Dragon one shot
Tonight, we had a one shot. It has been a hot minute since I have been able to run a session of any role-playing game, but I had an idea and some inspiration. I asked my four-year-old son what the party should play as, he said dragons. He also said “Holder” which is beholder, so I added that into the adventure. I added some goons and a few helpless Non player characters and broke out my tower. I let the players each pick a dragon for the night. We had a silver dragon, a brass dragon, and a copper dragon. years ago, I had purchased the monster stat cards so each player had a notecard sized monster stat card to use instead of a character sheet. They all were young adult dragons, which put them between challenge rating 6 to 9, which still let them be powerful dragons but not insanely strong where nothing would challenge them.
For the actual adventure the party would be waiting for their humanish riders to finish negotiating with whatever was in the tower. After thirty minutes of waiting the tower doors slammed shut and three horned devils appeared. Horned devils are mean, they have multiple attacks, a wounding tail ability, and if a chase happened, could fly after or away from the dragons. I had one of the horned devils mention something about “the boss” and “egg” the three dragons immediately set upon the fiends. Both sides of the conflict had multiple attacks and wild abilities. The Dragons used both elemental and status effect style breath weapons leading one of them to be both paralyzed and slowed and eventually asleep. The dragons put them to the claw and found a beholder inside the tower.
The beholder asked if they were here to help with the intruders and mentioned that the dragons were not the color or scale of dragon he was expecting, but he would take their help evicting the invaders from the tower. The group said sure and we found their riders were battling with a group of evenly matched dragon men warriors. Before announcing himself to the combatants the Brass dragon put the evil warriors, dragon men, to sleep with his breath attack and the beholder realized something was wrong. The party traded attacks with the beholder only seeming to shoot sleep, paralysis, and telekinesis rays at people. it started throwing its sleeping allies off the tower to wake them up, as well as one of the npc riders. The copper dragon saved one of the riders as he fell as well as the others before they could get tossed from the tower. A multitude of breath attacks were thrown at the beholder and it kept return firing with every ray in its arsenal seemingly except disintegrate. It eventually charmed the silver dragon to help it fight, letting the dragon know to stall a few more moments before his boss showed up. The party was under the impression the beholder was in charge until a thunderous voice demanded to know where the egg was. It seemed the egg had been a rumor and not at this location at all.
The gargantuan red dragon appeared, pit fiend baby Bjorn-ed like a bad tattoo on its chest, and the party realized they were dealing with some form of Ashardalon. The beholder started to flee, attempting to hide from the smaller dragons and was caught in a line of acid from the copper dragon, popping the beholder and ending any ongoing magic effects he had on the party. Ashardalon hit the copper dragon in his breath attack, a massive cone of fire. The group focused their breath weapons and were able to deal some damage to Ashadalon, who responded by knocking them prone by flying up in the air and pelting them all again with his breath weapon, gloated, and teleported away.
There were bits of the adventure that referenced things the players knew, like the red dragon Ashardalon and his quest to stave off death that has been a central part of their Spelljammer game. Small little easter eggs and nods to their journey.
It had been quite some time since I had run and games and this was a fun way of waking up the sleeper agent dungeon master brain cells that had been dormant for almost ten months. Life has been a bit wild.
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If you want to run this adventure as a one shot, the easiest way is with premade dragons. having access to a stat card made things easy for each player to see what they were capable of at the start. Each dragon had many similar abilities and were able to remind each other to roll and see if they would get their breath weapon back every round after they used it. The monsters being horned devils gave them a challenge that on paper was a higher threat than the three dragons but not impossible to defeat. The constant barrage of breath attacks made for massive swings in combat. sleep breath is a little busted, less creatures are automatically immune to sleep and was an oversight on my part. It made for players feeling powerful, so a win for the table.
Beholders are nasty, beholders on top of a tower are even nastier unless fighting dragons that can fly if you telekinesis them off a tower. Having warriors that the npcs were fighting was only there originally to give context to why they were at the tower but ended up being an interesting challenge to keep the npcs safe from the beholder tossing them from the tower or targeting them, since the little people were far squishier than the dragons. Naturally the party wanted to protect them.
The massive red dragon was an adult red dragon, if you want to amp up the drama you can go up to the ancient red dragon statistics but I knew the party would have difficulty with the super high armor class and damage output. He had over two hundred hit points in his stat block and I had him leave after taking over one hundred hit points in damage, while also watching the clock to make sure our players were not over super late.
At the end of the day, if your players are having a good time, you are doing a good job.
