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Dragon Rider Campaign

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Hello Boards,

I'm considering starting a new campaign influenced by Eragon and a bit of Dragonlance. More the former than the latter. I like the concept of a game world under tyrant rule with fledgling heroes on a quest to restore order, but want to stay within Pathfinder and 3.5 Mechanics. I like the dragon riders angle as I've never played in or run such a game, although honestly I'm thinking more along the lines of intelligent drakes than true dragons. True dragons just seems TOO Powerful and too easy to over shadow the PC themselves.

Anyway, what I'm looking for is some good reference material to help inspire me as well as established rules/campaign setting I can leverage.

Thanks in advance for the help!

If you don't mind using a third party product in your campaign, the following should give you some ideas for your campaign:

The Genius Guide to the Dragonrider

Also, if you want to have some variety with your PCs in a campaign like this, you can rule that a feat like Boon Companion applies to the dragon ally, allowing for a few levels in other classes to customize characters.

So I did a campaign a while back with these elements and it was loads of fun.yous I used mostly Spawns of Tiamat for villeins.
I also made a class based off the Dragon disciple that I'll post if you'd like.
Here is a list of all Draconic Creatures in D&D from wikipedia it will give description and where find them.

Actually, most of the game mechanics that provide a dragon mount have limiters hardwired into them that keep the mounts down to a level where, like a cohort or a Paladin's mount or a Druid's animal companion, they might nab a little spotlight, but they don't steal the show.

Do you want to use the classic chromatic dragons? In that case, your campaign will have to start at a fairly high level and be quite high-powered. If you want that, go for it, there's plenty of material in the 3.5 book of dragons and whatever (I'm more of a homebrewer so can't point to that much in detail).

If you want more of the grimness of "a few heroes against a corrupt world" you might want to use non-standard dragons and a lower level. Levels 6-10 are considered by many to be the "heroic" adventure levels (as opposed to "gritty" 1-5 and "wuxia" 11-15) so that might be a good place to fit them; they feel larger than life and have cool powers but not so powerful as to be able to stare down armies or treat demons as their b%+++es. Even levels 1-5 might work, though they probably shouldn't ride dragons below level 4 at least or it would feel weird.

For a really basic "drake", do a half-dragon horse or some other Large animal and use that as the base; you can alter afterwards. I generally prefer my low-powered dragons to be sentient though not very intelligent; somewhere in the 4-6 range of intelligence, though YMMV. Having an above-average wisdom but low intelligence would make them kind of animalistic, but still sensitive good on the "common sense" stuff; down to earth (hehe bad pun) but still not up to advanced plotting and the like, and give them kind of a "feral" touch so to speak.

I've never run a dragon rider campaign, but my campaign world features dragon riders as NPCs and they've met both friendly and unfriendly dragons.

The 3.5 book Dragon Magic from WOTC had some draconic mounts and such in it as well.

However, as I pointed out above, in the Dragonrider product from SGG, they have the traditional "big ten" dragons stated out in a manner similar to animal companions from the core book, so that you can start out with standard dragons from 1st level.
KnightErrantJR wrote:


However, as I pointed out above, in the Dragonrider product from SGG, they have the traditional "big ten" dragons stated out in a manner similar to animal companions from the core book, so that you can start out with standard dragons from 1st level.

This is important if you're planning to play at low levels. Most sources don't allow access to dragons large enough to serve as mounts for medium characters until level 8ish.

Thanks for the quick input everyone. A few more details.
The big bad guy is the current king so the PC's will be part of the resistance. The true story analog would be Eragon. My thought is the PC's would need to protect their mounts early in life. Say pseudo dragon or shock lizard size to start but animals growing in size as the players grow in levels.

At 3rd level or so, when the dragons are about the size of say large wolf or pony I plan on providing a bonus Feat called Soul Meld. This allows them to merge with their companion. Basically this allows me to have story's/encounters without the dragons on the board as well as not worry about dungeon crawls and such. I should say the soul meld is not a sending of the dragon to another plane, there companions will just be riding in the back seat of their brains experience life as their rider does. I hope this will provide some fun role-playing opportunities as well =)

6th level I do expect the flying mounted combat to be more prevalent and then we will go from there.

Lastly the DragonRider abilities will go up in addition to their class abilities. This way we can still have a rogue, a wiz, a fighter etc..

Balancing it will be tricky, and may require some innovative tweaks to the rules on your part, but the easiest way to do this, in my oppinion, would be a form of gestalt.

Use the SSG dragonrider base class, and gestalt it alongside the character's levels. Leave the BAB, Saves, Hit Dice, etc that of their other class, but give them the abilities of the Dragon Rider (with some exceptions, this would require some tweaking like I said lol.)

If you don't mind having them ride creatures that aren't exactly dragons, just give everyone a dragon companion that works like an Eidolon. That way they can build their "dragon" from 1st level.

Edit: Looks like you intended them to start out protecting them and not riding them, so this might work well.

I did pick up the DragonRider pdf so thank you for that. I'm liking what I see. My thoughts are indeed to use just the class ability table in addition to the PC Classes. This should allow me to maintain a fairly traditional feel with the dragons being something extra.

Yes the first few levels will be more of the PC's protecting there companions, even trying to keep them secret. Later they will play a more direct part in combat. Growing in ability as the players do. The DragonRiders were peacekeepers of old and a direct threat to the current evil king who is one. Most likely he'll have some converted Lt as well. The betrayers of their order. The PC's will be a new hope in an oppressed world. I want to get them use to protecting others (there dragons) so it will be habit when they start protecting others.

Well hopefully. You never know how players will act =)
Jax wrote:

I did pick up the DragonRider pdf so thank you for that. I'm liking what I see. My thoughts are indeed to use just the class ability table in addition to the PC Classes. This should allow me to maintain a fairly traditional feel with the dragons being something extra.

Yeah, if everyone gets a dragon that progresses the same on the chart, everyone is even in that regard.

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