Dragon Encounters

How to Use

Combat Encounter 1: Iceberg (difficulty 23)

The players are on top of an iceberg. Perhaps their ship crashed into it and they needed to evacuate onto the iceberg, perhaps the white dragon sank their ship via dropping boulders, perhaps there’s a quest object or something that they wanted to investigate.

(Icebergs aren’t necessarily small or flat. You can have an iceberg that’s the size and shape of a small hill.)

Icebergs aren’t stable. Survival books will warn you not to climb onto one because they can flip over unexpectedly. Over here, I’m counting on that.

The white dragon can swim and burrow. Ideal strategy for it would be to swim under the iceberg and dig away at it until the iceberg flips. Tell the players that they see a white dragon moving toward them, and then that it unexpectedly dives below the surface. A round or so afterwards, they can start to hear digging and will feel the iceberg begin to tilt.

In addition to taking damage from being flung about wildly and having pieces of the iceberg fall on them, the water is horrible terrain for your players to be in.

1. They’ll take ongoing cold damage while they’re immersed.
2. They’ll have trouble fighting (see underwater fighting in the Player’s Handbook), and the dragon will be able to dive out of sight between its turns.
3. Getting thrown into the water will separate them. It could easily take them two rounds to get together, during which the dragon can attack them as it likes.
4. The dragon will have the option of dragging a PC down, where he’ll soon drown, take extra damage from the cold waters, be separate from their companions, and be at the mercy of the dragon.

If they manage to get back onto the iceberg, or avoid being thrown off in the first place, the dragon will go back to working on the iceberg. Time is on the dragon’s side, as the iceberg will only get smaller. They’ll have to figure out some way to get to the dragon, or to bring the dragon up. Frankly, I’m kind of curious how they’ll do it. (At high levels, I don’t worry about killing my players. They should be able to think of something.)

If the iceberg has a high point, the dragon can also bring down part of it on top of them. (See the next combat encounter.)

Variant: Instead of an iceberg, you can put the PCs on a stretch of frozen ocean or lake. The dragon can smash the ice by dropping boulders, or you can place a height nearby, allowing the dragon to use its tail attack to sweep down a number of stones each round.

Ice sometimes cracks, so you don’t have to limit yourself to the holes made where the boulder hits. You can put long branching cracks along the ice, and you can have parts of the ice begin to flip, dip down into the water, or break off, if the players approach the edge.

When the dragon feels that the ice is sufficiently broken, it can dive below and reemerge each turn to attack and dive again, breaking the ice more each turn.

Combat Encounter 2: Avalanche. (difficulty 24)

In which the dragon decides to kill the PCs via avalanche, and dig them out afterwards. (The white dragon can burrow, and enjoys frozen food.)

You can decide if they see the dragon flying for the mountain ahead of them. If they do, they might guess what it intends, and they’ll run. They’ll still have to find a different way to get to where they’re going, or to reach the top of the mountain in order to fight the dragon without exposing themselves.

If they don’t avoid the avalanche before the dragon triggers it, they’ll have a single round to reach after the avalanche is triggered before it buries them. I’ll list the survival methods they might use so that you’ll know that they’ll work, and can factor them in if they think to use them. They include:

• Running sideways to the avalanche. It is sometimes possible to outrun the edge of an avalanche.
• Blocking the avalanche from reaching the area where they are, possibly via Wall of Stone. It’s possible that the avalanche will knock the wall down, however.
• Flying. They may still be hit by objects thrown into the air by the avalanche, from rubble to boulders.
• Grabbing an immovable object, like a tree. They’ll probably need a STR check to avoid being wrenched loose by the force of the avalanche.
• Spreading themselves flat. By spreading out their weight, the person is more likely to be only lightly buried.

If they end up buried, they’ll probably try to break themselves free. Survival websites say that you only can only manage if you’re buried no more than a foot deep, but D&D characters are stronger than real humans.

Since the dragon will attack as soon as it sees that some of them survived, think twice about whether to have some of them needing help. On the one hand, you risk knocking out some of your players for the entire fight. On the other, you might cause them to do something clever to distract the dragon while they free their party members. Do as you think best.

Variant: Instead of bringing down a full-scale avalanche, you could have the dragon just drop large stones and/or blocks of ice on them. They’ll still have to deal with a dragon that will be out of sight, and they can’t even climb up to the dragon as the boulders/ice are so massive as to push them back down. While this isn’t nearly as deadly as an avalanche, the pieces of ice are still big enough to pin them down as well as hurt them.

Combat Encounter 3: Blizzard. (difficulty 22)

For this encounter, you are going to have to place them inside a house or an igloo. There is simply no way for them to do anything outside during a blizzard. Even if they survive magically, they won’t be able to see or hear each other, which removes all possibility of them doing anything meaningful.

The dragon does not have this problem. Dragons have blindsight, which indicates special senses. There are real animals whose senses of smell, hearing, vibrations, and/or temperature are good enough to let them sense other creatures even during a blizzard. Given that the dragon is entirely immune to cold, there is no reason that it shouldn’t find a way to utilize this highly-advantageous weather.

(Igloos were sometimes used as temporary shelter. They could be built when a native saw that a storm/blizzard was incoming and didn’t have time to return to a pre-built shelter. In this vein, you could give your players advance notice of an incoming blizzard and let them build an igloo. You’d probably want them to have a native with them though, just in case.)

If you want to make the dragon more fearsome, you can have the natives share with them a legend that the dragon conjures up a blizzard when it wants to hunt. In actual fact, this is just a false rumor, but your players won’t have any reason not to believe that it’s true. And, given that it isn’t true, it’s not even homebrew.

The reality is that it just uses this weather at every opportunity. Given that it can create cold, and that it likes its meat frozen, the dragon can store up food in a way that no other carnivore could ever do.

The dragon’s strategy will be to tear at the walls of their shelter. Each crack that it can create will bring in the cold, decrease visibility, especially near the openings and between them, and give the dragon areas though which it can make attacks at PCs that are near the openings.

Like by the iceberg, the way the players handle this threat is up to them.

Summary – 6 ways to use

1. If the PCs are on an iceberg, the dragon can swim beneath it and dig away at it. Done properly, he might be able to flip it over, and lfip the PCs into the water.
2. If the PCs are on ice, the dragon can try to break the ice by bashing it from below or knocking stones doen on to it from above, especially if it’s near a mountain bluff.
3. If the dragon can get the PCs into the water, it can grapple them and drag them down. It has a swim speed, and the PCs don’t. Also, artic water should do automatic damage.
4. If they’re near a mountain, have the dragon try to bring an avalanche down onto them. Even if they can dig themselves out, the dragon will be attacking them before they have the chance to do so.
5. If they’re near the mountain, and you can’t or don’t want to use an avalanche, the dragon can still send rubble and ice sheets falling down at them. They can’t retaliate without getting to the top first, and getting hit be ice sheets makes that difficult.
6. When a blizzard springs up, their only sensible option is to take shelter indoors. The dragon is perfectly at home in a blizzard, though, and can attack the walls of their home.