So, it’s summer, '92, you’ve been running AD&D2e’s Dark Sun, for about a year now; the players, have advanced and you’re flipping through the books looking for a monster to challenge them, and you find one: the Dragon of Tyr; you put him in the game, not knowing the canon and he gets defeated.
So, has anyone actually fought the Dragon of Tyr and did they defeat him, ever?
to tell the truth, in my game, the dragon remains rather a myth, a sword of damocles which hovers over each of your movements, something which exceeds you, largely. And if, by misfortune, you should cross his path,… then goodbye friend
so, just considering facing it is like saying you haven’t understood your insignificance
Come to think of it…I’m not sure if any of my groups have even seen the Dragon. I shall have to remedy that to put the real fear in them.
Haven’t fought the dragon yet.
Campaign we are running in has crested 30 and we got the opportunity to have a run in with the Dragon once. We had to bribe him with some of our loot, and be like “oh don’t worry big boss man, we’re not gonna flip the tablelands”. Of course we were a lot more eloquent than that at the time. Its something that has come up a few times, at least I think it has, along with NPCs that are trying to figure out ways to do so.
My character currently has no desire to see the Dragon dead, because … well… he’s the jailer. They don’t want the prisoner to go free.
Never, but when my life allows for it, I will DM a campaign that hopefully concludes at epic levels. The Dragon won’t be a pushover like it was in The Cerulean Storm.
An interesting twist to slaying the Dragon could be that Athas ALWAYS has a dragon. The Dragon is the current holder of the title and powers, and is the slayer (or one of the slayers) of the previous dragon. So if the player characters slay “the Dragon”, one of the PCs then becomes the Dragon in turn. The Dragon however is compelled to drain the life energy of sentient beings; animal life can only sustain the Dragon for a few months before it goes on an insane rage to drain sentient life.
That could be an explanation, if you aren’t using the Rajaat backstory, as to why the Sorcerer Monarchs don’t gang up on the Dragon. None of them want to be a cursed dragon. None of them want to be under the thrall of impulses that they cannot control.
I like that idea. The role of the Dragon is a curse.
The issue would be how to tie that in with maintaining Rajaat’s prison.
While i’m not generally a fan of such non-canon musing…
I’d simply go with the idea that the magics that maintain Rajaat’s prison are on an “autopay”-like setup, automatically refreshing and pulling magical energy at some frequency (say, with each solstice) and that the “curse” of the Dragon is simply a connection to those magics (making someone the “warden” of Rajaat’s prison), with becoming the Dragon being a consequence of the connection to the magics that maintain the prison. The magics draw energy from you and cause the hunger and defiling that make you the Dragon.
And as a fun consequence/twist, if an avangion killed the Dragon, they’d be the perfect permanent warden of the prison (being living generators of magical/life energy), baring their death by violence…
I think the idea of having to fulfill that duty of the Dragon is itself, a curse, but not like a magical one.
One of the problems with the Dragon’s death is that if no one plays the role of the bad guy, collecting those sacrifices falls to, as you noted with the Avangion irony,the one that kills the Dragon.
One of the dark fates of Dark Sun is that even if one could deal with the Dragon, and stop the sacrifices, could the world still handle that many people? People are struggling for food and water as it is. Removing the Dragon and removing the prison sacrifices creates thousands more mouths to feed every year that would otherwise be signed off as “a necessary evil”. When considering fighting the Dragon or even finding ways to satisfy the tithe, my character had to come to terms with these scenarios.
Because if Sorcerer Kings cannot use the tithe as a means to control the populace, people may start to question the benevolence of their kings. Food becomes more scarce, water more sought after. Suddenly the deaths of outsiders becomes more a necessity over the scraps. This was just a train of thought that my character ended up having, as I projected the possibilities of what would happen. Kind of the same thought process my character had about not opposing the Sorcerer Kings.
The path to defeating the Dragon is fairly simple. You get the right gimmick, you do the right moves, you could probably pull it off. The real problem lays in the consequences of victory. And that’s what makes Dark Sun such a fun setting to me. Because its not worth the victory.
Assuming Rajaat being the backstory, if the Avangion is using its inherent magical energies to keep the Hollow firmly sealed, then it probably has to forego restoring Athas, which is tragic.
Right. That’s why it took the particular group of “heroes” that defeated the Dragon in the Prism Pentad do to it. They were effectively Molotov cocktail throwing anarchists, to hell with the consequences of their actions. By the end of book three of the Prism Pentad, the heroes understood the stakes and the role of the Dragon on Athas.
In book five, they had another chance to backdown, when Gallard and Lalali-puy gave them the story of Rajaat from their perspective. Instead they continued their hostilities.
In the rhetorical defense of the heroes, overturning the entire order and hoping for the best is a legitimate political choice if the current political order is intolerable. From my perspective, the way the Dragon was defeated (and also Rajaat) was just unsatisfying.