Ontological Dragon-ness

The following is the consolidation of a few notes and some freewheeling ideas that ended up making up a major part of a very long-running game I DM.

The importance of dragons for a high fantasy world predicated on powerful people adventuring in pursuit of wealth and/or fame is that they are the ultimate mechanism that resets both, ensuring that this mode of existence continues. It is commonly known that dragons hoard: they are likely the biggest scariest thing in a given location, and until slain will collect the wealth of other monsters and would-be slayers. What may be less obvious is that they hoard status: being the biggest scariest thing in a given location, they take credit for the deaths of their would-be slayers. Dragons are smart, and extremely capable of instrumentalizing the world around them: it is rare to approach a dragon’s lair without being accosted by the environment and its inhabitants, and a particularly canny dragon knows to personally come take credit for an adventurer’s death whenever they fall.

The same way that slaying a dragon gives you access to it’s hoard, it also implicitly gives you a measure of status beyond all who fell before it. They failed where you succeeded, after all! In this way, both monetary wealth and great status can exist in the world for later use, held by a being to far othered from “normal” society to use it until that being is killed.

Kobolds are often assumed to worship dragons. The truth is more that predominant kobold culture radically rejects the need for wealth and status to return to the economies of peoples who are so often at odds with them, and consider the properties of ontological dragon-ness as something that itself ought to be collectively shared, a project that often does necessitate cooperation with more traditional dragons. This is a complex relationship and a significant amount of kobold political imagination revolves around the various things that count as “dragons” and what is desirable to do with them.

If you think this seems like kind of a hodgepodge of weird and not fully coherent ideas, to a large extent so do I! They’ve mostly been iterated on over the course of play, in the way most ideas come up in play: unevenly and with more coherent discussion coming up after the fact. The impetus for the whole thing was one of my players wanting to play a dragonborn, but also saying she was more interested in being a human who is turning into a more dragon-y being than the default guy-who-is-shaped-like-a-dragony-thing. The actual dealing with the process of becoming dragonlike was the interesting part.

This spurred a particularly weird memory of a thing I was struck by in the Elder Scrolls game Oblivion. There’s this weird motherfucker named Goblin Jim. He looks like a Breton, but he’s functionally the leader of a gang of goblins, and mostly follows the various rules they do. So we have this guy who by the visual signifiers Oblivion deals in should be a “normal” “person” but who ontologically is a goblin, and seems to have taken on this goblinhood deliberately (the game has zero commentary on him that I recall, and if you can make him friendly he talks like any other npc). While there’s rightfully a lot to dismiss about goblins-as-a-game-convention, the idea of what one might have to do to deliberately experience becoming one (and for that matter being one and becoming not one) has been kicking around in my head for a long while.

And thus by applying these ideas to a different type of fantasy creature the various ideas about dragon-ness formed, and with them a question that became a central pillar of the campaign: what if a dragon recognized the way that dragons seemed to function and decided they wanted to divest themselves of it?