Time Dragon

INTERVIEWER: And welcome back to PNN for the first annual Dragon Debates.  It’s time for opening statements from the candidates.  Lord Red, we’ll begin with you.

RED DRAGON: Of course, for I am the only dragon that matters.  I am the Lord of Flame.  I am the Emperor of Fear.  My very breath is a holocaust of—

GOLD DRAGON: Really?  We're using that word already?

RED DRAGON: Lower-case H.  I’m not a monster.

INTERVIEWER: Honored Gold, your response.

GOLD DRAGON: I am a force for good and righteousness.   My breath burns just as hot as Red’s, and I breathe chlorine gas as well.

INTERVIEWER: That was, like, three editions ago.

GOLD DRAGON: Wait, what do I have now?

INTERVIEWER: Weakening gas.

GOLD DRAGON: See?  Strength damage!  I am mighty.  And my benevolent hand has guided the course of dynasties.

INTERVIEWER: Most Resplendent Lungwang, you have a rebuttal?

SOVEREIGN DRAGON: Guide dynasties?  I am the living embodiment of dynasty.  I am a guardian of balance.  The scrolls say I was “placed in the skies by the gods themselves to safeguard harmony in the world.”

RED DRAGON: You should be placed in a Pokemon ball.

INTERVIEWER: Gentlewyrms, please—

TIME DRAGON: Hey, am I late?  Ha, just kidding; I’m always right on time.  Check it: time dragon here.

INTERVIEWER: Um…I don't see anything in my notes about a…did you say, “time dragon”?

TIME DRAGON: Yeah, I’m an outer dragon.  We’re kinda busy in space.  And I’m their leader.  Not to brag or anything.  Which basically makes me the most powerful dragon in existence.

INTERVIEWER: Actually, all these representatives on stage have approximately the same stats…

TIME DRAGON: Um, can they survive in space?  Can they fly to another planet?  Can they travel through time?  Are they immortal?

INTERVIEWER: Um, no, I don’t believe so—

TIME DRAGON: That’s what I thought.  WOOOO!!!  TIME DRAGON OUT. *flips table, teleports to before the debate was supposed to start, eats the interviewer, flies to a tropical paradise planet to tan*

Sometimes even time itself needs a guardian.  And while the Watcher may be enough for the Marvel Universe, Pathfinder universes’ watchers need to have a bit more bite.

Adventurers attempt to stop a fell ritual…and only partially succeed.  While they stop the cultists’ plot to call the Great Old Ones, they don’t close the gate in time, and the entire tower is ripped out of reality and time into another realm.  Now hounds of Tindalos and worse crawl out of the walls, and a time dragon sentinel pursues the flying tower, intent on smashing whoever is inside for so badly unraveling the fabric of history.

While many time dragons watch history from the edge of space and reality, others lead quiet lives closer to their charges.  Deep in the desert lies a sunken archive that contains, among other things, all the world’s historical records, tended by a time dragon and his loyal syrinx librarians.  Except the owl-faced scholars are not loyal—they are participants in one of the longest cons in the universe.  The syrinx and select yak folk and rakshasa allies are slowly rewriting the world’s history to craft a darker, more totalitarian existence firmly under their rule.  (This is no easy task beneath the nose of a dragon with share memory and legend lore, but the beast-men are nothing if not patient and careful.)  After millennia of service no amount of evidence will persuade the time dragon of the syrinx’s duplicity, so adventurers who wish to save the present will have no choice but to fight.

Those who know of the Aeon War speak of it in the past tense—an age where time dragons and aeons took up arms against each other across the spaceways and throughout the multiverse over a fundamental disagreement about the nature and destiny of universal balance.  Eventually, four mortal heroes from a backwater world turned the tide, using words and blades to forge an accord between the mighty powers.  All this is far in the past…only it’s not, as adventurers find out when their time dragon ally takes them back in time to fight in the war and assume the roles of the mythical mortal heroes.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 70–71

Shades of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Dr. Who in those seeds?  Yes.

ME: Is this post okay? 

ARTISTICLICENSETOKILL: Ha!  I like it.  Jew-approved.

ME: Score.  I mean, shalom.

ARTISTICLICENSETOKILL: Quit while you're ahead.

Solar Dragon

It’s not often I wish I could see Pathfinder monsters in anime form, but a dragon that can turn into a beam of light, channel radiation, and control plants?  That would be the coolest thing since the river dragon vs. paper shikigami fight in Spirited Away.

Solar dragons believe themselves to be as mighty and life-giving as the sun itself—hard to dispute, given that they can channel both life energy and radiation, and their fiery breath sears even other fire creatures.  In fact, some solar dragons probably think that they are their sun, or at least its avatar (…and in a fantasy world that might be true!).  So it’s safe to say that even the most good-hearted solar dragon is probably not a humble beast.  When you grow up learning that even plants will one day bow to you, it tends to do a number on one’s ego.

(Of course, any careful study of the solar dragon stat block reveals that they aren’t really that much more powerful than lunar or void dragons, and they are actually less powerful than time and vortex dragons.  If you’re thinking that this probably drives them nuts, you are already wise in the ways of dragons…)

At low to mid-levels, solar dragons are a heck of a way to introduce PCs to the wide potential of space.  (And going back to the ego thing, imagine a paladin PC’s gold dragon cohort/steed/confidant…and now imagine that gold dragon meeting a spacefaring solar dragon for the first time.  That ought to ruffle some wing flaps.)  During higher-level adventures, solar dragons might be tending whole planetoids like gardeners and demigods, and may not appreciate PCs who don’t follow the Prime Directive (said Directive being: Don’t piss off an outer dragon).  At the highest level, adventures involving solar dragons might literally have the fate of a solar system at stake.  Solar dragon vs. couatl vs. lich death sphere vs. malebranche dogfights, anyone?

Solar dragons may fly the spaceways, but their hordes have to be a bit more down-to-earth.  (The sun is a lousy place to store gold.)  Solar dragons who hide their hordes on terrestrial worlds tend to prefer equatorial climes with plenty of sunlight and riotous plant-life.  Volcanic islands are seen as especially ideal, even if that means periodically having to drive away red and bronze competitors.  On the other hand, stargazing green dragons covet the company of solar dragons, and provided the two can hammer out an ironclad agreement regarding treasure, a solar and a green can find sharing an island to be mutually beneficial.  Adventurers who end the life of what they see as an evil green dragon menace may find themselves facing an enraged solar dragon demanding to know why his research partner is dead and his half of the horde is missing.

Practically invisible to astronomers (who usually mistake them for sunspots), the Greenhope Ring is a chain of floating islands that circles the sun known as Pol.  Each is a miniature ecosystem created by crossover from the fey realms and supported by a steady stream of life-giving positive energy.  Fey, trolls, jyoti, and plant monsters are especially common here, as are the solar dragons who nest here to bask in Pol’s rays.  The solar dragons assume any ships coming this close to the Ring are pirates and react accordingly.  But at least one of these solar dragons, a venerable great wyrm, has decided he is Pol, and is making plans to drive away these other pretenders (many of them actually his grandchildren).  Clearly he needs to be stopped…unless of course, he’s right, in which case his death could sentence the entire system to a supernova or a dark, icy demise.

Where the solar dragon Baryoth’s domain even is is a matter of some astronomical and phenomenological debate—is he in some dark, devil-claimed nebula, an outcropping of one of the layers of Hell, or even in the void far above the pit that contains the Hell itself?  Reports from those who have stumbled upon him disagree, arguing about this location that is too infernal to be space and too much of the void to be one of the archdevils’ ordered torture chambers.  What all agree upon is that Baryoth is a solar dragon whose view of himself as a lawful ruler curdled into the evil of summary judgments and executions.  However Hell claimed him, he now guards a trio of sullen red starlets and a fistful of planetoids that hang in a sky out of view from any other stars.  He claims to despise the devils that come to treat with him and the mortals that stumble upon his court.  But it is clear that the stunted solar winds of this not-space are not enough to allow him to truly soar, and he craves a return to realspace soon.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 68–69

3.5 fans: Double-check your mind flayer lore.  Now imagine how much solar dragons must hate those guys.  Now think of who else hates mind flayers and tends to pal around with crimson dragons.  (Rhymes with “myth Yankee.”)  You’re welcome.

So toenduretheslingsandarrows asked:

I absolutely love this blog! It's given me a lot of great ideas for adapting different creatures to the campaign setting I use with my group, not to mention introducing me to a ton of 3.5 stuff that I never got a chance to look at. And as some who's credibly exited about Occult Adventures, I was wandering if you were planning on doing entries for the Occult Bestiary that Paizo putting out later this year. Thanks for helping to bring these monsters to ever vibrant life!

Hey!  Thanks so much!  

It’s great to hear you like/use the blog, and it’s nice to know my 3.5 content is good for more than just my own personal nostalgia.  I love Pathfinder and Golarion, but I also love 3.5 and the thrill of finding a good old book on the shelf, new or used.  So if I can deliver any of that thrill to you, awesome.

I’ve been sitting on your incredibly nice message for at least a week or two now because your question hits really close to home at the moment and I don’t have a good answer. We finish Bestiary 4 after the letter T, which means that the end of this blog is potentially very near—only a month or two away, actually.  If I take up the Occult Bestiary, that will almost certainly bridge us till Bestiary 5 comes out, and then we’re locked in for another year/year and a half.

So I’m torn.  On the one hand, I love this blog, love interacting with you all, and love the idea of being the guy who did it, who cataloged all the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary monsters.  On the other hand, I’m feeling the lure of having a project I’m happy with finished, and moving on to other projects.  1–2 hours a day/5 days a week is a lot to give to any one hobby, especially on top of a career and a radio show.  This blog was the thing that got me writing again, but now it’s in danger of being the thing that keeps me from writing (short fiction, long fiction, RPG reviews (I’d love to dig through old Dragon issues the way the Nostalgia Critic does cartoons), or maybe even trying my hand at some freelancing or Kickstarter/Patreon projects—for instance, a series of mini-campaign settings like the combined Dungeon/Polyhedron used to do in the early ’00s).

So the answer is…I dunno! I’ve got my Occult Adventures, Occult Bestiary, and Bestiary 5 on order, so I’ll have an answer for you once I see what surprises they have in store for me.  Of course, if you all have any thoughts on the matter, be sure to let me know.  :-)

Speaking of short fiction and other projects, after this weekend’s Q&A [included above for my Blogger readers] I wandered over to the Paizo boards and discovered that apparently this happened.

…Given that this news is over a week old, I should really check the messageboards more often, methinks.

Big thanks to all the hardworking Wayfinder reviewers, editors, and other volunteers!

Lunar Dragon

Presumably the most numerous of the outer dragons, lunar dragons are radiant, shimmering beasts seemingly fascinated with the lives of the planet-bound mortals they orbit around.

Beyond that…?  We don’t know.  That’s one of the awesome things about the outer dragons: We are given so little description of them that the field is wide open for you to leave your mark upon.

Maybe lunar dragons are capricious but basically benevolent protectors of their moons and the planets below.  (One would certainly imagine a lunar dragon in the Forgotten Realms setting acting this way.)  Or maybe their temperaments and alignments might wax and wane with the phases of the moon, swinging from chaotic good to evil and back.  Maybe they are tasked to keep races planetbound, or help guide them to the stars.  Maybe their visits to mortal artists is what drives these folk to new heights of inspiration…until the dragons’ alien presence renders the poor souls mad (hence “lunacy”).  Maybe every moon has its own patron moon dragon guardian or perhaps whole clutches of them congregate on particularly icy or beautiful or remote spheres.  It’s all on the table.

Hunting lycanthropes, adventurers come across a lunar dragon feasting on a wereboar.  Under the light of the full moon, the lunar dragon is gregarious, generous, and benevolent.  But the shadow that passes over the moon passes over the dragon’s heart as well, and in the dark of the new moon she is cruel and vicious.  She consorts mainly with fey, who are well used to such mercurial swings in their own folk.

Each of Tennaro’s 12 moons has its own guardian lunar dragon, scales tinged with the dust of his or her particular rocky sphere.  Jasuphex is an active beast that regularly swims with the tritons of Merrow.  Despite the warlike red of his scales, Utaro is a pacifist who meditates with the contemplatives of his moon.  Eltanux’s moon is lifeless, but he scries on mortals from the world below, occasionally intervening on behalf of his particular favorites.  And Vetaneth’s greed has gotten the better of her, as her hoard is filed with the hulks of treasure galleons she has plucked from the seas, the sky, and the void seemingly indiscriminately.

A clutch of lunar dragons are the rulers of a city on the dark side of the moon.  Attended by catfolk scholars, warriors, tumblers, and servants, the lunar dragons study the stars for portents and otherworldly invaders.  While travelers are not particularly welcomed in the hidden city, they are not unknown either, and occasionally can be put to good use.  Currently the lunar dragons are offering adventurers a bounty on twin void dragons—known and hated for preying on oma calves—and on one of their own, a silver-winged lunar dragon beauty who participated in the genocide of all life from her small moon.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 66–67

Catfolk on the moon?  Looks like someone’s paying homage.

Regarding yesterday’s post, goluxexmachina wrote:

Shouldn't completing the pentagram be possible at level 19 with an Int of 36?  Granted that's really high, but if you can get it super high it's possible even earlier I think. On the other hand, even at 20 it requires an Int of 28...

Sure, there are tons of ways to crunch the numbers and spell slots, especially once you start messing with high Intelligence scores, whether naturally or magically boosted.  I was keeping it simple: At 20th level pretty much any wizard can cast four memorized 9th-level spells a day and then trigger a wish (presumably cast the day before and worded to trigger after the other spells are cast, or triggered from an item specifically crafted for this event).  But each wizard’s path toward attempting this feat might be a little different—you don't get to Level 20 without taking a few risks and amassing some pretty unique items, artifacts, spell lists, and followers/familiars.  In any case, Lorthact doesn’t intend to allow any mage within his sphere of influence to ever aspire that high!

Have a good weekend, everybody.

Vortex Dragon

Another outer dragon—in only a week!  How cool is that?

If void dragons were about the horror of empty space (or worse yet, the tainted horror of nonempty space), vortex dragons are about space’s malleability—its behavior at light speeds, around wormholes, of quantum there-and-not-there-ness.  The universe has laws, every system of laws has loopholes, and the lawful neutral void dragons exploit these loopholes, simple as that.  Heck, they might even be the loopholes—after all, a void dragon’s very presence seems to distort the space around it.  It can breathe fire or gulp up a target with the tenacity of a black hole.  (Note that the description doesn’t put a size limit on the victim or the dragon’s stomach—and given its nature, I don’t think there should be one.)  And range attacks?  Forget about it.  Once a vortex dragon becomes an adult, it can bite you through a rift in space—anywhere in a 180-foot radius…and that radius only gets bigger as it ages.

And then there’s whom (or what) these dragons serve.  After all, if you’re an intergalactic dragon, you’re not going to be an errand boy for just anyone.  So they serve greater outer dragons—one can imagine older solar dragon stay-at-homes would use vortex dragons to correspond, and time dragons would recruit them to observe far-off events—and godlike entities (and probably the gods themselves, for that matter). 

Hmmm…a creature that speeds through the stars serving godlike entities…  Does your campaign need a Silver Surfer?  Now it has one.

Many vortex dragon belongs to the Order of the Comet, a guild of draconic couriers dedicated to making sure the message arrives—anywhere in the galaxy, and often across the multiverse as well.  The Order instructs member dragons about the celestial byways, teaching them to use solar winds, wormholes, and reliable gates to boost their own galactic emissary talents.  Their dedication to their duties is known across the spheres—in fact, the post horn symbol used on so many worlds as a postal service emblem recalls the Order of the Comet’s own spiraling sigil.  The Order and the dragons profit as well—reliability has a price, and by the time young comets have aged to mature adults they have padded their hordes enough that they can retire and pass along their routes and contacts to younger kin.

Trapping a devil is no easy feat.  When adventurers capture Barnabulus in a warded trap, they unknowingly trigger a magical alert that summons a vortex dragon.  Honoring an age-old agreement, the dragon speeds to the devil’s side.  The vortex dragon may not be able to spirit the devil away (unless it swallows him, which may be one option), but it can certainly make life difficult for the devil’s would-be captors.

A dimensional mishap deposits adventurers in a desert world where the laws of magic are different, the gods they know are absent, and once-familiar races seem sinister and warped.  Almost immediately they are embroiled in a war involving city-states and slave armies—and, without meaning to, turn the tide.  Doing so must upset some cosmic balance, because a vision of an aeon-like entity appears and pronounces, “Here+You+Should/Not/Be.”  Within days, a vortex dragon homes in on them—but whether to rescue or obliterate them is an open question.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 74–75

A little love to Dark Sun in that third adventure seed.

Got a nice note from a Redditor that included this question: 

Throughout your article you referenced Dragon Magazine a lot. I used to love the ones with great feats, spells, and other variant options. I was wondering if you had a list of any Dragon Magazines you would recommend I get my hands on?

My response, in part, ran like this:

“I have actually seriously thought about doing a 'Patch Rereads His Old Dragon Magazines' blog […]  (If I ever do, I'll be sure to let you know.)

“I'll warn you that I'm more about settings, gazetteers, and stories than feats or spells, so I may not be the best person to ask about the articles you like.  But since you asked, off the top of my head, I'd say grab from two eras:

“1) Anything from the years that the ‘Voyage of the Princess Ark’ series was running, from around issue 153 to 200 and maybe until around 224. In addition to ‘VotPA,’ Roger Moore was editing, the fiction was great, and since TSR was kicking out new settings practically every six months, there were always lots of interesting articles and extras.  The 160s and 170s were especially strong, and I reread my copy of 155 so many times the cover came off.

“2) This may be more your cup of tea: The first two to three years after 3rd Edition came out—I don't remember issue numbers off the top of my head, but from August 2000 on.  The new edition was a nice reset for the game, and suddenly you had all these authors rethinking and refreshing the basic races, classes, and settings.  The quality is up and down sometimes, but there are a lot more hits than misses (and the prestige classes were a breath of fresh air at the time […]  Dig up the Dragon Magazine Annuals from those years as well if you can find them—they were quite good.

“Hope that helps! I loved Dragon, and love talking about it, so maybe one day I'll scribble down more thoughts.”

That's a super-vague answer that's missing a lot of great material, but it was the best I could do at work.  Are any of you big Dragon fans?  I would love to compare notes/favorite issues sometime.

For personal reasons and because I was busy with new DJ training, this week's show was pretty much a rerun of old favorites and not a lot of new tunes.  That said, there is one new track from the Menzingers you have to hear.  Listen here!

(If the feed skips, let it load in Firefox or Chrome, Save As an mp3, and enjoy in iTunes.  Link good till Friday, 2/28, at midnight.)

Void Dragon

The Bestiary 4 does not mess around. So far we’ve had a mythic myrmidon, a psychopomp, an empyreal lord, and now a dragon.  From SPACE.

Void dragons are outer dragons, and—wait, let’s talk about that first.  Outer dragons are a branch of true dragons…but they go beyond that simple definition.  Like the primal dragons, outer dragons tread that line between dragon and aspect of a higher concept: the sun, moons, vortices, the depths of space, even time itself.  A lot of dragons act like they are celestial beings, but outer dragons can actually make that claim.  In many role-playing game settings, dragons even have a hand in their respective worlds’ creation myths—at least according to themselves, and often according to others.  Outer dragons make those stories more complicated (for where are they in the myths?) and more plausible (by virtue of simply existing).

The otherness of outer dragons is accentuated by their abilities.  Their presence is more than frightful; it’s downright alien.  Their breath weapons take on heavenly attributes as they age.  They don’t need to breathe, and they can fly between the planets and even the stars in mere hours or days.

Of course, straddling the line between being a mortal creature and something else also leaves outer dragons exposed to that else.  (We had a similar conversation about the umbral dragon; void dragons are even more far-gone.)  In the void dragons’ case, they have spent too long in the empty spaces between the stars, exposed to the baleful presences of the entities that inhabit that blackness.  If you ever wondered what a dragon servant of the Old Gods looks like, the void dragon is it.  If you ever wanted to replicate the servants of the Shadows from Babylon 5, void dragons are it.  Fighting a void dragon means fighting enfeeblement, exhaustion, confusion, nightmares, insanity, a bite that can reduce one to dust, and a breath weapon that delivers the cold and suffocation of space.  It means trying to hit a thing so far gone from reality it can blur or dimension door out of the way.  They are just wrong somehow, and in a way that seems to sicken others.  (Again, comparisons to Bab 5’s Shadows seem in order.)  Representing the darkness of the void would be bad enough, but they are tainted by what happens when the void becomes polluted.

One final note: Another reason to love outer dragons, especially void dragons, is their ability to terrify normal dragons.  Adult red dragons actually slightly outweigh adult void dragons in the stat block…but imagine in real life: an adult red dragon facing a dragon that can outmaneuver it, with breath that carries the cold of the blackness of space, who can haunt the red even in its dreams and then retreat into the suffocating void.  The red would flee in terror at the first encounter.  That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t plan its revenge—it might even try to threaten or blackmail some old adventuring foes to aid it—but the encounter would forever shake its confidence that it was the supreme ruler of the skies.

The space station Molinar is a metal ring in the sky, forbidding and cold and humming with alien power.  The void dragon Molinar is its sole ruler (having forgotten his own name eons ago, he has adopted the station’s moniker as his own).  The station leaks radiation from an alien reactor core long ago altered to serve the inscrutable needs of the Entities of the Black.  Molinar himself is uninterested in the device, content to devour star monarchs and bask in the evil energies, but the station itself will rise to the core’s defense by activating all manner of constructs.

The blue dragon Califor has been a thorn in the side of a company of adventurers since almost their first quest, when they cleaned out a nest of kobolds recently expelled from her service.  The adventurers have battled her proxies and the Califor herself ever since, and the dragon has returned their antipathy with interest—she even artificially aged herself in the fey realms to stay more powerful than the troublesome humanoids.  So the company can be forgiven for being shocked when she and a green dragon astrologer arrive unannounced during a wedding feast to recruit them to their cause.  The Time of the Void is at hand, and she urges them to join her—even at the cost of some of her hoard—to travel to another planet with her so they can pair with dragonkin and head off the invasion.

Not all void dragons listen to the susurrus of voices beyond the stars.  Abbatorus hates the pollution of his race, from the greenish taint on his scales to the madness he holds at bay through sheer will.  He cultivates adventurers to his cause of fighting the servants of the Old Ones.  Early on, they will not know who their patron is, but after they find themselves fighting elder things and being gifted shantak steeds, they will likely suspect something is amiss.  Nor are his motives altruistic—Abbatorus craves the silence of the void, and that makes most other life forms an inconvenience—and even in the short term he will not hesitate to kill his servants if they fall short in his estimations.  The last mortals who failed him are still digesting in their shantaks’ bellies.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 72–73

No radio show this week—worked through the whole three-day weekend.  Have Wye Oak’s new one instead.