The Queen of Dragons: Part I – Overview

Image credit, TheCampaign20xx/Power Score blog

2/22/2025

The first official edition of Dungeons and Dragons I DMed for was 5th Edition. The first adventure I tried to run for it was Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Actually, me and my friends tried running it… maybe seven times? It never took off.

I have since grown to dislike the system, and after reading the adventure with a new set of eyes, really dislike the adventure. But I want to like the adventure.

It’s about dungeons and dragons. The queen of all dragons no less. And it involves far-flung reaches and fighting all kinds of dragons, politicking with different factions, and a final climatic battle with the dragon queen herself! Tiamat!

I mean, come on. I can’t be the only one that got way too excited after seeing this animation:

My Goals

I have three main goals with this blog series:

• Convert it to a lower power setting
• Make it a sandbox campaign
• Wash everything clean of WOTC copyright

At the end of this I hope to sell the final product and have it be incredibly distinct from its original inspiration. There will be a multi-headed chromatic dragon queen that is summoned by cult’s ritual, and the decisions/actions the PCs make over the course of the campaign will effect the final power level of that monster, but everything in between we’ll figure out together.

I think it could be a really fun book, and my first published campaign. I think the OSR community is missing campaigns that aren’t mega-dungeons (no shade at mega-dungeons, I love them, but I miss campaigns).

To prep for this I read this amazing blog post about Tiamat, and reread the Tyranny of Dragon’s books. Any other suggested blog posts or books, send them my way!

The Big Picture

Dragon masks are strange artifacts from pre-history (think Babylon/Sumeria) that allow the wearer to control dragons of that color, and afflicts the wearer with a dragon madness associated with that color. Most have been lost to time, but legends say they’re in deep dungeons and vaults hidden away from the rest of mankind by ancient heroes who sought to end a dark age of city-states run by dragon-kings.

In current times, there is an evil, conspiratorial group that seek to rediscover these masks and use them to enslave dragons and rule the world (the group goes by many names as to keep its intentions a secret, one of them is the Cult of the Dragon).

The Cult was started by an enterprising man with a four-step, full-proof plan:

• Find all five of the masks and combine them into one mega mask
• Get an insane amount of treasure together, then perform a ritual to lure the dragon queen from her demi-plane
• Use the mega-mask to control the dragon queen, who in turn is most likely unkillable, and will now assist them in ruling the world
• Profit

With this pitch, and the first dragon mask in tow, he convinced key figures in many places to aid him in his quest. They don’t have armies of lay-cultists, but instead they have influence over many (but not all) of the politics and armies of the realm, and use those to get what they want.

Think of them like the Templars from Assassin’s Creed. “Peace in our time,” thinking individuals mixed with, “the power of the sun in the palm of my hand,” thinking individuals.

Some key points to take note of:

• At the start of the adventure, not all the masks have been found yet
• The “cult” is not a monolith, and there are sub-factions with their own ideas of how this should all play out in the end (i.e. who gets to wear the final mask, or if they even want a final mask, maybe they’d rather keep just one for themselves)
• Everyone wants these masks, not just the bad guys, because having dragon slaves is really beneficial to any leader’s day-to-day
• There are organizations from pre-history that still exist that wish to stop this from happening (such as the Order of the Platinum Dragon) and other organizations that want to help but want a piece of the pie (a mask) in the end
• Destroying a dragon mask is next to impossible or maybe it has some hideous consequence, idk, but there’s gotta be a reason people didn’t just do that

Dragons: what are we talking about here?

In this world, dragons are the pinnacle of nature’s apex predators. They can live forever, only get bigger and stronger as they do, and are incredibly intelligent. In fact, they can even speak to humans. They aren’t all-powerful magic users (I want this semi-compatible with Crowns which only very rarely has spellcasting without grimoires), but they are magical to some degree.

All dragons are proud, and usually evil. No metallic dragons, just the classic colorful dragons. Red, blue, green, black, white. Keeps it simple.

I think it would be fair to say that one or two of these dragons would be willing to assist the players, we’ll see how that plays out.

Hex-crawl, point-crawl, what’s the format?

Well, dragons tend to live in different biomes based on their color. Red are mountains, blue are deserts, green are forests, black are swamps, white are tundras. So travel will be necessary to see all these sites and find these masks (which presumably are hidden in these same areas for some reason, to be determined later).

Right now, I’m leaning towards a hex-flower start. A local area for low-level adventurers. Some relevant dungeons, clues, and some smaller faction politics.

Here’s the pitch:

• The local area is the seat of a barony
• The starting adventure is the exploration of a recently uncovered tomb, busted into by miners. They’re hiring adventurers to clear out the monsters so they can get back to work mining
• The tomb contains one of these dragon masks (the second mask to yet be discovered) and the miners basically skipped the difficult parts and went straight to the final few treasure rooms of the dungeon (with a few monsters)
• Suddenly, the Cult of the Dragon agent’s within and without the barony swing into action, and other organizations also join in
• The heroes can try to use the mask themselves (afflicting themselves with some dragon madness), hand it over to another faction in return for a healthy amount of gold and maybe a stronghold, or do some other thing, idk
• The heroes, being recognized as real go-getters for finding the masks to begin with, are hired by different factions to then scour the globe for the other masks

Getting to these other mask areas is a point-crawl and always involves sailing. Why? Because sailing is fast, there’s not a lot of random encounters so time-skips are fine, and maybe the players can upgrade their boat for the journeys.

After two of these journeys (which colors they go investigate are their own decision) the cult will have found the other one. Or maybe other factions, idk.

Either way, the cult will begin to search-and-destroy the other factions in order to find the other masks, now with multiple dragons in their employ.

In a perfect world, the Cult dramatically gets them all, the PCs have to chase them to their temple-stronghold, and then have to fight the Dragon Queen (perhaps in a weakened form depending on their earlier decisions). If they win, she is banished from the Earth for 666 years, and now there’s a big war over all the left-over gold like the ending of the Hobbit.

Keeping the journeys from being linear

To keep it from being linear, each of the dragon mask locations (there will be three, the heroes start by finding one and the Cult starts with one) is going to need to be a hex-flower of its own. A web of politics, dungeons, and roaming monsters like the barony before it. It will not be obvious where the mask is, only that it is somewhere in quite a large area, and its not obvious if its even been found yet. By anybody.

Here we can experience sub-factions in conflict with one-another. Here’s some ideas:

• This branch of the Cult wants to keep the mask for themselves so the parent cultists have to pretend to be members of the Order of the Platinum Dragon to work with the players and take down the local ring-leaders.
• A local ruler, separate from all organizations has found the mask and has succumb to dragon madness. They control dragons and terrorize the area and its all hands on deck to stop them.
• The Cult of the Dragon has turned this area into a stronghold and are scouring the land looking for the mask. The players need to lead a small invasion force, form a beachhead, and find it before the Cult can.
• The player’s intel found out about a masks’ location before the cult did. They’ll have to act fast and not alert the Cult to their actions, otherwise the Cult (which has a strong influence in the area) will be smothering them with agents!

A few more of those and we’ll be cooking! Feel free to send ideas down below!

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Thank you for reading!

Until we meet again,

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR ADVENTURES