Literally any. Dragons can be intelligent as they are in d&d canon, and therefore have motivations as complex as any hero or villain. Or you could say in your homebrew world that dragons are rampaging beasts, forces of nature that can drop out of the sky and ruin your day, and brave heroes must slay them etc.
They can be mad scientists, hermetic sages, genocidal maniacs, champions of order, anything.
Mechanically, when using dragons as antagonists, they represent a higher than average challenge, so it might be a fight you want to layer behind intrigue or a more complex adventure, giving the players something to do to build to the dragon fight.
There's a lot more useful lore on them you can take inspiration from in the Monster Manual. Hopefully that helps.
Young dragons can be used as periodic encounters as they hunt for food or try to find a lair and gather treasure for it.
Adult dragons would be way less frequent. They may also go out to hunt or you may rarely have a local government try to hire adventures to assault a lair that is too close for comfort (maybe the dragon attacks that town once per generation).
You could also make a dragon the BBEG of your campaign (black dragons are good for this).
Or you could just run Rise of Tiamat (hoard of the dragon queen is kind of meh).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I find it hard to write a campaign about or involving dragons, how do I go about it?
Literally any. Dragons can be intelligent as they are in d&d canon, and therefore have motivations as complex as any hero or villain. Or you could say in your homebrew world that dragons are rampaging beasts, forces of nature that can drop out of the sky and ruin your day, and brave heroes must slay them etc.
They can be mad scientists, hermetic sages, genocidal maniacs, champions of order, anything.
Mechanically, when using dragons as antagonists, they represent a higher than average challenge, so it might be a fight you want to layer behind intrigue or a more complex adventure, giving the players something to do to build to the dragon fight.
There's a lot more useful lore on them you can take inspiration from in the Monster Manual. Hopefully that helps.
Young dragons can be used as periodic encounters as they hunt for food or try to find a lair and gather treasure for it.
Adult dragons would be way less frequent. They may also go out to hunt or you may rarely have a local government try to hire adventures to assault a lair that is too close for comfort (maybe the dragon attacks that town once per generation).
You could also make a dragon the BBEG of your campaign (black dragons are good for this).
Or you could just run Rise of Tiamat (hoard of the dragon queen is kind of meh).