A little background might be helpful. The dragon in question was an Adult silver dragon by the name of Jevik. (I'm running 3.x, with a homebrewed dragon-building system, but sufficed to say he was Huge and had ten HD.) He was once a member of Chamber, though along the way lost his way and went rogue. While going rogue, he fell further, becoming a reflavored Disciple of Ashardalon from Draconomicon. (Said reflavoring involves cutting out his own heart and replacing it with a Khyber shard with a creature of Khyber bound inside it.) Jevik spent his time in Sharn, running a gnoll gang while alternate form'd which controlled most of the Lower Dura Ward. Contra the canon, in this particular game the Boromars were thrown out of the Lower Dura Ward by Jevik's gang and Daask following the fall of Greywall, with the latter two having been at the throats since then. The PCs engineered a chain of events that set Daask on the offensive against Jevik's gang in attempt usurp control of the Lower Dura Ward beyond Malleon's Gate, which in turn led to a monstrous gang war that the party had to intervene in to put an end to. (Well, more precisely, they got to watch Jevik kill Cavallach, then had to kill Jevik.) They now have themselves a dead dragon, in the bowels of Sharn, which could well be a hook for more adventures.
With that ground covered, I'd like to solicit any feedback on what could be done with Jevik's corpse that could be an interesting turn: My general idea, at this juncture, is for one or more groups to approach the PCs and offer to buy some or all of it, potentially currying favor or scorn with who they do or do not select. Below are a list of groups that I think might show an interest, as well as their rationales for doing so:
--The Chamber: Dragons running around Sharn usually catch the attention of the Chamber. In particular, in this game, the draconic presence in Sharn is rather prominent: A Chamber faction has established what amounts to de facto diplomatic mission in the city, with its members making no bones about they really are, in the hope of pursuing the organization's goals through less...duplicitous methods. The Chamber mission's presence barely tolerated by Sharn's powers-that-be, as the idea of multiple dragons running around the city unnerves quite a few, and they would certainly have an interest in making Jevik's corpse disappear lest it give the appearance that dragons were running around setting the Lower Wards on fire.
--Morgrave University: The field of dracobiology is a rather sparsely detailed field of study: Most of the work that has been done involves working with wyverns and other non-true dragons. What is known about the true dragons comes from the living varieties who're kind enough to provide blood and scale samples: Dissection of true dragon corpses is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and bequeath a good of prestige upon any institution capable of pulling it off. And if there's any that Morgrave University wants more of, it's prestige.
--The Arcane Congress and The Twelve: Draconic organs and blood are sufficed with magic, making them powerful reagents for rituals, enchantings, and one-off spell-castings. Much for the same reason as dracobiology is a poorly understood field, the supply of such draconic reagents is exceedingly tight. The great magical research institutions of Khorvaire might, then, have an interest in such.
--House Tharashk: They would be interested in only one part of Jevik's corpse: His heart. For his heart is a massive Khyber dragonshard that weighs on the order of a quarter-ton. The market value of such a thing is probably mind-blowing.
--The Lords of Dust: The reason why that dragonshard will never reach the market, though, is because it contains a bound rakhasa. Its recovery would provide a spur for the Lords of Dust to eventually get involved: Perhaps, in turn, drawing in the Church of the Silver Flame in the process.
Mostly thinking aloud at this juncture: Any and all feedback is appreciated.
I would say that all of those groups would make an offer if they knew the corpse was available. Almost anyone would be interested in something that valuable, although I think you picked the ones most likely to see it a personal victory in possessing it. I might have added Aerenal to the list, if only because they're the camapaigns experts on dead dragons and what you can do with them.
I'm curious as to Jevik's relationship with the Lords of Dust in your campaign. Is his possession of a demon-heart something they see as an offensive blasphemy? Have they (perhaps) been behind the scenes the whole time, trying to engineer his destruction and thus become one step closer to freeing the demon? Or has Jevik been a pawn of the rakshasa all along, twisted by the whispering fiend that ultimately replaced his heart?
I can definately see some Prophecy sing-songing about all this. Maybe letting "a dragon rule with the heart of a fiend" is one step in breaking the rakshasa from his prison. At the very least, agents of the Lords of Dust should blow the lid off this whole "de facto diplomatic mission" the dragons have going on and seed some real panick about it, possibly leading to more dragon deaths.
I hadn’t really decided on what the precise relationship between Jevik and the Lords of Dust. I’m fairly certain they wouldn’t find what has happened blasphemous: After all, it’s not every day you get to corrupt a dragon and to do it from the inside, no less. (As the Disciple of Ashardalon PrC slowly grants the dragon in question the half-fiend template, I’d say that qualifies as “corrupting”.) I’d envisioned Ashardalon as being a dragon subjected a fate worse than death: An early champion of the couatl-dragon alliance in the Age of Demons, he was made into a plaything of Tiamat, who cut out his heart and with replaced with a Khyber shard holding a bound a powerful and steadfast lieutenant of hers. The lieutenant’s job was to drive Ashardalon mad and break his will: It succeeded beyond Tiamat’s wildest imaginings, with Ashardalon going off the deep-end and becoming one of Tiamat’s favorite and most trusted lieutenants. (And, rather ironically, making the demon who volunteered for the job rather irate, as Ashardalon essentially replaced him.) He survived the cataclysmic end of the Age of Demons, and is still sealed in the Pit of Five Sorrows, along with his mistress and the other draconic abominations from the Age of Demons. Jevik went rogue from the Chamber a century or so ago: While following a fragment of the Prophecy, he discovered, deep in the bowels of the caverns beneath Sharn, the den of a rakshasa that had set itself up in the remnants of ancient House Cannith foundry. (If you’re at all familiar with the Forgotten Forge adventure from the 3.5 ECS, that’s where said rakshasa was.) The rakshasa, by hook and by crook, managed to convince Jevik that the Prophecy fragment that he was chasing required that he cut out his heart and imprison the rakshasa there. (I’m open to any potential Prophecy verse that could be read to require that, but at the moment I’m leaving it ambiguous and just letting that Jevik was stupid enough to think it was good idea speak for itself.)
At any rate, said rakshasa was part of a centuries-long gambit by the Lord of Dust: It was babysitting artifacts of importance to the Church of the Silver Flame and which could mean problems for the Lords of Dust were said artifacts ever recovered. (The entire third act of the story is, in essence, dedicated to the revelation that the Antikeeper was, in fact, the real Keeper and for the past five-and-a-half centuries the Church of the Silver Flame has been run by a long, long line of alternating charlatans and Antikeepers: Most of the Dreadhold-imprisoned Antikeeper’s useful widgets were being watched over by the rakshasa). The Lords of Dust in the Demon Wastes don’t know what their point-man in Sharn has been up to: There aren’t Silver Flame paladins running around with artifact armor or arms, so it’s safe to say everything’s still fine, at least from there distant vantage point. The rakshasa also never told Jevik about his mission: Jevik, eventually, liquidated the shinier things he recovered from the rakshasa lair and left the not-shiny things in that pit, to be discovered a century later by hapless adventurers. Whether the rakshasa failed by letting some of the Silver Flame artifacts back into circulation or was merely doing what was called for by the ludicrously circuitous plot in which he was engaged is a good question which I had not addressed: How the PCs interact with him while he’s imprisoned, I suspect, will determine that.
Re: the Lords of Dust blowing the whistle on the Chamber’s activities in Sharn, that whistle was blown decades ago by the Chamber itself. The Sharn that I run is rather like a more rational Sigil: It’s sufficiently cosmopolitan that the mere presence of a dragon doesn't cause a panic. As said, the Sharn Chamber make no bones about what they are: While they adopt humanoid alternate forms most of the time to make it easier to deal with everyone in the city, they do not hide or deny that they are dragons. That they are dragons is not necessarily widely known, but this is more due to the nature of social dynamics than it being a secret. The Sharn Chamber operates out of the Ambassador Towers just like any other diplomatic mission: Their job, as they see it, is to safeguard Argonnessen’s interests through Khorvaire’s conventional diplomatic channels, observe the politics of Khorvaire from an unconventional vantage point, and do what can be done to prevent needless bodies from washing ashore in Argonnessen by providing a proper channel through which access to the continent can be obtained.
Ironically, because the Sharn Chamber’s mission makes no attempt to hide or suppress the truth about what it is, the most vulnerable people in Sharn are probably the members of the Chamber itself. As they find themselves trapped, on one side, by a Brelish political establishment in Sharn that’s never been particularly receptive to their presence and only accommodated them after having it crammed down their throats by Wroat, and on the other the vagaries of draconic politics. (Sufficed to say that the Eyes of Chronepsis detest the entire idea and want to kill everyone who’s associated with the project, save for the fact that the Chamber’s operation in Sharn keeps producing illuminating Prophecy verses and/or actual benefits for Argonnessen.) A rather precarious perch to occupy, which is why only the oddest of the oddballs tend to wind up signing up for it. (Of course, the oddest dragons also tend to be the sorts that can interact with the PCs without cuing up boss fight music, so it’s a good thing.)
The whole reason my party even got involved in this particular subplot was as a result of high diplomatic intrigue. Done by dragons and outsiders. The party had made friends with a rambunctious warforged while running the Forgotten Forge, who they hired to do a job for them while they went out of town. Said job darn near got the warforged killed at the hands of a wyrmling of a pyroclastic dragon from Fernia, who was punished by being made to become said warforged’s sidekick.. The party was summoned to the consulate of the City of Brass, where they were asked to head down to the Lower Dura Ward to rescue the wyrmling and their friend. They were hired to do so because a diplomatic impasse had been reached because, on one hand, the Sharn Chamber was adamant that the wyrmling’s father not be allowed to go running around down in the Lower Dura Ward for fear he’d cause an international incident, while the City of Brass’s consul-general steadfastly refused to dispatch the embassy’s fire archon guards to extricate the wyrmling for fear of sparking an interplanar incident. The looks on their the PCs faces when they understood they were being hired because the players were too powerful to do the job by themselves was rather amusing.
As you illustrate, there are dozens of groups that might be interested in acquiring some or all of the dragon's body. Some of these organizations (the Twelve, Arcanix, Morgrave) might be willing to use diplomatic channels -at least intitially- to get ahold of it, while others might skip straight to "assassins in the night" negotiation techniques.
You have a great setup here for some world-spanning intrigue with the poor PCs caught in the middle. Disposing of a body that big is difficult enough anywhere else -doing so in Sharn without somebody seeing it is going to be all but impossible. Unless they're high enough level to simply Disintegrate the body (which still leaves them the small issue of a Volkswagen-sized dragonshard), they're going to have to deal with someone to move and hide the thing -maybe that's Daask, maybe that's Boromar, maybe that's Cannith, maybe that's the Chamber embassy.
Even if the PCs manage to involve only one organization, there's also the possibility that the organization in question isn't unified in it's goal or has been compromised -I expect that Cannith South, for example, is heavily infiltrated by agents of Canniths East and West, as well as possibly by followers of the Lord of Blades, the Citadel, the Royal Eyes, the Emerald Claw, the Inspired and the Lords of Dust (etc. etc.).
All in all, there's really no way they can keep this a secret from everyone. Even if they do manage to dispose of the body and the dragonshard and silence all the witnesses, there's no guarantee that Jevik didn't have friends (or enemies) who'll come looking for him eventually.
Of course, this depends on the direction you want to take the campaign, but you're sitting on a gold mine of intrigue and adventure -I'd say break out the picks and get working.
Literally, I've had players nearly kill themselves trying to recover various pieces of a dragon they wanted for themselves (and I've been one of those players, at times...). The concept of letting someone else get into it first is one that is totally foreign to me.
I've never encountered a group of players who's first thought upon slaying a dragon is "What do we do now?" so much as "Dibs on xxx" regardless of their skill in obtaining whatever piece they want.
Yes, but the trick here to remember is that what would be a "monster" in any other setting, is in Eberron a "taxpayer."
You can't just go around bumping off anything with more than two legs like you do in ForgottenGreySunLance. People tend to notice and be not happy with you when you do in Eberron: these people are called "police" (sometimes "government agents").
Literally, I've had players nearly kill themselves trying to recover various pieces of a dragon they wanted for themselves (and I've been one of those players, at times...). The concept of letting someone else get into it first is one that is totally foreign to me.
Same problem, really. Unless you plan to use all of it yourself, selling parts of sentient, sapient creatures is going to get you in a lot of trouble in the civilized Five Nations.
Also, let's say you grab a skinning knife and whip up yourself a brand new suit of dragonscale armor... in the campaign in question, the Chamber has an embassy in Sharn.
So what happens when one of those ambassadors (also: a DRAGON) sees your plucky PC walking around wearing the body of somebody he might've known?
In my campaign, we would refer to this unfortunate adventurer as "lunch."
Also, if I've managed to kill one dragon already, whats to keep me from repeating that when his pissed off friend comes at me? Or keep them from getting kicked out once they blow up half the town trying to achieve that rather rash and irresponsible act, regardless of sucess or failure?
So let them do as they will, but the catch is that anything they sell suddenly starts having mishaps and an aura of bad luck around them. The Dragonskin armour starts speaking dark whispers into it's wearer's mind, the blood begins to convince the alchemists's using it that they should perhaps brew tainted hellish concoctions etc etc.
So now the PC's have let loose one hell of a monster and in six months time their dragonslayer actions are coming back to bight them on the proverbial... (what can I say, I'm an evil DM)