Chromatic Dragon Types as Developmental Stages

We are inspired once again by one of my favorite worldbuilding blog posts. What happens if we discover that the classic colors of the chromatic dragons are not different lineages, but different stages  in the development of all such dragons?

White dragons are wyrmlings. The coloration of their scales is not so much truly “white” as it is a lack of pigmentation. Viewed up close, white dragon scales are almost translucent; although viewing a dragon up close is not advised, even at this young age. Humans refer to the white dragon as “the least intelligent” and “most animalistic,” but it is not because they are some inferior strain of dragonkind; they are simply immature dragons.

In its newborn state, the white dragon is a heat sink, literally absorbing heat from the environment around it. Its frosty cold breath weapon is not so much a matter of inducing cold as it is one of removing heat. A white dragon's tolerance for very cold temperatures is also an evolutionary adaptation that keeps it away from other, older dragons, who favor warmer climes, and might punish a white wyrmling for unwittingly trespassing on their territory.

Black dragons are young dragons. Their wyrmling scales have gradually absorbed enough light from the sun (harvesting that heat) to darken to a steel-gray or purple-black color. They are too big to continue to capture energy passively from the environment around them like wyrmlings, so they begin to take more energy from consuming ever-larger prey. Their breath no longer freezes. Instead, internal apoptosis begins to destroy the organs that drove the dragon’s early growth as a wyrmling, which they no longer need. The remains of these organs are liquified, stored in a special sac, and mixed with bile (plus any indigestible prey remains) to produce the acidic slurry breath of the black dragon stage.

Dracologists are still working to understand the symbiotic dragon-princess relationship (painting by Hans Arnold)

Green and blue dragons are adult dragons. The dull black scales of the young black dragon gradually take on particularly greenish luster, influenced by chlorine production from a new organ within the dragon’s body, nestled between the lungs. Chlorine is one of a number of gasses that the dragon can now expel in place of the acidic breath it left behind with its juvenile state. 

When the gas organ is sufficiently mature, one of the most interesting stages of draconic development begins; the gas “turns itself off.” The dragon instinctively throttles its gas-breathing function, leaving it without its breath weapon for a period of weeks or months (dragons will almost always retreat to hidden lairs during this vulnerable time). The scales, deprived of trace chlorine, transition to a deep sapphire blue. While in hiding, the dragon will seek out a rocky surface incorporating diamond or some similarly hard material, using it to scrape away at a layer of keratin on the roof of its mouth, exposing a conductive spur. It emerges as a blue dragon, breathing bolts of lightning at all who oppose it.

The sequencing of the green and blue phases, and the dragon’s instinct to cease breathing gas, long mystified scholars. But it is now believed to be a very practical adaptation. A dragon both able to breath flammable gas and to provide a spark of ignition risks quite literally igniting its insides and blowing itself up (the chlorine itself isn't flammable, but can enhance the combustibility of the other expelled gasses). By separating the developments into different phases – and repressing the preceding phase during the second phase – the dragon learns to master both effects.

Once the dragon can both breathe gas and ignite it without endangering itself, it can begin its final transformation. This typically involves nesting in a large horde for decades, even centuries. During this time, the dragon undergoes a slow molting process, losing its blue scales, and drawing trace metals from the hoard around it to reinforce its underlying “true” scales, which are a brilliant ruby red. 

The dragon is now an ancient dragon, a red dragon, a true dragon. The dragon is ready to rule. The world is ready to burn.

Unfinished Business: Complicating Resources Like a Scene in a Film

Many games give players “resources” as an extension of character creation or advancement. Some of those resources are people. Family members, former colleagues, friends, and so forth.

It can be difficult to introduce these resources into the game in an evocative, dramatic, interactive way, because everyone knows that the resources are character features, and ludologically, not so different from a piece of equipment or a special ability.

How can we make these resources feel more like tangible elements of the fictional world? One way is to steal a trick from films. 

Imagine this scene in a movie; you’ve almost certainly seen it before. A character needs something to achieve their goals. Information, access, tools, whatever. They know someone who can help, but because of something that happened in their shared past, they are reluctant to reach out, and know this person will not be happy to see them.

Trainspotting 2

Why? 

The second-person subject in each result below refers to the PC in question, while the third-person object refers to the resource.

1. Unpaid debts. You owed money or wealth of some kind. They may want compensation with interest; or may have decided that money alone isn’t going to be enough to make things right.
2. You ended on bad terms. You argued, litigated, fought, or worse. Time has not healed any wounds, and they are ready to pick up the struggle where it left off.
3. Your connection was more than professional. Bodies or feelings were in play, and they were either left hanging, or punished after you left. Their reaction to you will be complicated and extreme, and they will be very interested in what personal relationships you’ve made since.
4. Respect has faded. They looked up to you, admired you, or perhaps saw you as the only "real" one. The circumstances of your departure or your long time away have dimmed that esteem. They don’t believe you still have whatever made you stand out back then. They will want you to prove it before they help you.
5. Competing obligations. Since you last met, they’ve started a family, committed themselves to a cause, or otherwise entangled themselves in obligations that rival or overshadow whatever loyalty they once had to you.
6. You’ve changed. They are disturbed by, curious about, or obsessed with how different you are since the last time they saw you. They’re going to have a lot of questions about what has happened to you and what you’ve done, and won’t take kindly to disambiguation. 
7. Old rivals. Whether you were sparring in the dojo or performing on stage, you were their only real competition. They still think they’re better than you, and want to prove it before they offer any help.
8. Left behind. You escaped. They didn’t. Maybe you thought they were as good as dead, or maybe you were just looking out for number one. They’re going to expect you to answer for leaving without them before they lift a finger.

As with any game element, these should not be punitive; if the resource is something the character earned through advancement or by virtue of their class, playbook, whatever – they need to have it. But these kinds of ideas can be useful when a mixed success or an emergent complication suggests the game needs some friction. 

In Praise of Location-Based Scenario Design

Two of the recent games I have run are “travel” games. In one, the premise is that the characters wake up on a train without their memories. The train moves from place to place, and as they explore each stop on the train’s journey, they uncover clues related to their predicament. In the other game, the players are afflicted with a mysterious magical condition that causes them to Plane Shift randomly through the multiverse, encountering dangerous and unexpected situations.

I’ve enjoyed running both of these games, and I don’t regret pitching them to the players… but they had the unexpected side-effect of making me miss location-based play.

You won’t typically see it printed on the label, but “location-based play” is important to old-school D&D and similar games. The dungeon is not just an abstraction, or the place where the monsters are, but also a literal constraint around the possible actions the characters can take. The location where the adventure takes place creates time pressure, facilitates antagonist action, and intrinsically offers a series of risks and rewards.

The traveling games I ran were more scene-based. The scope of action is less constrained, if at all. Pressure and conflict have to be induced more deliberately.

Running these scene-based games made me appreciate how much location-based play does some of the work on the GM’s behalf. Listening to 3d6 Down the Line’s excellent Adren Vul podcast also drove the point home. A fixed location like a megadungeon organically induces factions, monsters, NPCs, traps, hazards, treasure, and other “game objects” to bounce off each other. 

One of the best aspects of location-based play is that this occurs organically. The GM barely needs to think about it; these interactions intuitively descend from the character of the location itself.  

A scene-based game can and often should re-introduce known concepts periodically, yes. But it takes more work. How did they get there? Why have they shown up again in such a different context? Embracing serendipity as a law of the universe can help, but it will also tax verisimilitude more heavily than simple physical proximity.

A rich location can create its own intrigue and adventure -- illustration by Artur Skizhali-Veys

The difference between location-based and scene-based scenarios may seem obvious, but it’s quite common to see people mix them up. Take, for example, the five-room dungeon concept, created by Johnn Four. The five-room dungeon idea is a preparation shortcut for a TTRPG session. At a glance, “five-room dungeon” sounds like a location-based style of play; it’s a way to make a dungeon, right?

Not really; reading in more detail, it’s clear this is actually a scene-based approach. Four cites Joseph Campbell of “Hero With a Thousand Faces” fame and says “It's the story framework that matters most for great gaming.” That statement likely sounds fine to trad or modern gamers, but is antithetical to OSR gamers, i.e., those who most promote location-based situations. 

Four seems to recognize that the name is a misnomer, clarifying that it is not limited to fantasy games. To the degree five-room dungeons involve locations, they are essentially a way of building what old-school games would call a “lair”; a small dangerous place, perhaps waiting to be discovered while exploring a hex. The lair may have one or more monsters, and the possibility of treasure, hazards, and challenges. It’s probably enough to fill a single session of play. But it fundamentally lacks the promise of exploration that characterizes dungeons, and it is expressly linear. 

There’s enough confusion out there that I saw someone in one instance trying to create a megadungeon by clustering five-room dungeons together! Could that work? Well, maybe. But I think it would have to be done very carefully and deliberately, as it’s a matter of combining two scenario design techniques from diametrically different schools of play.

Polytheism, Belief, and Ritual in Fantasy RPGs

Consider the following scenario in a fantasy RPG. While traveling, the PCs arrive at a small village. The villagers tell them that for many generations, the people in the village have left offerings for local spirits. The spirits in turn protect the village. If the village ever fails to make the annual sacrifice, the spirits will be angry. Oral histories attest to this, but there's no other evidence. The offerings make up a significant chunk of the small village’s agricultural output and could otherwise be used to improve their practical welfare.

What will the PCs make of this? If your players are like most players I have met while gaming – basically modern material realists whose spiritual beliefs are centered on personal morality rather than community ritual – they will probably be skeptical of the villagers’ choices. Their first thought will be that this is a waste, or at best, something that preserves community cohesion at significant expense. Because players subconsciously have their ear out for an adventure hook, they may also suspect that some malevolent local creature is manipulating the villagers.

So that’s what the players probably think. But what do their characters think, in a purely in-world sense? They would have to take this situation pretty seriously! There would be room for doubt, but they couldn’t scoff at it out of hand.

Why? When thinking about fantasy worldbuilding, it is helpful to remember how ancient people interpreted gods, spirits, magic, and the unknown. They were not ignorant or backward or “superstitious” in an abstract sense. They were making sense of the world in a way that was pragmatic and sensible within the context of what they knew.

I was thinking about this question in part because of a series of posts on the excellent A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog on how ritual works in a polytheistic world. The author, Bret Devereaux, makes an important point that more games should factor into their worldbuilding:

"The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge."

Why does this matter for RPGs? Well, he begins the first post on ancient polytheistic beliefs with a few screenshots from the Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder video games. He points out how the fantasy RPG adoption of religion – for ethical or philosophical reasons – differs greatly from the real-world adoption of religion.

East God by Ching Yeh. The gods are not your friends! They do offer power tho...

Clerics, paladins, and other believers in modern D&D basically act like monotheistic thinkers in a polytheistic world. They choose one system, and the stronger their belief, the greater the power granted by that god. 

"Because many gods can produce practical results for you – both good and bad! – you cannot pick and choose, but must venerate many of the relevant gods."

A cleric or paladin in a polytheistic world shouldn’t be a one-true-god diehard. Instead, they should have multiple, flexible arrangements with various gods, balancing the power they offer with their contrasting goals and powers. The fact that fantasy gods are proven to exist and not an article of faith actually makes this more true in a fantasy world than it already is in the real world. A cleric’s advancement should be a careful accumulation of bonds and credits with various relevant gods, uncovering the mysteries of their desires and actions, rather than a linear escalation in the ranks of a single institution of the true faithful.

It is interesting that the original cleric of D&D in 1974 was closer to this ideal than later iterations. They were defined more by their alignment than commitments to particular gods. In contrast, modern D&D presupposes that a single god grants all of a cleric’s spells. Some editions played around with spheres, allowing clerics to tailor their focus, but modern D&D mostly gives some bonuses for the spells closest to the deity’s heart, and then calls it a day. 

In the second post in the series, Devereaux notes that the “core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.”  

Imagine being a cleric in a world that works like this. What if you want to cast Spiritual Weapon? If you are lucky, perhaps you have a choice to pray to Athena or Ares. Perhaps praying to one will make it harder to seek the aid of the other in the future. Perhaps only Hades can grant the spell Raise Dead, and that’s a big commitment. In such a system, the variety of spells available is constrained not so much by spheres and lists as it is constrained by how many deals the cleric can balance without fatally angering any particular god.

In this way I am a fan of how relics in Knave 2 are so clearly framed as exchanges with particular gods. Compared to modern D&D, this magic is very distinct from arcane spells. It's a form of extrinsic advancement. And it really delivers on the idea of a world with living, active gods, rather than remote, abstract philosophical concepts.