And I have no idea why he's doing what he's dong.
The bad guy is effectively trying to perform genocide against dragons. He's been using dragonborn as guinea pigs to test a dragon-targeting disease he created using knowledge from a artifact tome of secrets -- he doesn't hate dragonborn, but they're non-people as far as he's concerned.
So, I'd really like him to have a better reason for all this than "Dragons killed my family so I'll kill them!" or "Dragons are really dangerous so I'll preemptively kill them before they cause trouble!" I want my villain to have a point (even if you disagree with his method), or at least an understandable reason for what he's doing. It could even be that he has some other goal and Kill All Dragons is just a step along the way to that.
Any ideas, guys?
The villain believes he is stopping a great evil, but he is creating evil by doing so. Also, many organizations might believe that the prophecy is false. Perhaps the whole prophecy was planted by a third party in order for someone to do exactly that (Orcus might be interested in mass murdering of dragons, or Tiamat might be doing that to rally the dragons against the rest of the world).
Pick a little bit from L5R´s Day of Thunder and a little bit of Dragonlance´s 5th Age, and you got yourself quite a storyline.
Hope that´s not as confusing as it sounds! ;)
Cheers!
Marcio
Hmmm, potential motivations for killing all the dragons there are:
1) Every one that dies bleeds elemental energy back into Chaos, or maybe into their environment. Perhaps the boss is trying to free or strengthen the Primordials. Or he might want to dissolve the world back into Chaos, either because he likes it better that way or because he's a nihilistic demonic type.
2) Each one that dies by his machinations weakens the draconic gods a bit. The boss wants to cripple them both, then steal their godhood and spawn a whole new race of dragons in his own image. Io was a powerhouse deity, it's a goal worth shooting for.
3) The boss is the last exarch of Nerull and bears a fragment of the dead god's spirit, perhaps derived from his artifact tome. His plague draws the souls of those it kills into his stronghold in Pluton. He plans on building a vast army of draconic shades and then assaulting the Raven Queen, slaying her and reclaiming Nerull's domain over death and the dead.
Heck, you could even combine some or all of them. A Nerull host who's planning on killing Bahamut and Tiamat as a preliminary step to destroying the world and using the resulting disruptions as cover for a revenge coup against Death Herself is a nice, complex vilain.
A campaign boss who's trying to commit draconic genocide via biowarfare? That's different.
It's one of those fun things that sort of grew out of my play group. I asked each player for a brief background detailing why they became an adventurer and so on, and the dragonborn fighter described how his village/tribe/family died of a plague and he was the only survivor. That sort of grew in my mind into this idea of a plague attacking dragonborn (though that's just a side effect; it's really intended for dragons) and while he's infected, he's been chosen of the Raven Queen and granted a limited immunity to the disease (which is to say, it's been slowed down so it'll take a few years to kill him instead of a few days or weeks -- in game terms it has no real effect, it's just flavor text).
2) Each one that dies by his machinations weakens the draconic gods a bit. The boss wants to cripple them both, then steal their godhood and spawn a whole new race of dragons in his own image. Io was a powerhouse deity, it's a goal worth shooting for.
I like this. The artifact he found, the Liber Umbra Serpentis*, contains information about Zehir's apotheosis, so it's not a bad idea that he's trying to absorb the energy of dragonkind to make himself a god.
(For purposes of the game universe, the Liber is actually almost impossible for a mortal to use properly; it generally backlashes with nasty side effects when they try. But of course there's always people who don't know that or assume they'll succeed where all others failed. And there's bits and pieces of the book that have been copied out or otherwise distributed, with similar but smaller scale effects. Liber manuscripts are basically a plot device that let their owners do arbitrarily weird and crazy things. And yes, it's more or less based on the Claire Bible from Slayers.)
3) The boss is the last exarch of Nerull and bears a fragment of the dead god's spirit, perhaps derived from his artifact tome. His plague draws the souls of those it kills into his stronghold in Pluton. He plans on building a vast army of draconic shades and then assaulting the Raven Queen, slaying her and reclaiming Nerull's domain over death and the dead.
That's not a bad idea either. One of the conceits of what's been going on so far is that people who get their hands on fragments of the Liber gain insights into the workings of the universe that let them do strange things, like tapping into the remnant power of a dead primordial or creating a disease that extinguishes the elemental fragment in dragons' hearts, causing them to sicken and die. So he might not be using the book for its intended purpose, but doing weird stuff with what it taught him.
One thing I did want to mention, this guy is intended to be more of a Late Heroic to Early Paragon BBEG rather than the true level 30 endboss, so he might have a certain amount of planar contact, but not too much.
* Dog-latin for "book of the shadow serpent". That's probably totally ungrammatical in actual Latin, but what the heck.
And if he has a big jar full of dragon soul-stuff, he has a good way to go all One Winged Angel when the PCs beat his first form...
How about this:
His "disease" is actually genetic therapy, giving the illusion of death upon infection. His long-term plan to create a new race of dragons more powerful than any in the world. He plans to use these super dragons as medieval WMD's in order to bully the world into conceding to his demands. The testing stages were difficult (it's really hard to make something look dead without actually killing it
), but he's confident that the therapy will work in the long term.Biowarfare, huh?
How about this:
His "disease" is actually genetic therapy, giving the illusion of death upon infection. His long-term plan to create a new race of dragons more powerful than any in the world. He plans to use these super dragons as medieval WMD's in order to bully the world into conceding to his demands. The testing stages were difficult (it's really hard to make something look dead without actually killing it
28 Days Later with zombie dragons? Could be fun. ;)
That being said, here's my idea in full.
The BBEG used Dragonborn as the test phase guinea pigs because the prototype virus was derived from a humanoid plague. Good place to start learning the differences between humanoids and dragons are the draconic humanoids.
Step two are full fledged dragons. The time, effects and overall impact on the body after the fact are important to study. He wants the body to remain as intact as possible.
The final step is going after the single dragon he really wants. This dragon has something about it that could give the BBEG the means to conquer the world, even the entire cosmos. But this dragon is powerful. God-like powerful. This dragon could go toe to toe with Vecna, Mordain and all them other chaps easily, and he doesn't even have a drop of divine nature to him. This in itself explains the need for the virus.
There is another prospect to the idea though. What if the Virus isn't meant to kill dragons, but enslave them instead. A whole army of dragons at your disposal is a pretty scary thing. Especially is he intends to use it on the aforementioned uber-dragon.
So he decided genocide was a good revenge.