Tags
Basic, Dragon, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, OSR, Random Tables, Random Thursday, RPG
Fire breathing dragons?! Bah, I met one back when I was a lowly undercleric of Googlymoogly who breathed the fetid remains of his past meals, a foul miasma that stuck you to the ground where you stood, and those that died choking on the muck turned on their fellows as foul zombies!
I wrote about customizing & re-skinning dragons back in early 2011 – one of the key parts of re-skinning them, in my experience, is to give each dragon a unique breath weapon. Thus I bring back the [Random Thursday] tag to present you with 12 alternate dragon breaths!
d12 Random Dragon Breaths
- Crystal Shards (cone, no special effect, characters with a shield get +2 on their saving throw)
- Explosive Fumes (fire damage in a cloud effect instead of a cone)
- Horrendous Black Goo (line effect, those who fail their save also have their movement rate halved for 1d4 turns)
- Sonic Blast (cone, sonic damage, characters failing their save suffer deafness for 1d12 days)
- Foul and Mighty Wind (cone, half damage, characters failing their save are knocked back 5 feet per hit die of the dragon)
- Rotting and Decomposing Flesh (line, characters failing their save are also infected with a horrible wasting disease that reduces Strength and Constitution by 1d6 points each day until cured)
- Napalm and Hellfire (fire damage, line, characters failing their save are covered in flaming goo and suffer an additional 2d12 damage per round for 1d6 rounds)
- Eldritch Force (magic damage, line, characters failing their save are also subject to dispel magic being cast on all their currently active spells)
- Black Vapours of Death (magic damage, cloud, those slain by the damage are immediately animated as zombies under the control of the dragon)
- Psychotropic Gas (poison damage, cloud, characters failing their save are subject to the effects of the confusion spell for 1 round per 2 HD of the dragon)
- Brilliance (magic damage, cone, characters failing their save are blinded for 1 round per 2 HD of the dragon)
- Absolution (magic damage, cone, those slain by this breath weapon cannot be raised or resurrected until the dragon is slain)
Have any more awesome dragon breaths that we can compile into a second (third?) table of dragon breaths?
Quite a while ago, as a player, I ran into a dragon who’s breath teleported those hit away… I’ve been thinking of trying a breath weapon that would send PCs through time, myself, but I haven’t really had the guts to pull that in a game…
I love it. I’ll definitely use that for the next 12 Strange Breath Weapons. Have it transport those who fail their save 1d4+1 rounds into the future. Thus splitting up the party into nice killable groups without making the DM deal with time travel too much.
Yeah, see, that’s much more reasonable than what I came up with =P d20-d20 years (and roll d365 for extra days) would make a bit more of a mess of things…
I have a Toad Dragon lurking around my game, which is basically a reskinned green dragon, except it spews out blood sucking tadpoles in its slimy breath attack. Save or have d6 toadspawn leeches stuck to you that do d4 damage a round (treat as stirges). So far my players have avoided that corner of the sandbox.
Did someone mention “toad”?
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Bit late to the party but in the Microlite74 supplement I wrote I had one that breathed slime that hardened up quickly and could be dissolved by alcohol, but was explosive, and another that breathed rusting gas.
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