Drakes have been with us in the Pathfinder game since Bestiary 2, with a handful appearing in
each subsequent volume. This familiarity
doesn’t exactly breed contempt—c’mon, we love dragons—but it does breed complacent
expectation. You turn to a drake page
expecting a speed surge, an environmental ability or two, maybe a special
attack, and blah blah blah.
That’s where art comes in.
Show me the GM who can turn to Ben Wootten’s jungle drake and not
want to put it in a campaign. That
camouflaged, squirrel-splayed, iguana-toed, archaeopteryx-tailed beauty is
begging to be in your game—only it doesn’t have to beg, because you already put
it in there, probably while I was still writing this. Last entry I was encouraging you to look past
the art as a useful way of rethinking the monster; today the art is 90% of the
reason to love this monster. Just goes
to show you: Every monster entry is worth approaching with fresh eyes.
(The art does have one problem—this is a jaguar- or even
horse-sized creature (that is, size Large), but it’s painted to look the size
of a faerie dragon, based on the surrounding limbs and leaves. (Maybe it’s a juvenile?) So remember that the adult jungle drake,
while small for a dragon, is still a semi-proper dragon—at least the size of
the raptors in Jurassic Park.)
Beyond that? It’s a
drake optimized to work in jungles. If
you’re a tactically minded GM, you can probably wreak a lot of havoc by
properly comboing the drake’s woodland stride/predatory grab/speed surge
abilities into a really nasty dine-and-dash strategy (particularly against
Small PCs, familiars, or pack animals).
An attack by a full rampage could leave PCs wounded, scattered,
gearless, and abducted/devoured in short order.
After their dirigible
is blown off-course, adventurers have only one chance to make it back to
civilization: a forced march through a jungle to a bubbling spring where sailors
take on water. With the monsoon season
approaching, the party has two weeks to reach the spring before the last ships
depart north, despite the canyons, bugbears gnashers (see the Monster Codex), flame pillars, and worse
that stand in their way. The last
challenge is a sprint across an isthmus patrolled by ravenous, grasping jungle
drakes.
Divinations indicate
a druid was reincarnated as a jungle drake.
Adventurers are hired to escort the druid’s master to him. They do not realize that the master intends
to skin his former pupil and use the hide to craft a particularly powerful
variant cloak of the bat (see Ultimate Equipment).
The blue-skinned
gnomes of the Tamuti Jungle are known for their worship of totem animals,
spirits that both represent and watch over their tribe. Among the more well-known Tamuti tribes
include the Sun Bears, the Jungle Drakes, the Anoa, the Blood Orangutans, and
the Oru Man, a two-headed, thin man-like cryptid. The Jungle Drakes are notorious raiders and
nomads, who not only torment their neighbors but also practice the normally
taboo act of riding their totem animal into battle.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 5
100
Jungle drakes are naturally common in Gladia’s vast jungles, all the more since the Kingdom of Kown-Dam’s fall. Ravenous and utterly fearless, they will happily take on any prey-especially humans.
Shores of Swords 