u/King-Nuggetz — reddlx

“YOU DARE CHALLENGE THE QUEEN OF DRAGONS, PREPARE TO BE STAINS UPON THE EARTH, YOU METTLESOME INSECTS!!!!!”

I present to you, my Magnum Opus, the culmination of 6 years of meticulous planning and careful crafting, all to lead up to this truly legendary encounter. This is no mere dragon, this is THE dragon, a devastating force of terrifying power, that is sure to be lethal to any party facing her unprepared. I wished to create a stat block that I believed was the truest representation of the all powerful might of the Queen of Dragons. An absolutely stacked roster of custom abilities and souped up actions, improving on the OG stat block in every way, tailored for only the highest level of play. It took the combined effort of 6x 20th lvl and 6x 16th lvl characters, along with a few companions and summons, to take down this mighty beast, with nothing short of 3 wishes. Think you can best the five headed tyrant, I’d like to see you try ;p

And what’s an epic boss fight without an unforgettable intro? I have links to an edit I made of my favorite song ever (Sacred Worlds by Blind Guardian), to serve as adequate boss music. I sampled various Hearthstone sound effects/voice lines, general sfx, along with my own voice, to create my masterpiece. I made two versions, one that is purely instrumental and one that has the original lyrics for the song. (My edits end after 2:10)

Let me know what you think, or if you have a strategy you think could take down the Mother of Dragonkind.

Glory Draconis https://on.soundcloud.com/tDmGpvKJpkR36YY3S4

Glory Draconis - Instrumental https://on.soundcloud.com/gv9zInwrLkeoRx3b20

A few weeks ago I finished a six year long Tyranny of Dragons campaign, with 6 lvl 20 characters for a truly epic and unforgettable cage fight against my custom Tiamat statblock. The journey to the eventual fight to the death was super fun and full of exciting twists and turns throughout the narrative. But there was one experimental decision in particular that made this game truly awesome. Having grown up a dragon girlie, this was a game I always wanted to run, and when Fizban’s Treasury came out, I knew what I had to do…..shove as many dragons in this game as possible. Having the characters go though Lost Mines of Phandelver, with the intent to have the players hit lvl 20 before facing the Queen of Dragons, I knew I needed to soup up the encounters in the second book. Fearing the inevitable power creep, I came up with an ingenious solution that not only allowed me to not scale up my combat as quickly, but aided in world growth in ways I could not have foreseen.

When preparing for the first Council of Waterdeep, I had each player make a secondary character that was 4 lvls below their main. But these wouldn’t just be any characters, they would each be representatives of the different factions that came together in the council. Now I know the councils are supposed to be more of negotiations with the various factions, but because of how world ending I made this threat feel, there really wasn’t a good reason for most factions to not help in joining the cause. These side characters were created half by the players, half by me, mainly because my players weren’t too familiar with all the factions of the Sword Coast. With all that being said, we had two members of the Emeral Enclave, one of Waterdeep’s court wizards, a Ascendant Dragon Monk, a dwarven fighter, and a bone devil’s warlock join the party. Now with each player having two characters, it allowed for the splitting of the main party, making two groups that could take on the two missions in between each council simultaneously. Not only did this allow for the shortening of the “in game” time that happened in between each council, adding to the urgency and suspense, but with each different combination of 3main 3side, gave each chapter a different feel and allowed for some unforgettable role play moments. I had essentially doubled the cast, and in doing so, quadrupled the role play potential, with each player not only getting to role play as a new character in the narrative, but to also interact with members of the main party in new and exciting ways.
In a way, we created 1/2 npcs, in the sense that their inclusion greatly increased the scope of the world. By implementing this, I allowed my players to fill out the world for me and it made every combat encounter feel fresh and challenging. Not only because of the lvl/ability disparity, but just the ability to switch up party makeups and have the characters rp their decisions on who to send where during the later councils.

By the end, the party consisted of 6 lvl 20 and 6 lvl 16 heroes, with the side characters fighting in the war while the main party went to storm the temple. Once Tiamat was released, a player used Wish to summon their side characters to help in the fight and the three session long slugfest was my favorite moment in all of my time DMing. (Thanks TaleSpire for making it happen ;p)

If you have any questions at all about how I went about this experimental decision or just my campaign in general, ask away and I’ll be happy to answer. ;p

(Map Reference) Well of Dragons Tiamat’s Temple – Tyranny of Dragons by pendragoon

(Tiamat Phase I Model Reference) Tiamat the Dragon Queen by mZ4250 painted by Jerbo-Paints

(Tiamat Phase II Model Reference) Goddess Queen and Mother of Dragons, Tiamat by Scott_Cross

(Severin and Character models made by me ;p)