While you’re most likely more than familiar with dragons inDungeons & Dragons, Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse adds information on the time dragons. Known to have the power to manipulate the past, present, and future, these dragons are significantly powerful.
Whether you’ll use them in your campaign is up to you, but they’re great additions to any setting for their abilities to change your game with their powers or their love for history to change your game. Due to their ability to literally change the fate of the world by making different decisions, they’re perfect additions for when you need to shake things up.
What Are Time Dragons
You’ll recognize them as soon as they are born. Time dragon wyrmlings have shining scales and tiny nubs of horns, making them directly obvious and standing out from other dragon types.
As they grow and learn how to manipulate time, their horns grow in beautiful rainbow-hued veins.
Eventually,time dragons can create complete temporal gates. These gates can not onlygo to specific times throughout the multiverse, but they can also go to different placeswithin time.
They are usuallyfascinated with history. They love historical records and objects that represent it, including treasures from lost or forgotten cultures. They’re alsointrigued by long, old, and ancient forms of magic and knowledge.
This is reflected in their dragon hordes, where you’ll see more of avariety of historical items and invaluable informationthat may just be lost to time from times long past.Their treasure is knowledgemore than physical hordes of items.
Time dragons have a cycle of rebirth. If they die, their soul is essentially recycled by combining with an egg; then it’s teleported to a random plane of existence.
When the egg hatches, the time dragon within willretain all of their knowledge and memories from their previous life.
A time dragon egg is immune to all damageand can take up to 100 years to hatch.
How To Use Time Dragons
With their love for historical facts and information and their literal game-changing abilities, there are a ton of ways to use time dragons.
Whether you’re using them in Planescape or your own campaign, you’ve got options for parsing information or literally changing fate and the past, which will alter the future.
Manipulating Time With Time Dragons
If you’ve gota plot that you want to change or a story you want to subvert,introducing a time dragon is the perfect option.
With theirability to travel to any place and time in the multiverse, they can take an adventuring partyinto the past to change a decision they’ve made, altering its effects in the future.
Whether you want them to travel back in time to stop a war or a plague or destroy the big bad evil before they become a threat, a friendly rapport with a time dragon opens so many possibilities.
Remember, however, that these dragons love to collect and preserve history; decide whether they’ll actually be interested in changing events of the past for the benefit of your players.
They may need to find the proper approach, perhaps intriguing the dragon with what changing history could mean or researching what the effects are could rouse them to your player’s side.
Remember to consider the type of players you have. Ensure they won’t upset a time dragon should they interact with it. They are typically neutral beings but don’t underplay their might.
Should your players upset a time dragon, consider the consequences of what that might do to the world, whether it’s making the players go back in time and redo the interaction or changing something in the past that could devastate their present condition.
They can use theirTime Gate ability once per day to create a portalto a specific location8,000 years from the present; whether in the past or future is up to you.
The portal lasts for 24 hours, so players will be on a time limit when deciding to use it. It can be obstructed by other deities at its destination point such asthe Lady of Pain.
Using Time Dragons In Battle
Ancient time dragons are gargantuan in size, so be prepared when planning on how to express just how huge they are compared to your player characters.
Make sure you consider everything they bring to the table before unleashing them and understand the difference between an adult time dragon, an ancient time dragon, and a young time dragon.
How To Use Them
Time Dragon Wyrmling
Good for a typical party of four at fifth level, this medium dragon knows draconic and two other languages. At this stage, the rend attacks don’t do enough damage to cause too much chaos, but if you choose to do all three, prepare for what may be a party wipe. Utilize the Time Breath attack here on the environment to showcase the power of the time dragon, but avoid using it against your players if you want them to survive. Use this level to introduce what this dragon can do as it grows.
Young Time Dragon
With more than double the hit points of its predecessor and a higher AC, all of its stats increase, and the young time dragon increases in size to large. Rend attacks do more damage, and time breath affects a larger area. You’ll use this dragon against a party of four to six players who are at least level 11 or higher. This time, you’ll want to actually use the Time Breath attack against the party.
Adult Time Dragon
It’s time to incorporate lair actions into your setup if using an adult time dragon. The lair actions increase their AC by 1 for this level and the next, and provide Temporal actions to have some fun when using them against players. These include moving forward in time and being in two places at once. With a high AC, legendary resistances and multiple reactions to choose from, this dragon shouldn’t be used against any group under level 18.
Ancient Time Dragon
You most likely won’t be using an ancient time dragon in combat unless you’re willing to kill your entire party. With a challenge rating of 26, and more than 500 hit points, it’ll be a tough battle. If you do use it, be sure to use Slow Time to stop your players from moving, Time Slip to half damage against you.
No matter what, be sure to use Time Gate if things are getting too bad. This move allows the dragon to open a portal in space between their horns that can go to any plane of existence at any point up to 8,000 years from the current time, whether it be in the past or the future. This is where you can control the flow of the game should things look grim for your players.
A great idea is to use a time dragon wyrmling that develops and grows over the course of the campaign, allowing your players to see how much stronger it becomes as it grows older.
You can use it as a challenge against your players instead of just an all-out attack against enemies. They are civil enough to agree to a challenge if they can learn something from it.
Next:Dungeons & Dragons: Every Gate–Town In Planescape: Adventures In The Multiverse, Ranked
