D&D: ‘Planescape’s New Time Dragons Are Anything But Wibbly Wobbly
Time Dragons may, in fact, be timey-wimey, but these CR 26 ancient wyrms are anything but wibbly and/or wobbly. Take a look.
Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse introduces more than fifty new monsters. And among the most powerful of all is a new type of dragon, to 5E: the Time Dragon. As the name suggests, these dragons are all about manipulating time. And yes, they can, in fact, travel through time.
Does that mean your game is about to get a whole lot more complicated? Only if you want it to be. But aside from the most powerful ability, Time Dragons, as a whole, are a neat wrinkle in the fabric of D&D’s multiverse. Two guesses as to what they breathe, before we dive in to look at their stat block.
Time Dragons – Tick Tock, Fight the Clock
If you were thinking “no, there’s no way that a Time Dragon breathes… time, surely I could understand gravity or something, but time?” Well, you’d be wrong. Because that’s exactly what they do, which I’m sure most of you guessed.
What does time-breath look like? In game terms, it’s an 8d12 cone of force damage, which is already pretty mean. But creatures who fail their save not only take full damage, but they are also “desynchronized from the time stream”, which is a nasty array of penalties. For one, all attacks against them have advantage. For two, they’re poisoned. And thirdly, all creatures have resistance against their damage. And once a creature is affected, it takes three successful saves (made at the end of a turn) to shrug off the effect.
Then there’s the main course, Time Gate, which is an ability that only Ancient Time Dragons have. This is mostly useful only as a plot device. But what a plot device. The Time Dragon opens a portal to anywhere in the multiverse, at any point in time within 8,000 years from the present moment, past, or future. So if you want to hurl your party through time, all it takes is a shove action.
Aside from that, Time Dragons have three reactions per turn, which is an interesting shift away from Legendary Actions. Especially in that they actually get three reactions a turn. Though none of them are super damaging, so while they have some powerful abilities, once their Time Breath is exhausted, they only have three “rend” attacks per turn. Unless they happen to be next to creatures at the end of their turn, in which case they could have upwards of six.
But if you manage to kill one, it’ll be back. They are reborn as a Time Dragn egg that hatches 1d100 years from when it materializes.
Time travel. Space travel. Is there anything these dragons can’t do?
