We’ve reached the last of the 10 classic true dragons! And you have to pity the poor white dragon. As fantasy role-playing
has progressed, every other species has grown more majestic or singular with
every iteration—becoming sorcerers and sages, astrologers and suzerains,
paladins and pranksters. As if to
counterbalance that fact, white dragons, already the runts of the litter, are
now portrayed as little more than beasts—and on Golarion, inbred ones at
that. In fact, it's so rare for
white dragons to actually have a brain or civilized aspirations that they get
their own name (“lazakh”) in Dragons Revisited.
The good news is, they’re still
consummate masters of their environments, and will do everything they can to
ambush, snow-blind, freeze, drown, and otherwise make adventures miserable in
the frozen surrounding their homes.
If you're a GM who wants to throw a dragon at your party without a lot
of spellcasting or prep work, they’re ideal. And if you’re a GM that really likes to play up the
battlemat and environmental/terrain hazards, they’re perfect.
As far as making your white dragons singular…well, if your
world has poles, do the dragons of the North interact with the South? Do they migrate? Or are they practically different
species? If your world has a long
winter, they become vastly more common and influential than their kin. And where else is cold enough for them
besides the arctic wastes—high peaks, the taiga, isolated deserts at night, below
the earth, in space, etc.? White dragons
might not deserve our respect, but they're classic, so we’ll give it to them
anyway.
Worm is a sorely
abused white dragon kept shackled in the frigid duergar city of
Deepreach. Meant to be defense
against invaders, in peacetime the muzzled and chained beast spends most of his
time penned in isolation or doing manual labor. Poor in health, he longs to see the sky of which he has only
the vaguest of memories. He will
ally with any adventurers that offer him his freedom, but he will turn on them
if one of them is a dwarf (no better than duergar, as far as he is concerned)
or if they flash wealth that could serve as the seed of his first hoard.
One of a bloodline
isolated even for whites, Meritrius worships the demonic lady of taboo
coupling, incest, and abominable births.
The last of her family now that her father and mother-sister have passed
away, she has gathered around her a cadre of likeminded lamia-kin, ogrekin,
qallupilluks, and half-breeds of all kinds (many of whose get have begun to exhibit
draconic or ogrish traits as well).
The cult now seeks to capture a metallic dragon slave to spice up their
revelries and revitalize their gene pool.
On the world of
Temlin, white dragons migrate from back and forth from the male North Pole
to the female South Pole for mating.
In some cases, this means the risk of white dragon predation even in the
steamiest jungles. In other cases,
it makes for strange bedfellows.
Winterclaw is a brute of surpassing evil, yet he aids a cetaceal every
year with the whale birthing, as if honoring some ancient pact. Old Myxim has given up the frozen South
entirely for the chilly mists of a cloud forest. Note also that the male white dragons, in order to impress
their mates, are the artists of the species. The female whites have little time for that nonsense outside
the mating season, but they do rely on complex contracts with minotaur henchmen
to guard their young.
—Pathfinder Bestiary
100–101
More on white dragons in Mike McArtor’s Dragons Revisited. If
you really want to get into the weirdness of Golarion’s dragons, check out Pathfinder #4: Fortress of the Stone Giants. (You’ll note some contradictions—for
instance, DR says whites often
rampage; P#4 says they rarely
do. Also, confidential to the
Paizo folk who occasionally pop by this blog: We’re waiting on those
abomination and humour septs, among others…) Mythic Adventures
has a mythic white dragon to test your PCs against. And while it’s by no means essential reading, the true
dragon fan will have a lot of fun with the 3.5 Draconomicon, and might even want to dig up the 2e Draconomicon or (this is really going
back) Dragon Magazine #146, just for
kicks.
As we continue our countdown, syringesin wrote in a panic
(he did not actually write in a panic; he wrote in a tone of idle curiosity; I
am deliberately miscasting his words for my own egotistical needs) to ask what
happens when we reach the end of the alphabet. It’s risky to promise anything 100% on the Internet, but at
present the plan is keep going—we still haven’t covered the Bestiary 3 letters A–D, the Inner Sea Bestiary A–M, or the Bestiary 4 A–U. Beyond that, who knows? I’ve gotten a taste for writing this
stuff, so we’ll see where my interests lie if and when the alphabet is
exhausted.
I also neglected two big things. The first was the recent passing away of Dave Trampier,
whose comic Wormy was a classic of
old-school Dragon Magazine. His last comic appeared in issue #132,
which coincidentally was the earliest issue I ever got my hands on as a kid (my
first being #140). Apparently his
life was troubled, but his art is iconic.
Second, I was so tired on Friday that I neglected to mention
DriveThruRPG.com’s big offering of free stuff in honor of International
Tabletop Day. I wouldn't normally
be bringing DTR to your attention because pdfs, ewww…but a) free things are
good, and b) one of those things is the Termana
gazetteer from Scarred Lands!!!
You. Want. This. I don’t
know if the free offer is still going on, but give it a try. I think Scarred Lands was a really
special setting and very worth exploring—especially if it doesn’t cost you a
cent.
So at 9:45 on Saturday night, I was settling into my bed to
read a Pathfinder adventure. Then
I made the mistake of checking Facebook.
So at 10:00 I was watching the Dismemberment Plan take the
stage.
In retrospect, that’s basically my life in a nutshell.
Speaking of music, not my best show technically (…yeah…that
sucked…) but musically, thumbs up.
(Saturday was also the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, but I
only touched on it lightly.)
