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MonkeySage
2017-12-22, 03:20 PM
My players are going to pick a fight with a blue dragon. And not just any blue dragon- she's the headmistress of an academy of wizard-assassins. These wizard-assassins serve in the capacity of a secret police force for the city they're staying in. This blue dragon... Should be rich.

However, I do not wish to drop a huge pile of gold in their laps.

tyckspoon
2017-12-22, 03:39 PM
Well, if they just manage to draw out the dragon and take her down outside of her minions and fortified lair, then they should just get the items and/or other treasures that she carries on her person. That should be a significant reward, but not a back-breaking amount of money - the dragon probably doesn't carry her entire hoard with her everywhere she goes, after all! (If she does, it should probably be in magically-secured extra dimensional storage or something similar, which means the challenge becomes figuring out how to access it once you have it.)

If they're actually undertaking an infiltration of or assault on the Wizard-Assassin academy, requiring them to beat or outwit the dragon's formidable minions as well as negotiating the traps and defenses of their headquarters.. well, that's a major achievement if they can pull it off. Let them have the rewards of it, or at least as much as they can shove in their pockets and still escape with. Could be some of the huge pile of gold, could be magical secrets and items, could be sensitive political information that was insecurely recorded in a little black book hidden in the false bottom of a drawer in the head Wizard-Assassin's desk.. If you're mostly concerned with making sure the players don't wind up with too much cash wealth, I'd just have the dragon's money secured in a different facility somewhere. The dragon and/or the magic assassin academy should provide plenty of possibilities for other kinds of rewards (some of which could be information about the security around and leads on the dragon's actual cash horde, if the players are interested in the idea of having a huge mound of gold to call their own.)

Tinkerer
2017-12-22, 04:08 PM
Yeah, keeping the characters away from the hoard would be the easiest way to control that. Or having multiple lairs which is not an unheard of tactic for dragons, especially in my D&D world where I definitely kept the hoard being tied to the dragon's strength ala 2nd ed.

KillianHawkeye
2017-12-22, 11:22 PM
Sorry, but I'm really curious.... Are they assassins who specialize in wizard killing, or wizards who operate as assassins?

As for your situation, I agree that the easiest explanation is that the dragon keeps the majority of their treasure someplace else.

iceman10058
2017-12-23, 05:58 PM
Careful, if the players feel cheated oyt of a hoard they will probably quit. Its likely the biggest reason they are taking on the dragon in the first place.

MonkeySage
2017-12-23, 06:56 PM
Actually, they don't know the Headmistress is a dragon, yet. They're after her because a Senator from the country they're staying in wants them to dismantle the Academy, which trains wizards in the arts of espionage and murder.

FreddyNoNose
2017-12-23, 07:26 PM
Actually, they don't know the Headmistress is a dragon, yet. They're after her because a Senator from the country they're staying in wants them to dismantle the Academy, which trains wizards in the arts of espionage and murder.

Well, that hoard has been used by the guild as loans. They get weekly/monthly payments back. If they don't get their payments, well, they know where all the assassins live. :D

Bohandas
2017-12-24, 01:08 AM
Perhaps a great deal of it is tied up in non-portable wondrous architecture

Algeh
2017-12-24, 12:42 PM
You can tie up a lot of wealth in actually running the school - owning the buildings, the school library and equipment, and so on. Custom magical items designed to help in the training of assassins would also be a good way to tie up wealth, since the PCs would then have the quandary of whether or not such items should be re-sold, carefully gifted to someone who would "use them properly", or destroyed. (This is assuming the PCs are the type to be generally opposed to assassins running around. Some PCs would instead keep and use the equipment to train as assassins themselves, which may or may not be a place you'd like this campaign to go next.)

You can also make the hoard mostly consist of finely crafted art objects, such as gem-encrusted statues. Sure, they can pry the gems off of the statues and get some value from them as gems, but a lot of the value is in the artistry of the statue itself. Will they take the, say, 10% they can get from the raw materials, or will they haul heavy-yet-delicate gem-encrusted statues around looking for a suitable buyer? (The second could be a fun side quest depending on the group.) Dragons almost certainly have a higher strength score than a typical PC, so they could have extremely large and heavy taste in statues.

Jay R
2017-12-24, 01:38 PM
Much of the dragon's treasure would have come from adventurers who thought they could kill him. So what would be the treasure most often brought there?

They find a great many Blue Dragon Slaying arrows and Blue Dragon's Bane swords, which are theirs now that the only blue dragon in the area is dead.

Bohandas
2017-12-24, 02:19 PM
You can also make the hoard mostly consist of finely crafted art objects, such as gem-encrusted statues. Sure, they can pry the gems off of the statues and get some value from them as gems, but a lot of the value is in the artistry of the statue itself. Will they take the, say, 10% they can get from the raw materials, or will they haul heavy-yet-delicate gem-encrusted statues around looking for a suitable buyer?

Or will they chuck it in a portable hole?

Algeh
2017-12-25, 02:15 AM
Or will they chuck it in a portable hole?

Given a sufficiently large statue, it won't fit (typical portable hole is 6ft in diameter and 10 ft deep in 3rd edition, so it's certainly possible to get one statue in there unless it's a really big one, but a group of even regular-sized ones would be tricky - if I wanted to specifically thwart portable hole for a single statue in this case I'd probably make the statue of a dragon in flight with wings and tail outstretched so as to make it have a cross-section wider than 6 ft). However, it's certainly true that a higher-level party with lots of magical items has more solutions for carrying awkward stuff than a lower-level party, and how effective sheer size of the statue is as a deterrent would vary with party level. For a higher-level party, I'd probably go with something that's less physically awkward to haul around and more only interesting/valuable to very specific buyers due to the nature of the art piece.

The portable hole doesn't solve the "find a buyer" problem, which is probably the problem that's more interesting to roleplay of the two. I could see having to research the art interests and buying habits of various local nobles, trying to find one with both the ready cash to buy it and the interest in such things, maybe weighing two offers from different nobles, one in cash/gems and one in a mix of cash/gems and future favors but "worth" more or less than the other offer depending on how the PCs value those favors.

A lot of this depends on the group - some groups will simply pry out the gems and settle for the lesser money, some will take the time to problem-solve how to fence a specific item and get an entire sidequest out of it. Neither is "wrong", but it's a way of making the group work harder for that larger windfall so as to spread that extra money out over more adventuring (assuming you make fencing the thing into an adventure).

Mutazoia
2017-12-26, 04:12 AM
A dragon, who is smart enough to found an academy of her own, in a world where things are advanced enough to allow it, will have long since discovered, and made good use of, banking technology. All of her treasure (that she can't carry personally while in (demi)human form) is in a bank. Go one step further...it is literally in the bank...she owns the bank as well. That way she can safeguard all of her wealth, and have it work for her in the form of compounded interest on bank loans.

Besides, if you play her right, the PCs won't kill her. They may force her to retreat, while they pillage her academy, but they shouldn't be able to kill her. She can keep popping up in the campaign from time to time.