Gold Dragons

heard before. The dragon quickly gets annoyed with anyone who doesn’t laugh at its jokes or accept its tricks with good humor. Copper dragons love being the center of attention and do not appreciate being upstaged.

When cornered, a copper dragon fights tenaciously, using every trick it knows to defeat the foe. Copper dragons show similar aggression when defending lairs, mates, or offspring. In most other circumstances, a copper dragon prefers to outwit and embarrass a foe. To a copper dragon, a perfect victory comes from taunting and annoying an opponent into just giving up. In any situation, copper dragons favor thinking and planning over brute force. They often deal with superior foes, such as red dragons, by drawing them into narrow, twisting canyons or tortuous caves where they can use their climbing ability to outmaneuver the foe.

GOLD DRAGONS

Gold dragons are dedicated foes of evil and foul play. They often embark on self-appointed quests to promote good. Woe to the evildoer who earns a gold dragon’s wrath. The dragon will not rest until the malefactor has been defeated and either slain or brought to justice. Gold dragons do not settle for anything less than complete victory over evil.

A gold dragon usually assumes human or animal guise, even within its own lair. Gold dragons can live anywhere, but they prefer secluded lairs. Favorite locales include the bottoms of lakes, high plateaus, islands, and deep gorges. A gold dragon’s lair is

always made of stone, with numerous chambers, all beautifully decorated. The lair usually has loyal guards: animals appropriate to the terrain, storm giants, or good-aligned cloud giants.

Dungeon-dwelling gold dragons choose locations that provide them with suitable chambers.

Gold Dragon Identifiers

A gold dragon in its true form is easily recognized by its large, twin horns that are smooth and metallic, twin neck frills, and the whiskers around its mouth that look like the barbels of a catfish. Gold wyrmlings lack whiskers, but they quickly develop them as they mature. Younger dragons have eight whiskers, four on the upper jaw and four below. Older dragons have more.

A gold dragon has a short face with spines above the nostrils. The eyes are slanted and very narrow. Along with the whiskers, the eyes give the dragon a sagacious look. As the dragon ages, its pupils fade until the eyes resemble pools of molten gold. The dragon has a long, pointed tongue, backswept tendrils on the lower jaws that develop into frills with age, and cheek horns that jut out sideways.

On hatching, a gold dragon’s scales are dark yellow with golden metallic flecks. The flecks get larger as the dragon matures until, at the adult stage, the scales grow completely golden. A gold dragon smells of saffron and incense.

A gold dragon has an extremely long tail and broad, mantalike wings that run all the way to the tip of the tail. When at rest, the dragon closes its wings over its back like a massive, golden moth. It folds its wings back when walking or running.

A gold dragon flies with a distinctive rippling motion, almost as if it were swimming through the air. Many scholars argue that gold dragons are the most elegant flyers of all the true dragons (and the gold dragons agree). When viewed from below, a flying gold dragon can be distinguished by its long tail and rippling wings. Its whiskers and horns also show.

Habits

A gold dragon spends most of its time in an assumed form, usually that of a nondescript human or a harmless animal common to the area in which the dragon resides. For animal forms, gold dragons often choose domestic animals, such as dogs, cats, or horses, or swift moving but fairly nonthreatening forms such as eagles. As with the bronze dragon, the assumed form allows the gold dragon to travel and observe the world without attracting undue attention to itself. When traveling in particularly dangerous areas, a gold dragon uses an especially nonthreatening form. This approach helps set at ease fellow travelers the dragon might meet, and also allows the dragon to use itself as bait for any evil creatures lurking about. Many killers and robbers who haunt the world’s lonely places have met swift ends when their seemingly helpless victims turned out to be gold dragons in disguise.

Gold dragons always seek news of the wider world and local gossip about recent events. Any gold dragon is a good