Month of the Dragon: Green Dragon

Expanding on Monster Mondays, I’m spending March digging deep into dragons. Inspired by James Jacobs’ 10 goblin facts written for Pathfinder, I’m working my way through the Monster Manual creating ten facts about each creature based on their art and lore. The goal is to provide habits, scene-setting tools, and plot hooks for encounters.

10 Facts About Green Dragons

1. Captive Courts: A green dragon’s greatest prizes are typically the people it subdues to its will. A green dragon’s forest will often include a hidden estate where nobles, sages, and other elite thralls are kept. The captives aren’t always aware of their host’s identity or even that they’re truly captive. The most cunning of green dragons will use these thralls to manipulate political affairs, even far from its lair.
2. Coven Companions: Green dragons are often talented and dedicated manipulators, this hobby often leads them to take up alliances with hags. These alliances are fraught with infighting for dominance but the hags and dragons are thick as thieves, and a green dragon will often entrust its wyrmlings to the hags.
3. Fey Foes: Overlapping realms put green dragons at odds with other types of fey. Even if an archfey is unable to subdue a dragon, they may send their minions to antagonize the creatures, and if the dragon truly annoys the archfey, adventurers may be sent to contend with it.
4. Draconic Rivalry: Green dragons have a particular rivalry with black dragons. Black dragons resent their intellect and natural affinity for poison. Green dragons resent the encroachment on realms they see as their natural territory.
5. Bloviating Biographers: Self-important and endlessly proud of their scheming, green dragons kidnap scribes to whom they narrate their life stories with the intent of posthumously publishing their memoirs so that the world will know of their machinations. Some dragons are too proud to wait and find themselves unraveling their own plans thanks to their gloating.
6. Genealogical Gastronomy: Green dragons love to eat elves, and they can become obsessive in this pursuit. Some green dragons will pick a particular elf family to manipulate across generations, relishing in raising up elven heroes only to bring about their ruin and finally their demise.
7. Familial Fellowship: Green dragons have unusually strong familial bonds compared to their chromatic brethren. Green dragons mate for life and keep their young close, entrusting them to favored subjects like hags. Green dragon families usually occupy adjoining territories, leaving vast tracts of woodland inhospitable to outsiders.
8. Tree Signs: With territory often abutting that of their kin, strict delineation of hunting rights is an important aspect of green dragon relations. The dragons use a complex language of trees and other plants grown in a particular configuration and claw markings on said trees to indicate their territory and proximity to their lair within that territory.
9. Thorny Trials: Green dragons are careful selectors of their pawns. They may pluck nobles and sages from society based on long observation, but an adventurer’s worth is harder to determine. That in mind, the dragons will often turn their realms into deadly obstacle courses meant to put would-be dragon slayers through physical, mental, magical, and moral tests before they come face-to-face with the dragons bent on their domination.
10. Dragon Cemeteries: Green dragons have age-old funerary traditions. When a green dragon dies, its kin will devour its flesh and bury its bones beneath a sapling of its favored tree. If a green dragon clan survives long enough, this cemetery will become a dangerous snarl of massive, twisted trees.