https://seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com/2025/02/05/beginning-this-months-rpg-blog-carnival-dragon-neighbors-how-do-you-live-with-a-dragon-nearby/
So how do you live next door to a dragon?
Well, if you're an ordinary person, it might not be all that bad. See, dragons and lords don't get on. If you've got a lord, they show with all their cronies – sorry, 'knights' – up talking nonsense about who can fish in what pond, demanding your best cattle, and all that kind of thing. Then their lord shows up, or Gods forbid the King, and you've got to show up at the castle, looking all happy to be a day behind on your fieldwork while you wait at table.
Seriously, fuck lords.
A dragon, meanwhile... sure, they take the occasional cow as well. But only for themselves, so it works out less in the long run. But they don't care who does what where. Or with whom, come to that. They collect weird shit. Gold mostly. But then so do some lords, and at least the dragons don't increase taxes over it.
Yeah, if you're a peasant, a dragon isn't a bad neighbour at all.
The trouble comes, once again, with lords.
See, those lords think they have a right to the land, and everything that came from it. They want as much as they can get, even if they can't actually use it. And that means they hate dragons. To a lord, a dragon is a fire-spewing flying monster that'll kill their 'knights', burn 'their' crops (guess who suffers then) and steal their gold.
Well, sometimes it's daughters, but really that's just a roundabout way of getting gold.
Anyway. To a lord, a dragon is something that needs to be killed. Sending 'knights' out is a fool's game. Dealing with dragons means sending out a small, hand-picked team of experts. They're damn good at it, at least if the lord forks out for good ones. But Gods, those lot - they call themselves 'adventurers' - are arrogant, self-entitled dicks. Worse than the lords, somehow.
Then, after they've come through (and usually burnt someone's house down), they need paying. So the taxes go up. Or worse, one of them gets made a new lord.
Did I say that 'adventurers' are the worst? I was wrong. They get even more intolerable when they have land and a castle.
But the worst case is when the dragon doesn't get killed. Then you've got a pissed off dragon out to deal with a threat. And a pissed off lord who wants to get rid of the problem they created. And who suffers for it?
You know damn well who. The ordinary person.
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