Dragon · 12 hexes · SM +5 Ancient Black Dragon [Monsters on Automatic, SRD coverage: dragon age and colour variants; answers Ancient Black Dragon (SRD 5.1)]
Black dragons keep to swamp and drowned ruin, and they are the meanest of the chromatic line: cruel for its own sake, patient about it, and happy to let a place rot around them. The breath is acid, and it keeps working after it lands. An ancient dragon is older than the kingdom it sleeps under and has outlived everyone who ever knew where it was. It is not a fight. It is a negotiation with something that has already worked out what you want and what you are prepared to trade for it.
Attributes
ST70
DX9
IQ15
HT15
HP70
Will17
Per17
FP15
Basic Speed6
Basic Move12
Dodge9
DR12
Melee attacks
| Usage | Level | Damage | Reach |
|---|---|---|---|
| BiteBite (11): 8d-1 impaling, Reach C,1. Teeth built to punch through bone and hold. | 11 | 8d-1 impaling | C,1 |
| ClawsClaws (11): 8d+1 cutting, Reach C,1. Cannot parry. | 11 | 8d+1 cutting | C,1 |
| TailTail (9): 8d crushing, Reach C,2. Swept through the rear arc. Cannot parry. | 9 | 8d crushing | C,2 |
| Wing BuffetWing Buffet (9): 8d-1 crushing, Reach C,2. A wing swept across the front arc, using the wings the creature's Flight already pays for. Knocks a lighter target down rather than wounding it. Cannot parry. | 9 | 8d-1 crushing | C,2 |
| Acid BreathAcid Breath (11): 15d corrosion, Reach Ranged, cone. A cone of acid that catches everything in front of the dragon. It costs the creature to use and cannot be repeated every second, which is the only reason a fight with one lasts more than a turn. | 11 | 15d corrosion | Ranged, cone |
| Frightful PresenceFrightful Presence: Reach Ranged, 20. Everyone who can see the dragon rolls Will. On a failure they are frightened of it and cannot willingly close, and a bad failure means they run. No attack roll and no defence; it costs the dragon nothing. | no roll | — | Ranged, 20 |
Traits (24)
- Amphibious
- Bad Temper (12)
- Combat Reflexes
- Damage Resistance 12
- Damage Resistance 15 (Acid; Limited (one damage type))
- Discriminatory Smell
- Enhanced Move 1.5 (Air)
- Extended Lifespan 5
- Extra Attack 1
- Extra Legs (Four Legs)
- Fangs
- Fearlessness 4
- Flight (Winged)
- Greed (12)
- High Pain Threshold
- Horizontal
- Infravision
- Nictitating Membrane 3
- Night Vision 9
- Peripheral Vision
- Striker (Tail; Crushing; Long +1) (Long +1)
- Talons
- Telescopic Vision 4
- Unfazeable
Skills (5)
- 11Brawling
- 11Innate Attack (Breath)
- 18Intimidation
- 9Stealth
- 18Tracking
Notes
- GCS ancestry draft: gcs/black-dragon-ancient.gct
- Independent build total: 760 points of racial traits plus 18 points of racial skills.
- Answers the SRD heading(s): Ancient Black Dragon (SRD 5.1). Only the creature identity is taken from the SRD; the GURPS statistics, ratings and prose are this project's own work and reproduce no SRD text.
- Typical Stats, damage and ratings are derived from the racial template, not authored beside it, so the sheet and the stat block cannot disagree.
- Body mass used to scale this build: 20000 kg. ST, Size Modifier and DR are checked against it; see the gurps-animal-sanity-check skill for the bands.
- Movement: ground Move 4; air Move 12, 36 at a sprint (primary); water Move 4. The published Move is the primary medium's cruising Move; sprint figures are stated here and not folded into it.
- Treasure and grappling are not authored for this batch and ship as explicit nulls; `lair` carries a short habitat note, because where a wandering animal dens is an encounter fact rather than a loot one.
- Breath damage is stated as literal dice rather than derived from ST: it is a property of the creature's element and age, not of how hard it can push.
- The breath is marked as costing fatigue, which halves its contribution to the rating. Without that a dragon would be rated as though it breathed every second, which no dragon does.
- Element immunity is built as heavily Limited Damage Resistance rather than as a special rule. It protects against one damage type and nothing else, and it deliberately does not count toward the record's published DR — a red dragon is not armoured against a sword by being immune to fire.
- Extra Attack, Frightful Presence, Extended Lifespan, Infravision and the wing buffet were added after a post-hoc comparison against the local Enraged Eggplant dragon conversions and the SRD stat blocks. A dragon that could only act once a turn and could not frighten anyone was not a dragon; the comparison surfaced the gap and the build is still ours.
- KNOWN DEFECT in the shared rating path, found by this batch and not worked around here. scripts/review/cer.mjs documents `usesFatigueOrSpell` as halving an attack's contribution, and damageContribution implements it — but combatProfileFromStats never copies the flag onto the profile, so the halving is dead code for damage and live only for afflictions. Sixteen of these forty dragons pick their breath as the best attack and are therefore rated as if they breathed every second. The acid breathers are worst hit, because corrosion carries a x2 damage multiplier: an ancient black dragon rates 227 against an ancient red's 174 on otherwise identical bodies. The fix belongs in cer.mjs and in the application it mirrors, not in these specs. Filed as issue #55 here and Zuljita/DungeonsOnAutomatic#432 in the application; the two must land together, because both implementations share the omission and the parity smoke test therefore passes while both are wrong.
- About 15 m nose to tail, which is the SM +5 row, and the point at which the published size discount on Strength has all but bottomed out.
- ST from Basic Lift: it lifts a laden wagon in one foot.
- Extra Attack: an adult dragon bites and claws in the same turn, which is most of what makes it different from a very large animal.
Encounter rating
CER175
Offense78
Protection97
Threat tiersevere
Appearing1
Wandering1
Tags
- monsters-on-automatic
- ai-generated
- doa-authored
- srd-5-1
- dragon
- reptile
- apex
- hoard
- flier
- talker
- swamp
- evil
- colour-black
- age-ancient
GCS v5 downloads
Where this one came from
- Source record
- Ancient Black Dragon [Monsters on Automatic, SRD coverage: dragon age and colour variants]
- Source system
- doa_fixture / doa_authored
- Released under
- cc_by_4_0
- Conversion
- 0.1.0-srd-independent-build
- Review status
- approved
- Credit
- Monster statistics, ratings and description prose by Monsters on Automatic; AI-generated first draft, project-reviewed, released under CC BY 4.0.
- Description
- Written by Dungeons on Automatic, released under cc_by_4_0
- Independently authored GURPS build. The SRD supplies the creature identity this record answers to and nothing else: no SRD statistics, wording or presentation is reproduced, and no third-party GURPS conversion was used as an input.
- Answers the SRD heading(s): Ancient Black Dragon (SRD 5.1).
- Racial template: 760 points across 31 traits, plus 5 racial skill(s) worth 18 points.
- Every trait is drawn from the project's controlled GURPS vocabulary in scripts/srd/trait-library.mjs, which carries the page reference and published cost for each entry.
- sourceSystem is recorded as doa_fixture because that is the package contract's value for project-authored material; the SRD headings this record answers are in provenance.coversSourceIdentities.
- Ratings are recomputed through the consumer CER path on every build, so a mechanics change cannot leave a stale rating behind.
Copyright 2026 Monsters on Automatic. GURPS-compatible monster statistics, ratings and prose authored for this package as an AI-generated first draft under project review. No SRD text, and no third-party GURPS conversion, is reproduced. Portrait and tokens are AI-generated original art. Sources and credits.