Adventure Idea: A Dragon's Tears

Recently, through some talk on a roleplaying games forum about violence in games, my brain started thinking. One of the tracks it rode upon was the one where a lot of the quests, problems and assignments the player characters in roleplaying games get are clearly and easily solvable with violence. Then, at one point during walking from the station to school, a thought struck me. Potion ingredients. You see, me and my wife are reading through the Harry Potter books together (I've never read them before, and it has been a while for her) and I guess the end of the second book (The Chamber of Secrets) had stuck with me. I'm not gonna spoil it, but those that know, know how it applies.

I was thinking how tears are not an easily harvestable ingredient from mystical creatures. You can't gather them by killing and skinning, like they are dragon scales or something. You have to go about it another way. And that made me think about why people might cry. It might be by telling it a sad story (like a thief's tragic backstory) or listening to a beautiful song (Bards and Disney Princesses, you're up!) or Priests and Prophets trying to instill guilt of some kind. (Clerics, Paladins, ... it's your chance). It's also a delightful chance for the roguish prankster players to think outside the box, like buying carts full of onions and start cutting them in front of the dragon. (Like many fairy-tale heroes.) There might still be those who might to use pain to make the dragon cry, but that gets into torture and X-card material and is clearly non-heroic behavior.

Anyway, I wanted to put these thoughts to words and get them out, so here are two ideas or story seeds to get this problem to your characters.

A Dragon’s Tears

1. The king has been cursed by a Fairy Queen after insulting her. She cried at hearing the plea of a servant who was caught stealing. The king answered with hard punishment to the servant. The fairy, in disguise as a rich trader, put a curse on the king, turning him into a dragon. The curse can only be lifted when the dragon cries. The Queen, not wanting a dragon for a husband has put out a reward for anyone who can make the dragon cry real tears.

This is just an option without an immediate violent solution. It will ask the players to think of ways to get the dragon-king to cry. It’s a chance for bards to ply their trade and try to move the king to cry, for clerics to try and convince the king to a deep and sorrowful repentance, a chance for a down-to-earth cook to buy a cart full of onions and start cutting them all in front of the dragon until he cries, etc. A charlatan and cheater might try to fake tears, but as long as the king remains a dragon it’s clear that the curse still stands.

Of course, die hard adventurers might still decide to try and hunt down the Fairy Queen and force her at sword-point to remove the curse, but she most likely will not, and if they find a way to force her hand so as to do so, she and her court will remember.

2. The king has offered a reward for whoever can bring him a dragon’s tears. It is a needed ingredient to treat the strange illness his daughter has fallen under. This is what the Royal Alchemist has told him. The reward? A title and land, a chance to become your own Lord.

With this option the players get the option to try and hunt down a dragon (many charlatans will try to sell maps to dragons, as if they are to be found just everywhere). The first step is to find a dragon, then they need to find a way to get that dragon to cry and to collect its tears. And then, with those tears, they need to find their way back to the king. With a quest as publicly available as that they will no doubt have plenty of competition along the way.