A Most Dangerous Library

 

This... actually kinda exists in one of my campaigns.

One of the new cool things in the 5e MM is that green dragons don't just hoard art, they hoard *artists.*  So I had a green dragon obsessed with books.  His name was Namzugingal, but most called him Vermillion.  His library was rumored to be the largest in the world, and his slave-librarians could find the answer to nearly any question... if you were brave enough to dare Vermillion's lair to ask them.

What the Arkenstone Can Do For You

The PCs are finally geared up (or angry enough) to take on the dragon! It's gonna be a big event in your campaign (because: DRAGON!!!) and you want the treasure hoard to be worthy of it. How do you make it something truly special without making it stupidly huge? How can you make quality compensate for the fact that you're not actually giving your players literal hillocks and ravines of coinage?

 Here are some suggestions for things that have served me well over the years:

History

The dragon hoard par excellence is probably still Smaug’s, and it’s heaped with the story of the dwarvish kingdoms and their alliances and rivalries with their neighbors. Describing the treasure is one of the few times you have the undivided attention of everyone at the table, so it’s a great time to sprinkle (not dump) some exposition on your players. Coins bearing the face and name of the second Warlock-emperor of the Melechan dynasty (worth ten times their mere weight value to collectors), arrows crafted by elven fletchers to slay the Arch-lich Kazshet, or the gilded toe-bone of the poet-scholar St. Gweniach will draw a lot more attention to the history of your setting than any dry dissertation by long-bearded scholars or sleepy ents. Focus on bits of history that are or will be important to your campaign’s current events, and especially the active interests of your players and their PCs.

Danger

Smaug’s hoard contains the Arkenstone, a wondrous gemstone that bears more than a passing resemblance to the doom-fraught Sillmarils. Perhaps the Temple of the Risen Sun doesn’t think a reliquary of St. Gweniach belongs in the hands of murderhobos. Perhaps Kazshet’s agents infiltrated the circle of elven fletchers to add a curse to the enchanted arrows. Perhaps, as with the Arkenstone, there are cultural or personal or political ramifications to the ownership of some of that treasure. One of the things that makes The Hobbit stand out from generic fantasy fare is that there are exciting and fascinating consequences to the slaying of Smaug. So it can be with the dragons in your campaign.

Something Personal

This is a great time to make callbacks to the backgrounds of the PCs or events that happened earlier in the campaign. The paladin’s great-grandfather’s sword doesn’t need to be in the hoard, but there might be a sword that’s marked with the rune of a company of knights he once rode with, or the champion’s prize from a tourney the great-grandfather competed in. There might be a treatise on abjuration magic written by the wizard who was a mentor to the wizard PC’s teacher. There might be some piece of jewelry or other objet d’art that a villain vanquished by the PCs early in their careers sent as tribute or bribe to the dragon. Callbacks like this are a great way to make the players feel like their characters fit into the setting.

The Dragons of Doom & Tea Parties

Rules Magis at Gamers Closet wants to know:

So I have a question. Not sure if it is that fact that I have been playing WOW, the book I am reading or the current campaign I am playing in. But dragons seem to be vastly different from one setting to another. Some are the King Arthur type of a foul beast to be slain by a knight on a quest; some are the invincible all knowing creatures of legend like in the Raymond Fiest books and others are the mounts and servants of Dragon Lords.

Dragons have been important to me for a very long time. I can certainly see the benefit in treating them as just another monster on the list. However, in what I assume is a similar way in which some folks believe that fighting the gods is anathema, I really can't treat dragons as just more fodder for higher-level combats.

So dragons hold a central place in my Doom & Tea Parties campaign. Their nature is something that has been building in my campaigns over time, drawing from many sources, some literary, some mythological, with a pinch of pop-culture. As the eldest children of Tiamat, they are chthonian creatures, almost forces of nature. They are sadistically playful in the manner of cats, primal in their instincts and assumptions, and extremely self-centered. They are scions of primal chaos, and, as such, unpredictable, unreliable, and untamable in the long run.

Each is unique; there is not a race of blue dragons, but a blue dragon. They come in a wide variety of colors and combinations, and no, they are not coded for player convenience. To slay a dragon, which is sometimes necessary, is to destroy something that the world will never see again.

There is a spiritual aspect to this as well. There is a conservation of souls at work in my current campaign. Even without spells, a soul will eventually reincarnate (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with my own personal beliefs, but works really well with the spiritual geography of my campaign). Myth says that the first life of every soul is as a dragon. While they are certainly not on any endangered species list, there are noticeably fewer now than there were in the past. The death of the last dragon will mark the beginning of the end of Creation.