Drake Overview [Dark Sun]

Drakes are colossal reptiles that treat the desert world as their private hunting preserve. They lack true intelligence, but they are anything but stupid; measured by instinct, guile and savagery, few creatures match them. Their bulk, speed and ferocity are frightening enough, but their innate psionics make them truly deadly, and many rank them just below the world's dragon-tyrant in raw power.

They did not originate here. The first drakes used immense psionic strength to cross over from their elemental home planes, found the world to their taste and stayed, and many generations have hatched there since. Air, earth, fire and water drakes each reflect the plane of their ancestors.

Even with their mental powers, most drakes would rather fight with tooth and claw. Every kind has two claws, a bite, a tail lash, psionics and a breath weapon usable once per day, and air drakes add a wing buffet. A drake concentrates everything on one foe until it dies, then turns to the next. It does not always bother to kill its food before eating. Its claws, whose damage varies by type, also serve for walking and digging, and must be worn down by use or the nails curl back into the pads.

A drake bites eagerly, especially when the bite could kill. If its attack roll beats the needed number by 4 or more, it locks the victim in its jaws and shakes violently, doubling the bite damage. For as long as the victim lives the shaking continues, dealing the original, undoubled bite damage automatically each round. When it can, the drake swallows the dead or wounded victim whole and looks for another. From the next round the stomach acid deals 1d20 per round, with no save, until digestion is complete, and the victim's belongings must save vs. acid or be destroyed.

The tail is often the worst weapon. Swept side to side, it strikes as an area attack, so the drake suffers no penalty against targets it cannot see. Any creature it strikes, however large, is stunned for 1d6 rounds unless it saves vs. petrification. Tail damage varies by type.

Each drake also has a devastating elemental attack whose form depends on its kind. Recreating the effect takes 15 days, so it can be used only that often.

Their innate psionic powers, all devotions shared by every variety, work without drawing down the strength points that fuel the drake's other powers. Its body control power, which adapts it to one chosen hostile environment, is fixed to its element. Combined with each type's own disciplines, these abilities make drakes terrifying foes.

Most people doubt drakes exist at all. Very few have seen one, and fewer still survived. Hunting them is for the reckless or the suicidal. Now and then one dies of age or sickness, but nobody knows their lifespan and hardly any have been slain.

Each type's home ground follows its element. Earth drakes can live almost anywhere but favor rocky country and mountains over open sand. Air drakes range freely on the winds from the mountain ranges to the silt sea and beyond, usually laired among high peaks. Fire drakes tolerate dry sand but hunt for volcanoes and hot springs, and will even burn down a forest to bask in the blaze. Water drakes are the most restricted, keeping to ponds and other water.

A drake's lair is never open and airy, since its home plane has little open space. It wants to be wrapped in its element. Rather than a great hollow, an earth drake squeezes into a pocket barely big enough to hold it, and loves it. This makes drake lairs harder to break into than those of other giants.

Many who glimpse a drake think they have seen the dragon-tyrant itself, and rumors of several dragons circulate constantly. Most are dismissed, and several such sightings have proven to be drakes.

Natives of a drake's ancestral plane scorn it as a deserter that traded pure elements for a lesser world. Meetings with such beings are tense at best and violent at worst, and elementals and drakes of the same element nearly always come to blows if their paths cross on the prime material plane, though drakes deal peaceably with beings of other elements. Drakes never go back to the elemental planes; most were born here and have never seen them. The mightiest psionicists can become beast masters, and drakes are among their favorite psionic beasts.

Drakes eat chiefly humans and humanoids, along with shellback lizards and dune hulks when they can, and scale-runners if they must. Carnivore meat is their favorite.

Their hides, teeth, claws and blood are worth a fortune, and some sorcerer tyrants forbid their sale outright. Templars confiscate any such goods that reach the market in their master's name; with drakes so scarce, they can simply declare the goods stolen from the ruler and send the seller to the executioner. Elves flout these laws constantly, selling drake goods at a tidy profit while staying one step ahead of the templars.

The hide makes fine armor. Made into leather armor, it improves on normal leather by the drake's negative Armor Class: leather is AC 8, so the hide of an AC -2 air drake yields AC 6. The teeth and claws make weapons that count as +2 thanks to their strength and keenness, though they are not magical. The blood goes into certain alchemical mixtures. Folklore insists that any scrap of a drake carries great luck, and shady elven peddlers sell such charms from hidden stalls away from the templars. Most are fakes, and even genuine ones have no magic, yet desperate buyers still pay dearly.

Drakes mate whenever the urge comes, not on any cycle. The female drives the male off and waits, laying one or at most two eggs that take six months to hatch. The ever-hungry young need constant tending and grow from 2 to 20 feet in their first year, adding 5 feet each year after until full grown.

Every drake is a collector, and only it knows what and why. An earth drake might hoard precious metals or thousands of stones of identical size, an air drake might claim certain peaks or favor things that drift on the breeze, and a water drake might gather shiny objects or containers for water. What fire drakes hoard is a mystery; they would destroy their hoards rather than let a stranger see them. An unarmed person facing a drake has one last hope: offering it something worthy of its collection. A pleased drake will often let a tribute-bearer go.