at a
legit, publishable campaign setting, and borrowing from existing campaign
material is part of the process of DMing D&D. I just want that out of the
way so nobody thinks I’m pretending to be original where I’m not. If it turns out I don't have an original bone in my body I'll just call this project my "homebrew version of Points of Light" or whatever.
So, check back here for
more Let’s Build a World posts as I cobble together an attempt at my own campaign setting, and feel free to offer your own suggestions in
the comments.
Next time: Ground Rules.
No comments:
Post a Comment