Fantasy Monster: Dratgon

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Dratgon

A scruffy beast covered in patches of scales and fur, with scaly, pink tail, a pair of bat wings, and a rat-like head on a short neck.

CR 7; XP 3,200
NE Large Dragon

Init +9; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, scent; Perception +15

Defense
AC 20, touch 14, flat-footed 15 (+5 Dex, +6 natural, –1 size)
hp 85 (10d12+20)
Fort +11; Ref +12; Will +11

Defensive Qualities swarm shape; Immune disease, paralysis, sleep

Offense
Speed 30 ft., fly 50 ft. (poor), climb 20 ft., swim 20 ft.

Speed (swarm shape) 15 ft., climb 15 ft., swim 15 ft.

Melee bite +14 (2d6+5 plus disease), 2 claws +14 (1d8+5)

Melee (swarm shape) swarm (6d6 plus distraction and disease)

Space 10 ft.; Reach 5 ft. (0 ft. in swarm shape)

Special Attacks disease (DC 17), distraction (DC 17), noxious breath (30-ft. cone, DC 17, nauseated 1d4+1 rounds or dazzled for 1 round)

Spell-Like Abilities (CL 10th, concentration +9)

Constant—speak with animals (rats and rat-like animals only)

3/day—commune with rats (as commune with birds, excepts affects local rats)

Statistics
Str 20, Dex 20, Con 14, Int 7, Wis 15, Cha 9
Base Atk +10; CMB +16; CMD 31 (35 vs. trip)

Feats Combat Reflexes, Great Fortitude, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Nimble Moves

Skills Climb +10, Fly +12, Knowledge (local) +11, Perception +15, Stealth +14, Swim +10

Languages understands Draconic

SQ rat-kin

Ecology
Environment underground (sewers)
Organization solitary or pair
Treasure standard (trinkets and trash collected by rats)

Special Abilities

Disease (Su) Galloping filth fever: Bite or swarm—injury, physical contact with infected—contact; save Fort 17; onset immediate; frequency 1/hour; effect 1d3 Dex damage and 1d3 Con damage; cure 3 consecutive saves. Anyone coming in physical contact with the victim of galloping filth fever has to make a Fortitude saving throw or become infected as well. Prolonged or repeated contact (such as taking care of the sick) forces a new Fortitude saving throw each hour. The saving throw is Constitution-based.

Noxious Breath (Su) A dratgon can breathe a cloud of noxious fumes covering 30-ft long cone-shaped spread once every 1d4+1 rounds. Creatures caught within the cone become nauseated for 1d4+1 rounds on a failed Fortitude saving throw (DC 17). A successful saving throw renders them dazzled for 1 round instead. The saving throw DC of this poison effect is Constitution-based.

Rat-Kin (Ex) A dratgon recognizes rats, and is recognized by them as kin. It can influence rats, dire rats, rat swarms, and similar rat-like creatures of animal-intelligence as if using wild empathy with an additional +4 bonus (for a total bonus of +13). It can affect animal-intelligence, rat-like magical beasts with a –4 penalty. Animal-intelligence rats never attack dratgon, and it is completely immune to rat swarm damage, natural, magically controlled, or summoned.

Swarm Shape (Su) A dratgon can polymorph into a swarm of dire rats as a standard action. It counts as swarm of Tiny creatures in such form, with AC 19, listed speed and swarm melee attack. Dratgons use this ability to traverse pipes, half-collapsed parts of sewers, and occasionally venture underground, or kill victims in a way that leaves much less attention than their full-scale bites. If a dratgon in a swarm shape moves to space occupied by a mundane or summoned rat swarm, it can take a swift action to absorb the rat swarm regaining hit points equal to the rat swarm's current hit points.

A strange draconic beast that can be occasionally found in the sewers below particularly large and cities, a dratgon looks like a loveless child of a dragon and a rat, or three. While dragons are indeed known for their fecundity and ability to crossbreed with creatures of all kinds, it's really unlikely that they would found suitable rat paramours. Which makes the origins of dratgons a mystery—are they an experiment gone wrong? A descendants of a particularly desperate dragon? A lineage of rats that feasted on a preserved dragon carcass until they grew to resemble their fodder? A lineage of petty dragons that feasted on rats until they degenerated until they started to resemble their prey? Victims of a curse?

Other dragons have little respect for those creatures, considering them degenerate cousins at best, and twisted mockeries at worst, rarely if ever acknowledging any possible kinship.

Setting Ideas: The Green Compromise

Today, we are taking a break from an endless queue of stat-blocks. Recently, I ran into an old background idea of mine that I wrote elsewhere, so I decided to post it here (with a few sentences polished here and there and a few new paragraphs added).

The Green Compromise

A sect of benevolent (or at least staying away from bloodthirsty might-makes-right, eat-or-be-eaten, you-are-either-hunter-or-prey mentality) druids came to a conclusion that further development and expansion of civilization is impossible to stop without resorting to cataclysmic solutions which they wanted to avoid for various reasons (ranging from compassion for other living beings that would be annihilated, through the fact that power needed might exceed their means, and last, but not least, they might destroy themselves as well). Instead, they decided to influence the civilization development, hoping to shape it into a more acceptable form.

They noted that the horizontal and numeric spread of civilization is primarily driven by need for agricultural lands, and at the same time new agricultural lands lead to further increase in population which drives further territorial expansion. This lead them to conclusion, that the territorial spread could be reduced by either preventing or at least reducing population growth or by increasing efficiency of food production.

One of the factions decided that preventing population growth is not feasible solution so they choose the second solution: they harnessed their earth, water, weather, and plant magic to increase soil fertility, provide water and sun in right proportions, enhanced the plants, and multiplied the crops by orders of magnitude. As intended, this slowed but not completely stopped cultivation of new lands for farming, allowing to sustain much bigger urban populations without need for corresponding increase in rural population.

Their assistance came at certain conditions, giving the druids political voice in settlements, important advisory role in matters related to necessary expansion, a degree of sovereignty over wilderness, and some degree of control over population growth and expansion.

However, constantly growing population increases demand for mineral resources, which can't be solved that easily. While some druids have ideas for promoting safe and stable mining practices, even they know it might be a road to nowhere. Unlike plants and animals, minerals can't really be tended to grow in sustainable way... And the process of transporting them alone is a huge issue that requires building roads, reshaping the land, and seeking more and more deposits before the old ones are depleted.

The Green Compromise has to deal with other issues as well. Many forces subtly or not so subtly work to undermine it from all the sides—those who want the expand the untamed wild lands and diminish the civilization, the apologists of unrestricted urban growth, the free farmers who detest the organized, strictly controlled agriculture, and even darker groups scheming to undermine the very balance of the world, destroy the civilization and corrupt the nature. Various druidic factions and wildland communities view the Green Compromise with suspicion, contempt, or outright hatred. Arcane colleges are slowly developing their own alternatives to druidic magic, intending to replace village druids with agricultural magicians. Priests of both rural and urban cults envy the good old times, when they did not have to share their spiritual authority with uncouth animists. Common folk, mercantile organizations, and nobility alike rarely understand the intricacies of equilibrium needed for the system to work, responding to stable supply with increased consumption. Many would like to turn all the wilderness, which was supposed to be preserved by the Green Compromise, into more and more cities and estates.

Can the Green Compromise survive? Will it quickly collapse under onslaught from all the sides or slowly fade away, hacked away piece by piece? Who will come on the top after all is said and done?

Campaign Idea: Rise Of The Green Compromise

The Green Compromise is an idea, a proposal brought by groups of druids before the monarch of a young kingdom surrounded by deep forests and high mountains. They offer to aid the realms with their magic—blessing crops, warding off pests, and mitigating unpredictability of weather—asking in return for restrictions on expansion of settlements, lumbering, and mining.

The court is intrigued but not yet sold on their ideas, and various factions push for and against committing the kingdom to the compromise. Aristocrats holding a lot of agricultural land already, are favorable toward having stable, secure harvests, as do yeoman farmers tending their own farms—while those who hold fiefs which are more forested and would like to expand further, and landless farmers, whose only hope for prosperity is to be settled on newly cleared areas are less swayed by the ideas of lumbering and settlement restrictions. The merchants worry about securing suitable routes through the forests and mountain passes, the priesthoods preach both for or against the idea, as directed by their deities dogmas.

Are the PCs agents of one of the factions working to fulfill their goals (druids, royal court, a magnate or an alliance of many)? Envoys of the court whose role is to examine the possibility of proposed coexistence in practice (or secretly investigate if the druids are trustworthy and honest in their proposals, and not having a secret hostile agenda)? Assembly of representatives of various factions designated to deal with issues that could undermine the Compromise in its infancy?