For an upcoming campaign I plan on running dragons as magical beasts with no language or culture, with an intelligence score of around 1 point per age category. They will be a little bit like the dragons in Fred Saberhagen's 12 Swords series... I plan for them to be a central role in the ecology of my setting with dragons existing at every size category from fine to colossal. Pretty much everything either eats dragons or gets eaten by them at some stage in its life cycle.
Can anyone help me build a template to convert the PRD dragons to something like I've described that will produce an accurate CR? Aside from the few spiffy things that come with the 'Dragon' creature type, I need to take into account the simpler tactics due to lower intelligence that will make their spells and spell-like abilities count for a bit less.
You should use the Feral Dragon Template from Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary. It seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
-2 natural armor (minimum +0)
Loses all (Su) and (Sp) abilities except for breath weapon weapons.
Loses spellcasting capabilities.
Loses DR and SR.
+4 Str, -4 Dex (minimum 1), +4 Con, -15 Int (minimum 1), -4 Wis (minimum 1).
CR = HD/2 or original CR-4, whichever is greater.
Thank you! That is a great place to start. $10 sounds like a pretty good deal, I'll give it a look. I'll adjust the intelligence penalty, and keep some of the supernatural abilities and spellcasting for dragons with intelligence greater than 3 but I like the look of it.
Can anyone who has playtested these chime in? Did the encounters seem balanced?
I've used the Advanced Bestiary extensively in my 3.5 games and it works well for PF as well. 2 weeks ago I ran Curse of the Riven Sky, which contains a dragon encounter. I swapped it out for a a dragon of a higher age category with the feral dragon template (2 of them, actually, but I have a group of 8 players). I'm also running RotRL and am swapping out the dragon from FotSG with a feral counterpart.