How many dragons do you *have* to kill to complete the trilogy?
BelgarathMTH
Member Posts: 5,653
Hey, friends, I was just playing my Might and Magic 8 run, where dragons are made into an extremely sympathetic faction, and the "paladins" are trying to exterminate them, steal their eggs, trophy hunt them, and enslave dragon babies. In other words, the paladins are presented as being like the killer of Cecil the Lion, and are seemingly designed as a nominally lawful good faction that evokes outrage and revulsion from the player, such that the player is almost certain to bring the dragons into the Alliance rather than the paladins.
So, my sympathy with dragons in all rpg's, since they seem to me to be no different than "reptilian big cats", has led me to start thinking about doing my next trilogy + SoD run as a dragon disciple.
That means that I would never kill any dragon unless I absolutely had to in order to keep playing the game.
So, how many story-forced dragon slayings are there in the BG trilogy?
I'm thinking that the only do - or - die dragon in the BG trilogy is Abazigal. Is that right? How many dragons does the game design *force* you to slay?
So, my sympathy with dragons in all rpg's, since they seem to me to be no different than "reptilian big cats", has led me to start thinking about doing my next trilogy + SoD run as a dragon disciple.
That means that I would never kill any dragon unless I absolutely had to in order to keep playing the game.
So, how many story-forced dragon slayings are there in the BG trilogy?
I'm thinking that the only do - or - die dragon in the BG trilogy is Abazigal. Is that right? How many dragons does the game design *force* you to slay?
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Comments
Don't do the Firkraag quest...or work for him!
Use the ward stone to avoid the Umar hills shadow dragon
Work for the white dragon in the underdark
Pickpocket Irenicus's dragon for the goblet
Pass the test of pride in hell
Pickpocket the dragon in watchers keep for the goblet (I think that works...) or don't finish the dungeon
Pickpocket Draconis for his head (I remember hearing about doing that)
Free the enslaved dragon
...
But you have to kill the Bhaalspawn dragon. That's it as far as I know.
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Btw: you should mod your game to change the big metal unit into a dragon rather than a golem and give it to your dragon disciple. It even comes with a flame thrower!
For what it's worth, most BG2 dragons are clearly evil. The only ones who don't have hostile motives towards you are Adalon, Saladrex, and Fll'Yissetat (and Anadramatis from Ascension), none of which you have to fight. It's ethically sound to slay the others.
Heck, I would have gladly spared Smaug in The Hobbit if he had been reasonable about the situation. Actually, why exactly again did the humans and dwarves need his cave? Bilbo already had the One Ring, and that was the important thing. Smaug only had to die because Tolkein bought into cultural tropes about "dragons are the symbol of the ultimate evil", not because Smaug was actually, innately evil. After all, the dwarves and Bilbo had no interest in slaying him other than stealing all his wealth and taking his home from him. I think if I were Smaug, I would have went on a rampage and tried to obliterate my oppressors, just like he did. All poor Smaug wanted to do was to sleep forever and feel secure that his needs for food and shelter were taken care of. Honestly, I'm kind of like that as well, in my old age.
And even more, dragons in fantasy games, film, and literature are clearly *sentient* beings. Where is the "enlightened" Star Trek "prime directive" when it comes to planets with dragons, hmm?
So in your old age, you plan on finding a nice mansion a little outside of the nearest village, burn the village to the ground, kill the inhabitants of the mansion, pile all the valuables in the largest room and fall asleep on your pile of loot...? sounds nice, where do I sign up?
Smaug invaded a *city*, murdered everyone inside (women and children included), stole their gold...and burnt a second city for the lulz. Lawful good would spare him?
Firkraag stole the windspear lands. Had a group of paladins (who don't kill good dragons!) killed, kidnapped a child, and then admits to planning on killing the rightful owner of the lands because that man was no longer upset over losing said lands. Lawful good would spare him?
The dragon in the elven city was happily killing civilians and destroying an enclave of another ancient and rapidly dwindling race. Lawful good would spare that?
That's not lawful good. It's not lawful. It's not good.
Lawful good would work with good dragons, spare neutral ones, and out down evil ones.
What you describe works best with chaotic neutral, or a true neutral druid.
I mean just look at the shit Sarevok did, and his girlfriend wanted you to spare him...
Let me see if I got your argument straight:
"It is Lawful Good to let Smaug live after his crimes because it is possible to allow other murderers to live after their crimes."
Is that the gist of it?
My gist is, dragons always get the short end of the damn stick in fantasy stories.
Don't confuse the gold madness of a dwarven king (or his line) with the suffering of his people.
To recap:
(1) Sauron makes the rings of power with the purpose of corrupting the wielders
(2) Dwarfs are resistant, but not immune. Wearing the ring of power drives the dwarven kings mad with gold lust.
(3) The dwarfs of Erebor become wealthy, in part because of the power of the ring.
(4) Smaug attacks. On his way there he destroys *an entire human city* because 'why not?' Think about all of the men, women and chldren who burned to death because he was bored.
(5) Smaug then attacks Erebor. Again, causing intense pain, anguish and death among the civilian population.
(6) The dwarfs come back, led by their king. A king, who like his father, was mad with gold lust.
(7) When woken up, the first thing that Smaug does is attack another innocent population center, again targeting non-combatants.
Lawful good should see this *monster* who is the size of an air liner and who is powerful enough to destroy (by itself) one of the strongest armies of the north, while fighting the army which was in a defensive position in a style of combat that was in the favor of the defenders...and easily won...the lawful good anything should say 'this thing can't be allowed to live.'
You don't get to say 'well, the dwarven king was pretty greedy.'
No. Just no. It doesn't matter if the dwarven king was a jerk. It doesn't matter if he was a greedy tool. What matters is that Smaug is an unrepentent monster, created by a demigod to be a weapon of destruction against the free peoples. You put that creature down, and you do it hard. Before it can go on to destroy any more cities, to topple any more civilizations, and to brutally and painfully murder more civilians.
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And to argue that dragons always get the short end of the stick? I agree, in general. But Baldur's Gate did a good job here.
Baldur's Gate:
* Adalon (A good dragon, who works for the Gods and who was blessed by the elven pantheon to have immaculate conception so as to have her dead mate's children)
* Dorn's Quest (Two good dragons who live in heaven, and who rally to its' defense when invaded)
* Hell Quest (The quest of pride has an unnamed dragon, whose entire point of being is to show why you shouldn't just kill dragons because they are there)
* Watchers Keep (The red dragon there is reasonable, civil, and the only way to fight it is to go out of your way to pick a fight. Again, showing the player that dragons aren't always there for fighting)
Judge a dragon based on its actions. Do not put the life of a murderer above the countletss innocents that they have already killed, and those that they certainly will, just because of its race.
To allow an evil dragon to live, just because it is a dragon, is, dare I say...racist (against all of its victims). Or...speciest, perhaps?
Smaug and other evil dragons are only evil because the writer writes them that way. If the story of The Lord of the Rings were a historical account, we could say, "History is written by the victors." There could be another conceivable point of view.
What if people killed Smaug's mate, or his hatchlings, or had been slaughtering innocent dragons for centuries just because they were dragons, and that's why he's so angry against humans and dwarves. We don't know what motivated him, because the story doesn't really tell us. We only have his motivation for city destruction as personal pleasure on Tolkein's say-so. It could just as easily have been a strategic act of war on his part, justified from the dragons' point of view.
Again, I'm not terribly serious here. I'm just playing devil's advocate on behalf of the dragons because I'm having fun with it.
Doesn't Smaug have the right to a vigorous defense here in our BG Forum court of law?
It's not like Aragorn commissioned a history book and the result was the LOTR trilogy. Then we'd have reason to doubt the veracity of the story's depiction of Smaug.
Smaug is a really bad example.
What we know of dragons is this: They were created by Melkor as weapons to break the siege of Angbad. They did so with rousing success, shattering the army, and only failed to complete obliterate the free people's because of the dwarven rear guard. The dragons went on to destroy the elven kingdoms, destroying the cities of Nargothrond and Gondolin, shattering elven power in middle earth for the rest of the ages. The only elves who survived the combination of draconic might, balrogs, and orcs were those that managed to hide.
The dragons were not beaten back until the War of Wrath, when the Valar (ie: Gods) themselves intervened and made war on Melkor. The surviving dragons fled to Northern Waste.
When Sauron returned, the dragons rose up once again. They made war on man and dwarf, dwarf especially, as the dragons were motivated by greed of dwarven gold. To put it simply, it was a slaughter, with no record of the dwarves managing to kill even a single dragon. Rather, they were driven out of nearly all of their kingdoms, including their greatest remaining city, Erebor. For some more details, it was a 20 year long war, which saw the dwarves completely and utterly on the defensive. The dwarves lost two kings (King Dain I and Fror). In the aftermath of it, the dwarves had to abandon the Grey Mountains entirely to the dragons, fleeing for the Iron Hills and Erebor.
Erebor was then taken by Smaug. All we know of Smaug is that he came out of the Northern Waste. An area completely safe for dragon kind, far, far, far away from any other race.
There were no dragon hunters. There were no adventurers going after dragon eggs. There is not a single instance of anyone ever persecuting dragons or going anywhere near their territory. But what we do know is that they obliterated two dying races. The dwarves had only three kingdoms left to their name. Dragons destroyed two of them.
To put it this way:
Smaug is like a complete stranger who hops on a plane, flies halfway around the world, and comes to your house. He burns down your neighbor's house for spite, kills your wife, children and parents, takes all of your possessions (and inheritance), and then claims the house for himself.
You are so powerless against him that *all* you can do is dream about sneaking back into your old house and stealing back the possessions that Smaug stole from you. You can't even think about getting any real vengeance against him because he is that much stronger than you.
So you sneak back into the house and he finds out. So he goes out and burns the entire neighborhood to the ground, killing every stranger he meets because he is angry. Then, just as he is about to finish the job of killing everyone, some kid gets a lucky shot and takes him down before the murder spree can be completed. At which point you have your house back...but your family is still dead and everyone wants you to pay for the damage that Smaug did to them.
Kind of sucks to be you in that situation, eh?
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NOW
If you want to play devil's advocate, you should argue for the dragons who remained in the Northern Wastes. We know nothing about them besides that they were intelligent, and aside from totally face wrecking the dwarves of the Grey Mountains, didn't do venture out much. All they had was a single twenty year war. You could well argue that it would be wrong to invade the Northern Wastes to destroy dragon kind because of the crimes committed by Smaug, and before him by other dragons. That could be a valid argument.
But to argue that Smaug should be allowed to keep Erebor, all of the gold within, and should never pay for his myriad of war crimes? That I cannot swallow.
My gist is, dragons always get the short end of the damn stick in fantasy stories. But he's the one with the power, the one they are willing to follow. I'm seeing a domino effect here, the corrupt fueled the corrupt, and innocent bystanders got hit in the crossfire. On a serious level, I don't deny how evil smaug really is, but I also don't remember dragons in LOTR EVER being good. Now I'm not a large fan of the series for obvious reasons... That goes beyond the dragons of its world, but I do remember that the dragons in the world were created evil or At the very least created to be weapons by morgoth. In the grandest sense, he was doing what he was created to do.... Be a weapon. I can and I do!!! It did OK, it didn't do as horrible as some other games I could mention where you pretty much killed dragons nonstop until they released the dlc that had a Dragon class type character in it... But half assed the Dragon transformations -coughsacred2cough-
Whoa, something stuck in throat.
Yet.. We let kings, and generals live in games for doing exactly this... Kill countless innocents in their own wars. Hell arniea like the one smaug solo'd don't become as powerful as they are by playing by the Lawful good rule book. Hell, adventurers do this... We go out, invade creatures very homes and kill them! In BG alone, you pretty much massacre an entire xart village... Why? Because you're an adventurer... Do you know the xarts have done something wrong? Go into a bears cave, kill the near andd take w/e you want. We don't even try to talk them down, or try to explain we are just passing through and have no intentions of causing any harm... We just kill everyone and call it adventuring. Hell, in dao and 2 I remember that you pretty much go into a dragons nest and massacre everything. If memory serves correctly. The characters don't even blink a eye lash. The very type of thing smaug did, the player does in a large number of video games.
I mean, you can argue they attacked you first, but hell I would too.. If someone came into my territory armed to the teeth, rolling 5-6 deep. In a world with a history of people wondering around, killing and taking things, I'd strike first to defend my home to. Then add insult to injury, their sins get glorified in song and tales, which inspire more to repeat their actions. Not saying I play favorites, but... If a Dragon apocalypse happens... I'll be in the first generation of traitors to fight for the dragons!
But in all, OK semi seriousness again... I do agree Smaug had to die, despite how much it hurts to say that. I'd killed him too... But, I prefer how Divinity handled dragons, oh that and spyro. I really loved spyro because there were no humans in the world... And no elves... Not counting skylanders.
And this is why I like you Dragonking, because you humor me.
As for the power part, and the corrupt fueled the corrupt...there is a difference between hoarding wealth and being a jerk, and killing people.
The difference lies in this: The dwarven king was a greedy jerk, but he did nothing to put his people in harm's way. You can say that a high powered wall-street tycoon got wealthy through sketchy means...but that isn't on the same scale as the thug who kills the tycoon and everyone in the tycoon's office to get the money.
The tycoon didn't do anything to put his employees in harm's way besides making alot of money. Nothing illegal about that. He didn't know the thug. Heck, he even spent money on top of the line security. At the end of the day, there is no crossfire, because only one side was firing.
It kind of brings me back to some old paladin debates. The thing is, not everyone who is 'evil' is deserving of death. Just because someone pings as 'evil' doesn't give a hunting pass.
For Smaug, he was completely in the wrong. And I agree with you that Smaug had to die.
I also agree with you that in a dragonpocolypse I would join the dragon overlords. Because holy shyt, they breathe fire! And bullets bounce off of them. Screw that. Let them have their gold and sleep for a few centuries. It's better than getting burninated.
@Grum I'm just going to say diamond mines in Africa and sweatshops I'm China >.> But either way, I concede the point to you, I mean the oldest Dragon did place someone under a hypnotic spell and forces them to kill their lover if I remember correctly in LOTR. Either way, I want to see them try that shit on actual dragons in divinity.
Hell or against Nicol bolas.
"Yet.. We let kings, and generals live in games for doing exactly this... Kill countless innocents in their own wars. Hell arniea like the one smaug solo'd don't become as powerful as they are by playing by the Lawful good rule book. Hell, adventurers do this... We go out, invade creatures very homes and kill them! In BG alone, you pretty much massacre an entire xart village... Why? Because you're an adventurer... Do you know the xarts have done something wrong? Go into a bears cave, kill the near andd take w/e you want. We don't even try to talk them down, or try to explain we are just passing through and have no intentions of causing any harm... We just kill everyone and call it adventuring. Hell, in dao and 2 I remember that you pretty much go into a dragons nest and massacre everything. If memory serves correctly. The characters don't even blink a eye lash. The very type of thing smaug did, the player does in a large number of video games.
I mean, you can argue they attacked you first, but hell I would too.. If someone came into my territory armed to the teeth, rolling 5-6 deep. In a world with a history of people wondering around, killing and taking things, I'd strike first to defend my home to. Then add insult to injury, their sins get glorified in song and tales, which inspire more to repeat their actions."
I feel like I have to address this.
I totally, completely, and utterly agree with you. Wiping out that Xvart village is wrong, and when I play 'good' characters I try to avoid it.
Sure, you could make the argument that Xvart warbands can be found elsewhere, attacking adventuring parties. But even then, they are attacking armed bands of warriors near that lands. Armed bands of warriors who have a history of killing Xvarts. In the village itself, when they attack you they are doing nothing wrong. It is up to you to flee from the encounter. When the Xvart leader yells at you for killing them when they did nothing to you...well, that's a big black mark on your character. The idea that the bear Ursa kills the Xvart leader as 'comedy' doesn't mask the horrific nature of the act.
@BelgarathMTH
Also...something you may be interested in.
Iltkazar.
It is a dwarven kingdom that is ruled by King Mith Barak the Clanless.
Mith Barak...is a silver dragon. Who rules wisely and justly over the last remnant of Shanatar, one of the homelands of the Shield Dwarves.
For a dragon lover, it seems like the kind of place that you'd like.
If the xvarts weren't evil, they'd have blue circles and would greet you with neutral dialogue. Contrast that with Gullykin: you march in fully armed, just like in the xvart settlement, but this time, the locals don't attack.
Also, if you walk in unarmed, the xvarts attack you anyway.
They will not chase you, and you can get to the gnoll stronghold without ever invading their northern part of that map.
But yeah, we're at the classic fantasy world problem... Authors like to have "Evil with a capital E", because it gives their heroes something to do.
I'm as big a Tolkein fan as anyone, but there's a reason you never meet the orcs' wives and children... It's just generating conflict, without which there's no drama.
Plus, there's the fact that storytelling *has* moved on. Every summer blockbuster now wants to tell you why the Big Bad is the way he is... Whatever happened to "he's a bad git doing bad stuff, so go get him"?
Maybe we've become more sophisticated as an audience? Maybe writers now like to think that they're writing for a more sophisticated audience... Probably a bit of both.
I live in a world of greys... In my escapist hobbies, I like black and white.