My players just beat a dragon and are thinking of how to skin and gut it for all its worth.
How do I handle this?
My players get pretty crazy and I'm honestly expecting someone to ask me if there's a market for preserved dragon dicks or something.
>>44292775
You ask them to send for a bunch of experts who take a large cut of the profit, because murderhobos generally don't have the expertise required to field dress a dragon.
>>44292775
They make a roll to say how well they butcher it, and you tell them that they harvested X currency worth of dragon bits, provided they can find a buyer before it decays.
>>44292775
Do any of their characters have skill relating to skinning animals? Its not easy if you don't know how. On a dragon, with its super-tough hide and scales, you might run the risk of really botching it.
Require some skill checks.
Secondly, how far away from civilization are the players? If they're out in the wilds and have substantial travel time, the hide may start rotting before they get back and its scent attract scavengers looking for an easy meal.
>>44292775
I think one of my big pet peeves in games is when you have classes like Ranger or the ability to harvest game animals, and the GM making it difficult for those characters to harvest the body parts from dead enemies.
If you're worried about your players getting too rich or getting equipment that's too powerful, there are plenty of was to inhibit THAT, but don't be an ass and punish players who want to loot their conquests...unless that's a whole plot in the works.
>>44292775
RARE CHAPTER
>>44292886
They're not exactly skilled or experienced in skinning animals. None of them are rangers, but even so I don't want to leave them with nothing. Even just resolving it by saying they manage to sloppily harvest guts worth N amount of gold seems really boring to me.
>>44292775
>My players get pretty crazy and I'm honestly expecting someone to ask me if there's a market for preserved dragon dicks or something.
Well, is there? What's the setting like? If you have anything like the natural medicine folklore you get in Africa and Asian there probably is.
>>44293015
Well it shouldn't be hard to forgo the guts and shove the bones into a bag of holding. Do you know how much a full in-tact dragon skeleton is worth?
>>44293044
How are you going to cut it down to the bones? Look at a whaling ship - dissection of a large animal for resources is a serious job in terms of preparation, required tools and manpower. And whaling ships were mainly concerned with harvesting a few specific materials.
Is there anyone in the party who might plausibly have those skills? Otherwise I'd be inclined to >>44292847
>>44293083
Hey. There's a reason the bags of holding have a maximum volume. Just stick the entire corpse in their with all of the big meat chunks gone to lighten the load.
>>44292847
>>44292858
>>44292886
>>44292974
>>44293015
>>44293034
>>44293044
>>44293083
OP this is so wildly dependent on your setting you need to give more details. Who's to say dragons even rot? In D&D for a while dragons were powered by an internal magical furnace (which is what their breath comes from) so does that just rot? Maybe they're actually slowly consumed by their element?
There have got to be about a million things you could distill from a dragon corpse for use or profit as well. And there are so many hooks you could do with buyers for those items.
I think the most important questions to ask are:
>what do you personally want to give the players out of this
>what do you think the players want to get out of it
>>44293122
The meat is probably the most lucrative part. I mean, a dragon leather armour is nice and all, but imagine all the nobles out-bidding each other for the opportunity to taste dragon meat. 'cause that's a lot of meat.
>>44293015
Well if they're going to be boring and chop it up for just money then let them be boring and do a boring roll.
Also people overestimate how complicated field dressing an animal is.
>>44292775
Dragons have high concentration of magic in their body it's (among other things) what keeps them alive for centuries. At the moment of dragon's death, all magic escapes and without proper treatment applied immediately the body will rapidly decay, leaving only bones.
Dragon bones can be sold for d10x100 gold at the nearest wizard college. If party decides to do so, they will be soon known to all wizards of the realm as "those idiots who wasted a dragon by killing it without proper precautions".
If players bitch about it being unfair or something, point out they got lucky because the magic often escapes dragon carcass in powerful detonation doing nasty amount of damage.
>>44293122
>not realising the entire bag of holding scam is a demilich renting out extradimensional space in her personal demiplane so she can look over valuable corpses and magical artifacts stored in the bags
>opening your bag two days later to find out you've got a resurrected dracolich in there
>>44293178
It depends whether dragon leather armor (or dragonscale armor, maybe) retains the immunity to an element the dragon has. That's probably pretty valuable.
I can imagine dragon oil having powerful elemental magic properties too.
>>44293222
Yeah, the best parts are what you can sell or trade to wizards.
>>44293301
I was more thinking like:
>boil out the oil from red dragon fat
>it's insanely flammable, even explosive when lit - some adventurers wear a vial around their neck for warmth in colder climates
>boil out the oil from white dragon fat (but maybe boiling wouldn't work for this)
>it's extremely cold, will extinguish flames and freeze what it's poured on - useful for lockbreaking
>>44293015
What classes are the characters? Maybe have them use dragon bits in making new equipment. I. e. dragon bone bow/staff, dragon hide leather arnor, dragon scale armor, dragon talon daggers, dragon teeth throwing knives, dragon's eye turns into a cool trinket, be creative here
>>44293178
This assumes there's no taboo associated with eating dragons, which there may or may not be. Hell up until like 200 years ago it was considered cruel and unusual punishment to serve lobster more then twice a week in US prisons because there was a taboo associated with it.
>>44292775
Make sure you check it for contaminants. My group once killed a black dragon with the help of a werewolf, who accidentally managed to infect said dragon with lycanthropy. We harvested the dragon for spell components, and it just so happened there was a festival in the nearby town, so we shared a bunch of the dragon meat.
So now our campaign world has a town completely full of warewolves, including some of our former characters.
>>44293464
In fantasy it could easily be more than a taboo as well; you may literally curse yourself by eating a dragon.
>>44292775
You can recover resources equal 1d6x100 GP market value. 2d6 if you're player has an skills or backgrounds related to hunting or leather work.
Your welcome OP
>>44293156
Ok, I'll go through a list of what I can imagine valuable body parts and what uses they might have as well as the difficulty there is in acquiring them
>Dragon Scales
Hard to skin, valuable, but hard to keep intact after killing the dragon and skinning it. Even for a very big dragon, you're not gonna get a lot. Used for armor obviously and the highest of fashion.
>Dragon blood
Easy to extract, hard to preserve. Pretty much magic juice(?)
>Dragon claws
Easy to extract skill wise, but have fun cutting through dragon bone to get it. Actually not that useful, because claws can't be reforged into swords or whatever.
>Dragon bones
Collector's item and alchemy ingredient, can't really be used for armor, it doesn't smelt/sculpt/form well.
>Dragon heart
Very very hard to get intact, much more likely to fuck up in the extraction process, and very valuable. Used as an alchemical ingredient or a source of magical power
>Dragon brain
Not that hard to extract, but extremely hard to preserve, honestly not a lot of uses, but superstitions abound about its intelligence boosting properties
>Dragon Eyes
Hard to extract, even harder if you're trying to get the brain, too. A valuable collector's item - the "gem" of a dragon, can also be used for obscure alchemy procedures
>Dragon Liver
Very very hard to extract. Renowned for its medicinal qualities, give it to a terminally ill person and expect a serious improvement of health, if not an outright healing process
>Dragon Venom Sacs
Almost impossible to extract successfully? Not sure about this, probably just make it entirely impossible because this is an organ that needs a lot of moving parts to make work. Dragon venom would very valuable though.
That said, I might be overthinking this shit since it all seems so difficult to actually get and my players don't have the necessary skills. If they do try to get professional help, the corpse would just rot or be picked clean by scavengers.
>>44293583
>venom sacks
u wot m8
>>44293633
They killed a green dragon
>>44293633
he means testes, dragon semen is acidic enough to be considered venom
>>44293633
Black dragons yo.
>>44293583
Okay so of these I'd go over:
>Scales - You probably want to distinguish between skin with scales and skin without. I would figure out whether you want this just to be good light armor, 'mundane' armor of magical effectiveness and/or to protect some measure or protection or immunity from elements
>Blood - I'd make this completely and totally poisonous to anything not dragon-descended, but a powerful magical drug to draconic sorcerers
>Claws - agree, nothing overly special about dragon claws. Just a trophy or ornament.
>Bones - agree, pretty much. Dragon bones are probably light but highly durable though, considering dragons need to fly but are very tough.
>Heart - is it just a heart or is it also their elemental energy organ? I think I would have this associated with longevity as well.
>Brain - should actually do something but I'm not 100% what. Something not entirely positive, like you eat this and you become mad greedy and start thinking dragon thoughts
>Eyes - sounds good. I'd let it be made into a lens that either lets you appraise/gives you bonuses on appraising the value of items, and/or one that lets you clearly see the properties of the dragon's elements (e.g. the temperature and spreading path of a fire)
>Liver - sounds good, would also specifically make it a cure-all for the dragon's element - i.e. green dragon liver cures someone of poison, red dragon liver can cure any burn. Probably highly toxic unless treated.
>Venom Sacs - obviously let you apply the venom, not sure what else
Stuff maybe skipped over:
>Fat - can be rendered into oil
>Muscles/tendons - might be useful material if very strong
>Wing leather - might be different from regular dragon leather
>Teeth - probably the same as claws but more easily integrated into weapons
>Throat/mouth/tongue - all probably acid/fire/ice/whatever proof. Tongue might have magical properties of understanding.
>Egg/eggshell
>Lungs
>Sexual organs
>>44293675
You mean jade?
>>44293583
Can your players use knives? Can they find an orifice? If so, they can cut that fucker open and get at it's organs, unless dragon skin literally can't be cut by normal means. That any of the organs are difficult to harvest is also stupid, unless there's some reason like the heart is made of literal fire or something. Venom sacs I could see being potentially fragile and dangerous.
Also bones an claws can be carved into shit.
>>44293945
The idea being that dragon meat is tough to cut through and that you're more likely to cut up the organ then just cut it out.
Extracting an organ while keeping it undamaged has got to be fucking hard.
>>44292775
Ask them how they're going to carry the damn thing.
How much does a dragon weight? 1200 lbs seems downright dainty. And aren't they carrying a few hundred pounds of gold, loot, supplies, etc? Did they bring a wagon train with them?
