Dragon [Maztica]

These serpentine dragons, called tlalocoatls, rain serpents or rain dragons, have no limbs and a head at each end of their long bodies: one a snake's, the other like a scaly jaguar's. Their color runs from sky blue below to turquoise above. Aside from their aging, maneuverability and attacks, they share the usual traits of dragons.

They fly by innate magic and are nimbler in the air than most dragons. They open with spells and powers before closing. In melee each head bites, the snake head for 3d6 plus a venom that kills on a failed save, the jaguar head for 3d8. The dragon may also constrict, holding one victim for every 8 feet of its length and crushing each for 2d4 per round until one side dies, and it can snatch with a mouth or plummet, but it cannot use other special dragon attacks.

Each head has its own breath, usable once every three rounds, with damage that grows with age from 2d6+2 to 13d6+13. The jaguar head exhales a vapor cloud 90 feet long, 30 wide and 30 high, either scalding steam that deals breath damage or harmless cool fog; both last 1d4+4 rounds and block sight like darkness. The snake head blows a cone of ice crystals 75 feet long, 5 feet across at the mouth and 25 feet wide at the end, its damage half cold and half abrasion. When both heads breathe together, the normal damage is followed by a downpour equal to the dragon's create water, lasting one round per four gallons, inside an area the size of the vapor cloud. Each round in it deals 1d4 drowning damage.

It casts and uses powers at a level equal to 5 plus its combat modifier, and it is immune to cold and electricity. Further powers come with age. A very young one can use water breathing 3/day. Each later stage adds one more at 2/day: obscurement when young, solid fog as a juvenile, call lightning as an adult, transmute water to dust at mature adult and weather summoning when old. The very old gain transmute rock to mud and the venerable control weather, each 1/day.

They bring rain to the land and will water a dry region if properly appeased, though they are fickle and may unleash floods or let droughts linger. They lair in caves on cloud-wrapped mountains, sometimes sharing them with chacs, rain spirits that resemble jaguars. Each serves a rain god as a priest; all are hermaphrodites and breed only when the god allows. They mature so slowly that many die young, then age swiftly late in life, living at most 676 years.

Less greedy than most dragons, they still keep hoards, in local valuables rather than coins. Count cocoa beans as copper pieces, copper blades as silver, coral buds as electrum, jade or turquoise as gold, and gold-dust quills as platinum. Their magic items are local too. They eat cocoa beans, turquoise and jade with relish, drink huge amounts of water (which can worsen a drought), and love meat, especially young animals and human children. Their upper scales are lovely turquoise worth up to 1 gp each, workable like stone but tough as metal, so weapons made from them do not break the way bone or stone ones do.