Why is Scarne imprisoned by dwarves?

The Stonegarden adventure in Raven’s Purge is pretty good, but one thing has always bothered me: why is there a sodding huge dragon buried a kilometre beneath a dwarven city? (Also: why is the only thing keeping it there some semi-magical shackles, rather than said kilometre of rock between it and the surface?)

Similarly, what is the point of the Scarnesbane hammer? It does awesome damage, sure, if you happen to be a dwarven or orcish fighter; but as soon as you get injured it becomes borderline useless.

This is an attempt to answer those two questions, starting with the premise that despite having elves, dwarves, halflings and dragons, Forbidden Lands doesn’t actually need to resemble The Hobbit.

Why should dwarves fear dragons?

On the face of it, giant flying fire-breathing lizards and small underground-dwelling humanoids do not make for the most natural of enemies. Even if the dwarves had loads of gold and shiny jewels that dragons want, so what? The tactics that make dragons formidable opponents – appearing from out of apparently nowhere, breathing fire on large numbers of people, then flying away before archers can reasonably counter-attack – are exactly the sort of thing that doesn’t work against people who live in tunnels under mountains.

Conversely, Galdane Aslene nomads who hunt deer and bison, and herd large numbers of horses and cattle, should absolutely fear dragons, because their very livelihood is also exactly what dragons eat, and you have barely a handful of seconds to shoot the monster who just stole your wealth and/or your lunch before the scaly bastard is hundreds of metres up in the air again, comfortably out of bow range.

Less obviously, but more insidiously, anyone who becomes excessively rich, and starts accumulating large amounts of objects made from precious metals and jewels, is effectively building a hoard, and that can eventually draw a covetous dragon’s interest. Such a robber baron may well build their keep out of stone, which doesn’t burn that well, and tends to be full of angry people with bows, shields and swords. But the surrounding outbuildings, or the nearby houses of the people who keep everyone fed, may well be built out of wood, which burns really nicely. And of course the ultimate food supply for all the people living in or near the keep (i.e. not stockpiles of grain etc. but where the stockpiles come from) is either docile animals which a dragon will joyfully eat, or plants which can also be turned into pretty flames.

The times when dragons are most effective in Tolkien’s writings is when they’re used on the battlefield, for exactly the same reason as bombing unprotected infantry from airplanes is devastating, or when knights in shining armour decide to fight them one-to-one, which is certainly heroic but not what you’d have called the optimal tactical choice. (Maybe that’s the problem: if you’ve already committed to fighting an army, or a dragon has burned up all your crops and you’re starving, fighting the dragon is all you’ve got left. So you may as well go out in a blaze, ahem, of glory.)

But while path dependency is definitely a thing, you’d have to say that dwarves would have to have made many bad decisions before getting into a fight with dragons seemed like the least bad thing to do.

Dwarves should actually like dragons

In fact, if you think about it, dragons and dwarves should be natural allies.

Precisely because their concerns don’t overlap, it’s very easy for the two to come to an arrangement. Dragons want a place to live which is also a convenient base for flying out and hunting prey; where they can store a hoard of shiny things and be confident that goblins or halflings won’t sneak in and steal them; eventually they want to raise a family, or do whatever a dragon otherwise needs to do to ensure that the next generation of dragons happens.

Dwarves are literally in the business of building things like this. You want to be able to fly in through a narrow passage that’s hard to see from the outside, and then enter a vast chamber which has room enough for you to turn around comfortably, any other type of architectural details that dragons like, and can store all sorts of piles of silver, gold, diamonds, emeralds and rubies (not the elven ones, although it would be hilarious if they were)? Sure, our stone-singers can build you one of those. The druids will tell our bears not to bother you. Please don’t eat too many of the goats.

Oh hey, if you ever notice a bunch of angry surface-dwellers with swords and wearing armour coming our way, would you mind strafing them with lethal gouts of fire? We’d like to talk to the guys with the fancy hats first, but you can eat the rest.

IRL my house once got bees. As in, I went into the bedroom and there were bees flying out of a hole in the ceiling where an electric cable came out. I phoned a local bee expert, wanting to know how to get rid of them, and she said “a house with bees is a good house”. So we sealed up the hole, we happily watched the bees come and go from other more appropriate holes in the eaves under the roof, and it turned out that having bees drove the wasps away. Similarly, people who live in the suburbs put bird and bat boxes in their gardens, to encourage wildlife to come and nest.

You should expect mature dwarven cities to want to encourage dragons.

Beyond the obvious military advantage, it’s pretty obvious that when dwarven cities compete to decide which one is better, being able to say “we have a dragon who lives above us and likes us, and you do not” is a pretty solid move. And if your dragon isn’t just powerful but smart, then getting to talk to it from time to time and ask it for advice is amazing. If its price is your miners digging out gold, silver and precious jewels, well, at this point your society is pretty advanced and you already have plenty of people who do things that society doesn’t strictly speaking need (art, architecture, literature, competitive sports etc.), so it’s no stretch to say “hey, the dragon wants shiny things; who’s interested in going looking for interesting minerals?”

Because remember: unlike Tolkien’s dwarves, Forbidden Lands dwarves are not constantly delving too greedily and too deep. They don’t want gold and jewels, particularly. Why shouldn’t they give some to a dragon, if that means the dragon is now their friend?

So why do dwarves dislike dragons now?

Here’s my theory: a significant dwarf city used to have a dragon, and then didn’t, for whichever reason. This was a significant loss of face, which upset and angered many of them. Soon, some bright spark decided that them no longer having a dragon wasn’t bad; no, it was other cities still having dragons which was Bad, Actually. Their city was, this newly-revealed wisdom asserted, at the vanguard of a new movement of dwarven superiority, proud to stand on their own feet rather than bow and scrape to unnatural lizards. And the best way to prove the righteousness of this new movement was to conquer and defeat the other cities’ dragons.

The Forbidden Lands rules (GM’s Guide, p. 88) are typical in describing most dragons as bestial, but some dragons (e.g. the eldest) as powerful and intelligent. It’s not hard to imagine that organised fanatics with guerrilla tactics could take out all the known smart dragons, and once having taken power could rewrite the history books to remove any reference to ancient wise dragons who had useful things to say, while still keeping records of ancient rulers bowing and scraping to large lizards, proffering gifts of precious metals and jewels. The following generations will have known dragons only as stupid, bestial creatures (i.e. the ones that remain); and anybody who remembers dragons as ancient, subtle creatures is now dead.

Any knowledge of dragons that has been preserved has been twisted. Dragons are treacherous, everybody knows, and they will beguile you with sophistry, their unnatural intelligence befuddling you and making you unable to perceive the plain truth (aka what you were taught in religious school, and therefore know to be true). Ancient texts might talk about “dragon words”, which they mean to be rhetorical devices aimed at revealing the truth, like Socratic dialogues; or apparently-contradictory statements revealing a hidden kernel of truth, like Zen koans. (The implication is that some ancient dwarves were interesting enough not to eat, and wise dragons taught them these interesting methods of thinking.) The modern interpretation is that those things are lies, so if someone says anything pro-dragon, it is sufficient to accuse those statements of being “dragon words”, which the right-thinking people know to inherently be wrong and treacherous, and therefore best rejected instinctively out of hand.

If a PC says “I don’t understand, it looks like dwarves used to live in harmony with dragons”, and a dwarf says “ah, that’s exactly the sort of twisted dragon words we’d come to expect from people tainted by the pernicious whispers of the defeated dragons, which nonetheless linger on to deceive the pure and innocent”, and the PCs now want to ask “hang on; you have to decide: were the dragons safely defeated because they were obviously wrong and weak, or are they still around and an active threat that can never be defeated despite the best efforts of even a right-thinking dwarf?”, you have an “aarrgghh, Arvia, no!” moment.

Similarly, received wisdom might be that dragons were hideous monsters, like the things that Zytera created in vast numbers as part of their experiments with demons. But if you can show that dragons existed long before Zytera created monsters, doesn’t that prove that dragons are perfectly natural beings, and the “argument from demons” a post facto rationalisation? Not at all, will argue an anti-dragon zealot: the emergence of Zytera’s hideous creations confirmed the necessity of exterminating the dragons, and the fact that the pioneers of the fight against dragons predated Zytera’s experiments by centuries merely shows how ahead of their times they were, confirming them as true visionaries.

What happened to the anti-dragon movement?

You should expect the leaders of this anti-dragon movement to have worn gratuitously-blinged-out armour, with loads of golden filigree engravings and precious jewels everywhere, even if that would hinder their movement and/or make the armour structurally weaker. Because the point was in part tactical, to encourage enraged dragons to attack the dwarf wearing a gold hat and be taken down by hidden dwarves that it hadn’t noticed; but also symbolic, by saying to the dwarves’ followers: look at the riches that the dragons kept from you!

But once the dragons had been safely defeated, it will have been an easy choice for a dwarven leader to make, faced with competing demands for the city’s limited budget, to decide that the teams charged with fetching gold and jewels for the dragon could be redeployed elsewhere. The crown is awesome and can be used for coronations and other formal affairs, but a lot of the other stuff now looks gaudy and unnecessary; best to store it somewhere safe, where leaders can occasionally go and gawp at it, and the PCs can certainly find it and wonder why dwarves ever built something so impractical, but otherwise let the memories of that period of time fade. This is the true victory of the anti-dragon movement: that barely anyone remembers that being pro- or anti-dragon was even a position that you could take.

The crucial bit here is “barely”. There will be some who remember, who preserve records of the previous ways, who know the true meaning of the paintings on cave walls depicting dwarves parlaying with dragons. Who know the true reason why the dragon Scarne is to be found deep below the halls of Stonegarden.

Why would a dragon be found a kilometre beneath a dwarven city?

Unless the bestial, smaller dragons you can still find in the Ravenlands are somehow a completely different species from the ancient wise dragons that religious fanatics near-exterminated centuries ago, the two must be related in some way. The easiest explanation is that dragons start out bestial, and get larger and more cunning over the years. Maybe that means that before becoming masters of the air, they must first master the other elements, in all their forms? Starting with earth.

Under this interpretation, the place where Scarne has been for hundreds of years now is a dragon nursery. Deep below ground, dreaming, a young dragon can learn to decipher the tremors from distant volcanos; listen to tantalising whispers of molten lava from the bones of the mountains; discover the different tastes of silver, gold, obsidian and diamond, and therefore their true meanings. When its command of earth is complete, it shall emerge from the deep caves to explore the rest of the waking world, until finally it is large and wise enough to make an aerie for itself high in a mountain, to dominate a territory with rich enough hunting to produce offspring. When the eggs are laid, they must be returned to caves deep in the ground for the cycle to begin again. (If you like this sort of thing, play Golden Treasure: The Great Green.)

This is another part of the compact between dwarves and dragons, and one that a small but anxious cadre of dwelvers has been in charge of for far too long now. The hatchling Scarne was very carefully hidden from the rampaging dragon-killers aboveground, for multiple generations, and now that the anti-dragon sentiment has waned in fervour, the conditions for Scarne’s release are now better than they ever have.

Political conditions, that is. Because Scarne has been underground for so long that she has now thoroughly outgrown her nursery.

Scarne is stuck.

Every so often the dwelvers come up and parlay with the King of Stonegarden, urging him to send stone-singers and engineers down below to enlarge the access tunnels so the dragon can escape. (The campaign suggests that Scarne freed of her bonds would be capable of bursting free from a kilometre underground, creating a great crater, but that’s clearly nonsense. Not even dwarves can easily move a kilometre’s worth of rock, and they’re good at this stuff. A young dragon, even one that has spent countless years learning the true nature of the earth in all its forms, is not.)

This would be a great effort, though, even before you start to wonder about the knock-on effects of such intense building work on the structural stability of the city directly above them, or the effect the re-emergence of dragons would have on society. If there are ancient dwarves protecting the memory of dragons, after all, there must also be people on the other side yearning to relive the glory days of the dragon pogroms. A careful student of history will have noticed how many innocent dwarves also died in those wars, and how much collateral damage the conflict did to the harmony of the dwarven cities.

No, best to ignore the problem for now. The dwelvers are respected and holy, of course, but they must understand that what they ask for is too much. Best to smile and nod, thank them for their service, but make sure that nobody actually helps them, by threatening anyone who thinks of doing so with being stripped of their clan. Oh, and part of this agreement is that the dwelvers only speak to the King, and any dwarves venturing into their realm to fetch or surrender birthright coins – a ritual process that will take them only into a very carefully circumscribed part of the undertunnels, and certainly not anywhere where they could find about a sleeping dragon. If the dwelvers were to come up with some mystery about pressure levels making it impossible to speak above a certain altitude, all the better. This is, after all, helping them as well: nobody to help rescue the dragon also means nobody coming down to kill it.

What is the Scarnesbane hammer?

The Scarnesbane hammer was almost certainly not forged as “Scarnesbane”. It possibly had a previous existence as a dragon-killing hammer, and has since been renamed “Scarnesbane”, maybe at the same time it was wrapped with ribbons of dragon-leather (GM’s Guide, p. 139). Maybe this was after the remaining anti-dragon warriors heard whispers of a dragon that had escaped their predecessors, hidden deep beneath the earth, and vowed that it also should perish, the last of its treacherous and unnatural kind. At some point a small group schismed and took the hammer with them, to a location now unknown.

As the campaign begins, someone has found the hammer again, but probably not kept it for long: while a formidable weapon in the hands of a strong and healthy wielder, Scarnesbane becomes a liability as soon as you’re injured even one tiny bit. The trail to Pelagia must be dotted with injured tough guys who found Scarnesbane, pronounced themselves able to defeat all comers, and soon realised their mistake. Their victors seized the hammer and moved on, eventually finding another Charles Atlas type, who in turn pronounced themselves ready to take on all comers, until they in turn were injured, surrendered the hammer etc. etc.

I mean, it’s not a very good weapon, is it? A starting character (Path of the Blade 1; Path of the Arrow 1; Path of Blood 1 casting Immolate) can cripple the wielder with one hit.

So maybe the point of Scarnesbane was as a teaching exercise, like Voller’s helmet (GM’s Guide, pp. 142-143): to make a hammer that’s arguably too heavy, and watch your students try to fight with it. While its powers are fearsome if the wielder manages to hit, the counter-moves are fairly easy to work out too.

Or maybe it was made to troll dwarves? Goblins should be interested in nicking bits of a dragon’s hoard, if only to annoy dragons and/or dwarves, so what better lark than to say to a bunch of angry dwarves without a dragon of their own “here, take this dragon-killing weapon and go wreak havoc”? If the dwarf manages to actually kill a dragon, that’s obviously hilarious; but it’s also pretty funny if a dwarf decides they’re so powerful and mighty now with this magic hammer, picks a fight with other dwarves, but all it takes is a single solitary injury and suddenly they’re struggling to even lift their stupendously over-the-top weapon.

Some further thoughts on the interactions between dwarves and dragons

The savagery of the dwarven civil wars, during which the ancient dragons were killed and the old order overthrown, feels like the sort of episode in history that dwarves should have tried to learn from. Maybe their current obsession with competitions is a way of diverting the natural dwarven urge to quarrel into safer, more productive avenues, instituted by subsequent, more peaceful rulers who decided that this sort of thing should never be allowed to happen again? But current generations just know that this is just how we do things, and have no reason to remember why; much like how the European Union is the successor of the European Community of Coal and Steel, designed to make a third war between France and Germany impossible, but modern-day Europeans barely know that these days.

One of the duties of dwelvers is to store and create birthright coins for the cities above them. It’s easy enough to understand where stalactite and stalagmite coins come from; what about the more exotic ones, made from combinations of obsidian, diamond, gold or other substances? Maybe they get these as a byproduct of raising young dragons? (Do dwarves understand that the coins they take the most pride in are, effectively, dragon shit? Maybe they do.)

Is there a subtle relationship between a dwarf city being (a) open to foreign trade, so having coins made of shiny metal, and (b) having a dragon, who wants shiny metal? Maybe if a city’s economy becomes unbalanced, either because they greedily mint too many metal coins, or because foreigners get too powerful and take too many of the city’s metal coins away into their surface towns, this triggers the dragon’s wrath? Could this be what led to the original religious bigots’ slaying of their dragon, which kicked all of this off?

Talking of breaking the economy, the Glethra mines (GM’s Guide, p. 22) should have at least one dragon sitting on a positively-humongous hoard. Maybe this dragon has grown large enough that they’re no longer simply bestial, but they’re not exactly smart either. They’re smart enough, though, to have a vague feeling that what they need is a more varied diet. Hey, maybe if the PCs could find them some shiny jewels, the dragon could help them out?

Having a more-or-less friendly dragon living near your stronghold would be an amazing source of Reputation, a decent early-warning system if attackers are drawing near, and another way to get rumours to your players. They just need to occasionally placate angry herders: “your pet dragon has eaten my flock again!”

If there are halflings nearby, you might have to persuade them to either move away, or move into your stronghold so you can guarantee their safety. A goblin’s instinct on hearing about an ancient dragon’s hoard is to steal in and start pilfering; but goblins live in forests and are hard to find. Where there are goblins, though, halflings must be nearby; and they like to build neat little villages, tidy orchards and meticulously-tended crop fields, which are very easy to find. Dragons’ ancestral hatred of goblins should therefore have them burning halfling villages on sight.

If you’re looking for a place to stash clues about the ancient relationship between dwarves and dragons, an ancient aerie is a good place to do so. There should be art drawn directly on the rough surface of the nearby caves – the most sacred of all dwarf art – depicting a dwarf and a dragon parlaying, surrounded by precious metals and jewels. Maybe these paintings have been erased or modified (normally sacrilege, but not if the people who do it are priests, of course) in most dwarven cities, but not in far-away abandoned ones. Like, say, Wailer’s Hold.