I bet you thought we were done with Gem dragons

this month, but no!

Using my sage powers, I have delved into the deleted archives of Wizards of the Coast and

retrieved from the ether the listing for the 3.5 edition Obsidian dragon, thanks to a few

strident requests from devoted fans.

I will not be covering the unusual dragons related to Silver dragons and also called

Obsidian dragons from the Greyhawk world setting, as they are not related to the gem dragons

and are only found on that world, they are basically just a silver dragon variant, a

mutation if you will.

Finding the real Obsidian dragons is not easy though.

Look in vain for the lair of the Obsidian dragon my friend, for you will rarely find

it on any world of the prime material plane, but the same can't be said for the dragons

themselves, as they can turn up just about anywhere, and on any world, that they care

to, which makes them one of the most elusive of the fabled neutral aligned Gem dragons.

With only a single web article published in 2003, written by Scott Brocius and Mark A.

Jindra to answer our questions, I may have to engage in a little bit of speculation and

spin a few ways to make best use of the Obsidian dragon in the Forgotten Realms, and indeed,

any world you care to place them on, in the entire Dungeons & Dragons multiverse.

Obsidian dragons, while the most intelligent of the gem dragons, are also the most vicious.

Typically of Neutral Evil alignment, they are extremely haughty, anger easily, and like

to toy with their prey before finishing them off.

These are also one of the more powerful psionic dragons, with minds every bit as formidable

as fangs, claws and incendiary breath.

Yes, they breathe fire, but we will talk about that in just a moment, so, make yourself comfortable,

grab yourself a tasty beverage, we are about to get deeply nerdy.

When first hatched from their lustrous, pitch-black eggs, the small wyrmlings have scales that

a grey, rough to the touch and quite well defined, then, as they begin to hunt and explore

the world beyond their hidden nest, their scales become darker and progressively smoother,

seeming to blend together until their remarkable hide appears as smooth, lustrous and pitch-black

as the stone they are named after.

Also, it just so happens that the overlapping scales tend to form razor-sharp edges where

their joints come together, again, another trait of the Obsidian stone is its exceptionally

sharp, glass-like edges.

However, the real edge of this breed of dragons is their minds, even when first hatched they

have an intelligence of 15 and this increases as they age and grow.

By the time they have become adults, their intelligence is an astounding 25, and it doesn't

dragon could potentially reach god-like levels of intellect, with a score of up to 37...

this is almost indescribably smart, it is intelligent enough to be invited into the

infernal palace of Asmodeus to enjoy a challenging game of wits and perhaps help him with some

particularly complex and difficult schemes in exchange for simply ridiculous mountains

of wealth.

Asmodeus would not even attempt to pull any entrapping contract shenanigans with such

a creature, to do so would undoubtedly backfire on him considerably.

Am I hinting very strongly that a Great Wyrm Obsidian dragon is a nigh unbeatable foe?

No, I am outright telling you this is the case... so, the only way left to beat them,

is to ensure they never live long enough to reach their full potential.

Of course, this occurs to them about three minutes after they are hatched and so, they

immediately make use of their innate ability to pass instantly between the Material Plane

and the Inner Planes, vanishing from the world into the remote and lethal inferno of the

elemental plane of fire.

There they make their way to the Mountains of Coal where great numbers of their kind

establish lairs for themselves and range out from there, across the planar borders into

countless different worlds of the prime material plane, building a mental catalogue of suitable

hunting grounds and interesting locations to seek treasure and magical knowledge.

On prime worlds, they will always gravitate towards volcanic zones, as they are perfectly

able to survive in the extreme environment of a churning caldera, slipping through the

mists of vented gases, often flying just ahead of the devastating lava flows, snapping up

fleeing animals and immolating villages in their path, the lava leaving behind no evidence

the dragon was ever there.

The dragon uses this extreme heat to bring its entire body to nearly incandescent temperature

so that even if you could get within striking distance before its jets of flame breath get

you, the radiating heat will boil your flesh within your armor.

The Great Wyrm Obsidian dragons become so adept at planar travel and their understanding

becomes such that they are able to actually generate their own demiplanes using their

impressive psychic power alone, there are reports from one obscure necromantic skull

tome I listened to, deep in the candlekeep crypts and under the watchful eye of the dragon

spirit down there, which told of a great epidemic of terrible nightmares, where a demonic dragon,

like the heart of star cloaked in the blackness of the night sky seemed to usurp the sleepers

power of imagination, stealing their dreams as it were, to make a nightmare realm all

for itself.

Can you imagine the panic spreading among the living people as they awaken to find they

all experienced the same thing?

In truth, the dragon did enter their dreams, within the color wall of the ethereal plane

located at the boundary of the border and deep ethereal zones.

In such rare cases, this sort of thing will seem like a direct challenge to any gold dragon

in the vicinity of those dreamers, which can result in conflicts, but green dragons, who

may also manipulate the dreams of mortal folks near it's lair, will know better to get involved

and just leave well enough alone.

For whatever reason, invoking the attention of an Obsidian dragon is therefore highly

dangerous, they tend to torment other creatures mostly just to amuse themselves so, my advice

is to seek out some high alpine region or head as far north or south as you can until

you reach the lands of endless ice, as Obsidian dragons have an aversion to the deep cold

of such places, taking double damage from any cold-based attacks and suffering great

discomfort in frigid conditions.

Keep in mind though, this will probably only work with adult dragons or younger, the more

ancient dragons will simply cloak themselves in a magical aura of heat, and plane shift

away the moment they are exposed to the chill directly.

A truly determined foe may use some sort of dimensional anchor enchantment on them to

prevent their escape, at which point, the dragon will erupt into a terrible rage and

fight its captor to the death.

Excellent flyers, the dragon will keep its distance and soften up the target by unleashing

breath weapon attacks in the form of great cones of fire, its eyes blazing red orbs and

mouth incandescently hot just add to its highly intimidating appearance.

It will deliberately set fire to any material that will release great plumes of smoke and

ash it can use for enhanced cover from those trying to target it with ranged counterattacks,

meanwhile, it is hurling fireballs and using its mental power to manifest white fire in

a twenty-foot radius anywhere it can see within around 400 feet from its location.

White fire deals 5d4 fire damage to any who fail a dexterity saving throw and will set

fire to any combustible material, even melting metals with a low melting point such as lead,

gold and such.

if they do manage to break the lock on their planar travel, and are of an ancient age category,

they can simply snatch up a victim and transport them directly to the plane of elemental fire,

retreating to simply watch their victim burn to a screaming crisp in the unquenchable fires.

A good way to introduce the Obsidian dragon to your players is to have them plane shift

from deep within the plane of fire and be so hot, their entire body is glowing brightly,

then as they cool, their hide darkens gradually to the deep, lustrous black, just like lava

freshly flowing from a volcano, or some blacksmiths creation, cooling from the heart of the forge.

Getting anywhere nearer than ten feet of the dragon while it is glowing like that is going

to hurt.. not too much, but it will give the dragon a moment to take stock of its surroundings

without having to worry to much about getting a sudden flurry of critical strikes from a

highly trained monk, for example.

That being said, obsidian dragons do not shy away from combat, but they make quick assessments

of the opposition and determine within a couple of rounds whether they can overpower their

foes easily.

If not, they retreat to formulate an ambush or to avoid very powerful foes.

They also learn as they age, to marshal their most abundant resource... fire elementals,

which they can use unique, alien, extraplanar magic to safely contain within themselves

and unleash like a troop transport by simply breathing them out along with a cone of its

own breath weapon.

You can imagine the shock of the players when the cone of flames leaves behind a small mob

of minor fire elementals, perhaps even creatures like the miscreant magmins, racing about,

happily setting fire to everything they can.

It is a rare tactic for the obsidian dragon to snatch an enemy back to their own demiplane

to fight them, but there will be very good reasons for the dragon to do so, and I would

personally restrict this sort of tactic for when you want to snatch away a nearly dead

player character and hold them captive and alive, rather than just reducing them to a

smoking pile of ash and a pair of scorched boots.

Always provide some means for the other characters to somehow get to the dragon's personal demiplane,

its just another encounter location after all, but if they decide not to, have the player

roll up a new character right away and get them back into the game, or better yet, always

have an NPC on hand that a player can take over for a little while if their character

is cut off from the action for an extended period of time, as nobody likes to sit around

with nothing to do.

Why would the obsidian dragon capture a character rather than kill them outright?

Well, amusement, arrogance, or just a divide and conquer strategy, but it may be that the

hyper-intelligent dragon is conducting horrific experiments to try and create its own force

of elementally infused minions, both to protect its hoard while it is away from the office,

or as a squad of elemental storm troopers that it can effectively gate into its location

whenever it runs into more opposition than it expected.

In combat, the Obsidian dragon makes great use of its psionic abilities, and before you

worry to much about handling this in 5th edition, let me just provide the easiest method to

handle it.

While a number of monsters, like Mind Flayers, have been able to use their psionic abilities

since 5th edition’s launch, this has largely taken the form of being able to cast spells

without material, verbal, or somatic components rather than a discrete subsystem of rules.

I am actually fine with this, it makes perfect sense to me that a spellcaster facing off

against a mind mage is going to have real problems countering the psionic manifestations,

not because they can't dispel or counter spell them, but because they can't see any material,

verbal, or somatic components which clue them into what the psychic is about to unleash,

and when you think about it for a moment, this is exactly the advantage a powerful psychic

should have, the psychic is much more like a stealth sorcerer than anything else, so

play them that way.

Looking at the traditional array of psychic powers the dragon has, they are all easy to

convert to existing spell listings, Ectoplasmic wall is close enough to the Web spell, the

firefall manifestation causes an existing source of flame to erupt in a sudden flare

of power that erupts in a blindingly bright hemispherical plume that requires all creatures

in a 60 foot radius to make a dexterity saving throw or take 5d6 fire damage and catch on

fire, also, creatures within 120 ft of the plume must make a wisdom saving throw or become

blinded for 1d4+1 rounds, save ends.

Just set the save DC based on the challenge rating you want for your dragon, easy peasy.

from a young age, Obsidian dragon can cast fireball so, this just seems like they have

learned how to cause a fireball to erupt out of any available fire in their immediate area,

something a master of flames should be able to do really.

Some of the more obscure psionic powers of the ancient obsidian dragons transform them

into excellent recurring enemies, such as the psychic power called Mind Store, basically,

the dragon manifests a storage crystal that, on its physical death, safely contains the

dragons living mind and essence, this crystal should be located back on the elemental planes,

or within the dragons own demiplane of course, and it prevents the dragon's body being either

resurrected or transformed into something like a dracolich, which will really annoy

the cult of the dragon.

This storage crystal is not inert, it becomes the new body of the dragon, who floats around

in it, very annoyed for a while, still able to use telekinesis and telepathy to interact

with its surroundings as it slowly pulls either ectoplasm from the Astral plane or protomatter

from the Ethereal plane into its location over the next ten days and constructs a new

draconic body for itself to transfer back into, during this process, the dragon is highly

vulnerable though as anything destroying that body will also kill the contained mind of

the dragon, killing it permanently.

So, its a psychic phylactery, easy peasy.

Some good guidelines for quick and dirty use of psychic powers is, they are similar to

magic but almost impossible to counterspell, they can be dispelled if they are ongoing,

they usually have a range no greater than 120 feet or so, they require saving throws

and they are usually just variants of existing arcane or divine spell effects anyway.

Obsidian dragons can cloak themselves in psychic mage armor, manifest scorching rays, lots

of different fire effects, I'll do something I rarely do and put a link in the video description

text below back to the D&D Wiki page which lists all the Psion powers from 3.5 edition

D&D so you can just see what they do and figure out your own conversions, its really not that

hard, just remember to always choose the saving throws and damage limits based on the dragon's

Challenge rating and you can't go wrong.

For physical stats, the Obsidian dragon is most similar in size and power to the bronze

dragon, a red dragon would easily kick their tail if it was nothing but a straight-up physical

brawl, but of course, with the obsidian dragon, they would outsmart the red dragon every single

time and their use of both arcane spells and psychic powers is more than a match for most

other dragons, even gold dragons respect just how dangerous Obsidian dragons can be and

tend to give them a wide berth.

It might be different if the obsidian dragons were more active on prime material worlds,

but since they are not, the gold dragons just tend to deal with the consequences of their

infrequent visits, and not the root cause.

Obsidian dragons keep lairs stocked with whatever tickles their fancy, they are more likely

to rest in a lake of molten gold rather than a pile of treasure, they will mount trophies

of all kinds on moulded plinths of obsidian and of course, favour objects that a completely

immune to fire and heat, so, they are unlikely to keep books and scrolls and other traditional

magic items, in any case, they are intelligent enough to simply memorize whatever they read

once and don't need to ever keep a book or scroll.

If they do, for whatever reason, remain on a prime material world for an extended period

of time, their regional effect manifests as increased seismic activity, so, earth tremors,

geothermal features becoming active after many thousands of years of dormancy, and an

increased severity to any outbreaks of fire in either towns or forests within six miles

of their location.

Certainly one of the more obscure and formidable Gem dragons, thanks for the request, my name

is AJ Pickett and I make videos about RPG lore, monsters and exotic locations in the

D&D multiverse, thanks for joining me and as always, I will be back with more for you,

very soon.