Monstrous - Dragon

The fourth of my posts on using the book Monstrous to make some cool monsters. 

For inspiration I am using one of the guilds of Ravnica from Magic: the Gathering. Text in italics is from the book, text in bold is my own.

 

 

By Erica Yang

 

 

Dragon - Orzhov - Gold 

 

Vainglory

Although Gold's empire has laid in ruins for ages, Gold's vanity remains undiminished. Gold harbors a deep pride in its nature in being gold itself, leading it to hoard beautiful golden items and goldsmiths held in gilded birdcages. 

Sly heroes can attempt to appeal to this vanity by doing one of the following:

• Convincingly praise Gold with elaborate honorifics specific to Gold's vanity and the history of its former empire
• Present Gold with a fabulous gift appropriate to Gold's hoard 
• Tell Gold a tale about the folly of charity 

One or two failed attempts give Gold the upper hand in attempts to parley with it when using Serpent's Tongue. Further failed attempts will awaken Gold's Slumbering Cataclysm. 

 

Serpent's Tongue

When Gold and a mortal parley, they ask each other a question.

Gold must answer truthfully and even unwisely if the mortal has successfully appealed to Gold's Vainglory. The mortal must make a new appeal to Gold's Vainglory for each additional question they wish to ask. 

The mortal must answer truthfully and even unwisely if they hold any precious metal other than gold, or if they have failed an attempt to appeal to Gold's Vainglory. 

Ruinous Breath

Everything Gold touches comes to ruin, even the food it eats and the air it breathes. When Gold has recently consumed uncountable riches, its expelled breath corrupts and corrodes charity and kindness. 

 

Ageless Scales

Gold is coated with nigh-indestructible scales of pure gold. No mortal weapon can pierce them.

However, Gold's scales are marred by a massive fang of pure silver, the mark of a gruesome battle lost to history. 

Slumbering Cataclysm

When violently awakened from its slumber or moved to great anger, Gold descends upon a mortal civilization and utterly destroys a place of extreme wealth before returning to its lair.

Gold repeats this destructive act on a new target every day thereafter. Its path of destruction can only be ended by slaying Gold or by giving it all the gold in land.

 

By waitbutwhy.com

To be fully honest I am not quite happy with this monster, I have been thinking for a while about what to add to the end of this post and I have decided just to post it, no use in waiting for good ideas that might not come. 

 

 

Getting back to reviewing Monstrous I think the dragon entry is pretty good, the ruinous breath part seems a little weird to me but its fun and flavorful and could probably lead to some interesting situations. The serpents tongue/vainglory is very interesting and gives a nice amount of procedure to dealing with the dragon socially which is actually quite nice. The dragon was definitely one of the better entries in the book.