As you're probably aware, the old Dragon Tower is no more. No longer will a bunch of different dragons with wildly different preferred environments dwell together frat-house-like, playing pranks on the dean who yells 'Dragon house!' in anger. Probably details about the tiny bit of questiness and echoes involved will be posted here soon; this post is to talk about some of the mechanics of this.

A ruined dragon tower stands in place of the dragon tower of old.

Additionally, Tiamat and the five ancient dragons have each established lairs of their own, scattered throughout Thera. Each of these is a very small area explore.

In a sense this is an experiment in a different kind of exploration challenge; there's little special knowledge to find or puzzles to figure out, beyond discovering the lair locations themselves, and I imagine they'll all be reasonably well known soon as word gets around. What they are, however, is a much bigger challenge with much smarter dragons than you've encountered in the past. Along these lines, the rewards are much higher as well. In terms of pure hp/dam/etc. stats, the dragons haven't gotten a lot tougher and Tiamat specifically actually got powered down significantly, but... well, you'll just have to see.

I strongly recommend you take on most or all of the Ancient Five before trying to tackle the new Tiamat. Consider it a friendly piece of advice.


Some thing else of interest debuting here is the concept of area clustering. If you use the where command in the area the green lair attaches to (for example), you can see PCs in the green lair, and vice versa. Currently, this is only for the no-arguments where command only -- it doesn't change how call lightning, stalk, swimto, etc. work. Currently, this is only being used on the six lairs. We'll be keeping an eye on how this works out and consider expanding it somewhat to reduce the size of the world as far as looking for enemies. We're still discussing the best way to handle the other factors around this.

- Nepenthe

Yhorian