Adult White Dragon
| Harper Field Dossier | |
|---|---|
| Combat reference | |
| Type | Chromatic dragon (white) — the coldest and most feral of dragonkind |
| Vulnerabilities | None discovered; fire remains the Harpers' wager (unconfirmed) |
| Resistances | None known — it carries no charm against any blow but cold |
| Immunities | Cold of every kind: frost, ice, the deep-winter chill |
| Condition Immunities | None known |
| Strong Saves | Shrugs off effects that test reflexes, constitution, willpower, or force of personality |
| Senses | Sees in utter dark; senses hidden things close by without sight; keen of scent and hearing |
| Movement | Flies; swims and is at home beneath the ice; crosses ice and snow without slipping |
| Notable Abilities | A cone of killing frost, loosed again and again; a terror that roots the brave in place; can refuse binding magic outright a few times over; strikes with bite, claw, and tail at once and beats its wings to scatter foes and take wing |
| Provenance | |
| Knowledge | Well-attested — two encounters and the testimony of Maccath the Crimson, the Brotherhood's foremost dragon scholar |
| First Encountered | Session 33, aboard Skyreach Castle |
| Filed by | Agent Wren, of the Tellstone circle |
Filed to the company's book, and added to with each white wyrm you meet. — Wren
The Harpers' Read
This is no clever monster — it is a patient one, and a hungry one, and the cold is not its weapon so much as its home. The box at right holds what your company has paid to learn; here is what the circle makes of it.
We found no hurt it suffers worse than another, so pin no hope on a frailty unseen — though every old dossier and every frost-giant's song agrees that a thing which is winter should fear fire. Carry flame, but carry a plan that does not need it.
Do not meet it on the ice, where its footing and its wings and its swimming all tell against you. Spread wide before its breath, for it will wait, and herd you close, and spend that frost where it costs you most. Expect your finest binding to be shrugged aside, and have your next answer ready before it is. And steel your people against its terror before they stand in its shadow — not after.
Encounters of Record
The company's first white wyrm fought alongside the Cult of the Dragon aboard the flying fortress Skyreach Castle — Glazhael the Cloudchaser, grown to its adult strength and bound to the cult's service through one of the dragon masks that bend a chromatic to another's will. When the party stormed the castle and put the cult commander Rezmir to the sword, the dragon joined the brawl, took its wounds, and broke off — fleeing to lick them rather than die.
Two things the circle marks from it: a white dragon guards its hoard with uncanny exactness and knows at once when so much as a sapphire is moved; and even an adult will quit a fight it judges lost. Drive one off and it lives to be hunted another day.
Sessions 47–48 — Arauthator, "Old White Death," in Oyaviggaton
Far to the north, in the iceberg lair of Oyaviggaton amid the Sea of Moving Ice, the company came against a far older wyrm — Arauthator, called Old White Death, grown well past the adult of its kind though not yet the equal of the truly ancient. They have not yet struck the first blow; what follows is reconnaissance and the testimony of Maccath the Crimson, a captive scholar and the Brotherhood's foremost authority on dragons.
Mark these, for they reach beyond the common run of its kind:
- It wields spells. This one has learned magic beyond a dragon's birthright and layers frost-sorcery atop its breath — expect more than tooth, claw, and cold.
- It freezes the living into statuary. The company found Maccath's guards and would-be escapees set into the cavern walls as ice. Assume the fallen may be kept, not eaten.
- Its lair bends the very weather — unnatural winds and a killing cold for miles about, such that even the bronze dragon Verithrax and the marid Mick would not draw near. Fight it on its own ground and the ground itself fights you.
- It knows its hoard to the last coin — the very trait the company first saw in Glazhael the Cloudchaser. Theft will not go unnoticed.
- It holds an ice-hunter clan hostage and fills its tunnels with kobolds, ice trolls, and giant toads; the halls are slick ice with little room to turn.
To blunt its cold the company armed itself well — a ring and boots that turn the chill aside, gear to keep their footing on the ice, and frost-bane arrows from Maccath's own hand. When the book carries word of the reckoning itself, this page will grow.