What Subduing a Dragon Means

Hubris.

HUBRIS.

You tore it out of the sky.

Pushed your fingers through the romantic film of wonder.

Gripped a timebreaking god.

It lies twisted around itself, burning in rope, gaining scars in chains.

Its scales shimmer. The thing in your chest that drew you to do this beats at you to reach through.

Become bloody-handed.

TAKE.

OWN.

Break its skin with your fingertips.

Root around inside for the thing that makes it a god.

Ignore the long-tongued cries of pain.

Pain boiling reality around it.

You can't care. You're too close.

Pull

out

its

flight

and

its

fire.

 

Forever now, you may fly,

lest something tear it out of you.

Feel trust slip away from you forever.

 

Fire is larval genesis.

Hold it and know all fire spells.                       (Cast as a caster of your level)

1% of fire, any fire, will become

 

GENESIS  — late-stage destruction, as burnings start to curl, recolour, bloat, and reshape.

Fire that burns the right way can rewrite reality, or become something that doesn't exist yet.

                                                                     (Table perhaps to come, otherwise use a giant one — jam several together, ie d100 on five stacked d20 tables. It doesn't matter what they're

                                                                     for... encounters, mutations, anything. When it happens, make it big. World's already destroyed, eh? Might as well make it a little worse.)      

But of course, there is one other god:

CAPITAL.

Are you shrewd enough to negotiate a price for what makes a dragon a god?

For a dragon itself?

You will see kingdoms.

 

Dragons always escape. But it could be in a hundred years.

If they do, they will seek you. But they aren't gods anymore,

just big reptiles that drool curses,

mutter colourful grief for their flight.

They've no fire; only what few lightning bolts they catch in their mouths.

 

Killing a dragon permanently is a Carcosan feat.

 

Knowing this, can you sell what you've reaped?

CAPITAL can take all your worries away.

Sequester you in an unimaginable fortress of dreams.

Enact your will in parts of the world you'll never have to see.

It will give you more and more. Your word will mean more and more.

 

Have you heard of numen? A simple nod to accomplish anything?

Sell the dragon. Sell the flight. Sell the fire. CAPITAL will give you numen,

build the pyramid of aching labourers and broken backs,

manpower and mass graves, worshipers and pseudoslaves

to make anything so. What's some overbeast past its time compared to that?

 

This is how we drained the wonder out of the world.

Leave flying and genesis to the overripe who bought them from you.

Accept CAPITAL and anything will be yours.

This place is already a mud-wound filled with melting plastic.

We should have left the beautiful things were they were,

but we made our choice.