Adult White Dragon
| Harper Field Dossier | |
|---|---|
| Combat reference | |
| Type | Unestablished |
| Vulnerabilities | None discovered |
| Resistances | None known |
| Immunities | None known |
| Condition Immunities | None known |
| Strong Saves | Unknown |
| Senses | Sees in utter dark; scents and hears the hidden; feels prey through stone and ice |
| Movement | Unknown |
| Notable Abilities | Unknown |
| Provenance | |
| Knowledge | Partial — first-hand, but a single encounter |
| First Encountered | Session ##, on a high glacier shelf |
| Filed by | Agent Wren, of the Tellstone circle |
Filed to the company's book after first contact. Read it before you climb back up that ice. — Wren
Dispatch
You came down off that shelf alive, which is more than most who cross a grown white can say, so let me set down what we paid for while it is fresh. I have matched your account against three older Harper dossiers and a frost-giant's hunting song, and they all agree. This is not a clever monster — it is a patient one, and a hungry one, and the cold is not its weapon so much as its home. Take everything below as hard-won and incomplete: we have seen it only once.
What Bites Deepest
The honest truth, and I will not dress it: we found no hurt it suffers worse than any other. Steel and spell bit it as they would bite any great beast, no more. Do not count on a frailty we have not seen. That said — every reckoning the circle keeps of the white kind points the same way the giants' songs do: a creature that is winter has the most to fear from fire. We file that as a wager, not a fact. Bring flame, but do not stake your lives on it being the beast's undoing until the book can say so in ink.
What It Shrugs Off
The cold does nothing to it — nothing. Frost, rime, the breath of another such wyrm, the killing chill that drops men in the passes: all of it slides off as though it were warmth. Spend no spell freezing what was born of the freeze. Beyond that, it is simply hard to put down — blows that should have felled it merely angered it, and it fights well past where a natural thing would break. And mark this: more than once it will simply refuse magic that ought to have bound it — a holding, a slumber, a binding — and shake free as if you had never cast. Plan your finest spell to be ignored, and have a second answer ready.
Hard to Unfoot
It is a difficult thing to truly rattle. Efforts to frighten it, to poison it, to wear it to exhaustion, or to twist its will with charm or illusion tend to wash off — its body and its dull, proud mind both resist what would unmake a person. Its own terror, though, it spends freely on you: the mere sight of it bearing down can root a brave soul in place. Steel your people for that before you stand in its shadow, not after.
Its Gifts for Murder
Its chief horror is its breath — a roaring cone of killing cold that it looses without warning and into the thick of you. It will wait, herd you together, and spend it when it costs you most; give it only a moment's pause and it gathers that frost again. In close it is bite, talon, and the lash of its tail all at once, and it can sweep its wings to beat the ground-bound back and haul itself aloft. It is as much at home beneath the ice and in the black water as above it, and it crosses sheer ice and packed snow as easily as you cross a meadow. You will not outrun it on its own ground.
How It Hunts
It lairs high and cold — glacier, ice cave, frozen gorge — and knows every span of that ground. It hoards what it kills and nurses a slight for years. Expect it to mark you from far off by sound and scent, to strike from above or out of the snow, and to turn the terrain — crevasse, white-out, frozen river — against legs that do not belong there. It is feral, not cunning; its traps are the mountain itself, not schemes.
Standing Advice
- Do not fight it on the ice. Choose ground where its footing, swimming, and flight count for less.
- Spread out before the breath comes, and never bunch within a cone of it.
- Bring fire — but bring a plan that works without it.
- Spend nothing on cold. It is wasted.
- Expect your best binding to be shrugged off, and have the next move ready.
- Guard against its terror the moment it shows itself.
Knowledge Ledger
The company's running account. Move entries upward as they are proven.
- Confirmed
- Untouched by cold of every kind. Fights past natural endurance and has thrown off binding magic outright. Breathes a cone of lethal frost and can do so again after only a short pause. Moves freely over ice and snow and is at ease in water. Strikes with bite, claw, and tail, and beats its wings to clear foes or take to the air.
- Suspected
- That fire is its surest undoing. That it holds a deep grudge and will hunt the company again. That its lair holds a hoard worth the climb.
- Still Dark
- Whether it answers to anything greater, or lairs alone. Whether others of its blood share that shelf. The reach of its breath and how often it can be spent. Any true frailty we have not yet found.
Encounters of Record
- Session ## – First sighting and first blood, on a high glacier shelf. (Set the session and place; expand as the company crosses its path again.)