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 |
A chromatic dragon. See the Dragon overview and its kin: White, Black, Green, Blue, Red.
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
Session 33 — A white dragon aboard Skyreach Castle
The company's first white wyrm fought alongside the Cult of the Dragon aboard the flying fortress Skyreach Castle — an adult white dragon grown to its full strength and bound to the cult's service through one of the dragon masks that bend a chromatic to another's will. They never had its name; to the company it was only the cult's white wyrm. 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 47–49 — 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 approached on the testimony of Maccath the Crimson, the Brotherhood's foremost dragon-scholar, and then they fought him in his own halls.
Heed what they paid to learn, for this one reached well beyond the common run of its kind:
- It wields spells. Old White Death layers frost-sorcery atop its breath — walls and spheres of killing ice, bolts of chill, a clutching cold — and it is no fool with them. Expect far more than tooth, claw, and breath.
- It will not be seen when it does not wish to be. It drank draughts of invisibility and simply vanished, striking from nowhere; and it drank healing from its own hoard to undo the company's best work. Bring a way to find what you cannot see.
- Its lair is a second enemy. Blinding sleet, a dense killing fog, walls of ice thrown up to sunder the party, and icicles loosed from the ceiling — the very cavern fought them, turn upon turn.
- It commands the cold itself, calling up an ice elemental whose nearness alone is a wound.
- Its terror is real — the sight of it bearing down rooted the brave in place.
- It can refuse magic — but only so many times. The company found the seam: press it on what it is slow to dodge (its wits and its footwork are its weak points), hex it so it cannot, and each refusal spends a little of that defiance. They emptied it entirely — and still it was not enough.
The grim truth, set down plainly: the company drove it past half its strength, spent every one of its defiances — and it killed them to the last. Cold-warding rings and boots, which halved its frost, were the only reason they lasted as long as they did. That they drew breath again at all is owed not to the blade but to an infernal bargain that hauled their souls back into the fight. Do not mistake a single grown white for a manageable foe. An elder of the kind, in its own ice, with spells on its tongue, is a campaign-ender.