Sunday, June 23, 2013

My problem with dragons.

From this site.
OK, so having analysed the Night Dragon as a villain, and rediscovered some chagrin that I had
concerning dragons and other large, all powerful creatures with almost no equal, immense magical power, massive hordes of treasure and the intellectual ability far beyond that of the greatest minds of their time combined.

And my chagrin lies with the fact that dragons are generally just used as big powerful boss monsters.  For some reason, it's OK for a (usually) physically weak evil sorcerer to command armies, come up with super devious plots and come within an inch of taking over the world, but for some reason, despite being way more powerful, Dragons seem content with sleeping on their hordes.  Why are they not seen as gods, with each dragon commanding a whole civilisation swaying its growth and development - having its own priesthood and army and the king of the humans is appointed to do its bidding, such as gather as much treasure for them as possible, their favourite foods or expand their territory.

Instead, the most powerful and intelligent beings in the world just horde treasure and eat. 

I know that the Night Dragon does have a huge cult, but I get the impression that they grew themselves to wake it up and not because the Night Dragon itself ordered it to be so. 

Of course, if dragons did unleash all their potential on the world then it would be very different - humans would make less of a difference to the world.  No human could be top dog, and even if some humans lived under the rule of good dragons, then their lives would still have less meaning.  I guess dragons could arrange a situation where other races get on with their thing and they ask for the occasional offering (such as in Choice of Dragon), which might make more sense because then they would not have the boring job of actually maintaining their kingdoms.  There is also the Izzet Guild in ravnica which is run by a dragon and this has the situation I described above - the dragon in question has built up this guild around it to provide it with what it wants.  The people of Magic the Gathering have also come up with the idea that dragons one some planes (such as Jund an most dragons on Ravnica before they were hunted to near extinction) are just massive reptiles with little intelligence - just raw power.  However, this takes something away from dragons - why not just have a massive T-Rex?

Something I just wanted to get off my chest.

2 comments:

  1. Dragons lack the cultural predisposition to rule.

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  2. They might not, but then why don't they fly around terrorizing human kingdoms for treasure and meat rather than actually ruling them? There must be more to dragons than sleeping on treasure hordes and waiting for adventurers to kill them or warlocks to enslave them. They must have done something to amass such a horde in the first place.

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