Ancient Silver Dragon

Dragon · 12 hexes · SM +5 Ancient Silver Dragon (Monsters on Automatic; answers SRD 5.1)

Silver dragons like people and live among them in other shapes for decades at a time. They are likelier than any other dragon to simply help, and people who impose on that goodwill do it once. The breath is a cone of killing cold. An ancient dragon is older than the kingdom it sleeps under and has outlived everyone who knew where it was. What follows is less a fight than a negotiation, conducted by something that worked out what the party wants, and what they will give up to get it, some while before they arrived.

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
Cold BreathCold Breath (11): 15d burning, Reach Ranged, cone. A cone of freezing cold 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 burning	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 defense; it costs the dragon nothing.	no roll	—	Ranged, 20

Traits (24)

• Bad Temper (12)
• Combat Reflexes
• Damage Resistance 12
• Damage Resistance 15 (Cold; 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
• Temperature Tolerance 5 (Cold)
• Unfazeable

Skills (5)

• 11Brawling
• 11Innate Attack (Breath)
• 18Intimidation
• 9Stealth
• 18Tracking

Notes

• Racial cost: 755 points of traits plus 18 points of skills.
• Body weight: 22 tons.
• Movement: ground Move 4; air Move 12, 36 at a sprint (primary).
• Immunity to its own element covers that one damage type and nothing else, and it is not in the published DR. A red dragon is not armored against a sword by being immune to fire.
• The breath costs the creature to use and cannot be repeated every second, and a dragon that could breathe every turn would be a different fight. The published rating does not yet discount it for that, so it runs high for the sixteen colors whose breath is their best attack, worst for the acid breathers. Read these dragons as somewhat less dangerous than the number says.
• Extra Attack: it bites and claws in the same turn, which is most of what makes it different from a very large animal.

Encounter rating

CER174

Offense77

Protection97

Threat tiersevere

Appearing1

Wandering1

Tags

• monsters-on-automatic
• ai-generated
• doa-authored
• srd-5-1
• dragon
• reptile
• metallic
• apex
• hoard
• talker
• flier
• mountain
• cold
• good
• color-silver
• age-ancient

GCS v5 downloads

• ↓ Character sheet (.gcs)Open directly in GCS
• ↓ Ancestry template (.gct)Apply to any character

Where this one came from

Source record

Ancient Silver Dragon [Monsters on Automatic, SRD coverage: dragon age and color 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 Silver Dragon (SRD 5.1).
• Racial template: 755 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.
• Typical Stats, damage and ratings are derived from the racial template rather than authored beside it, so the sheet and the stat block cannot disagree.
• GCS ancestry draft: gcs/silver-dragon-ancient.gct
• The published Move is the primary medium's cruising Move; sprint figures are stated in the movement note and not folded into it.
• Treasure and grappling are not authored for this record and ship as explicit nulls, which reads as known absent rather than forgotten; `lair` carries a short habitat note instead, because where a creature dens is an encounter fact rather than a loot one.
• Body mass is the figure the build was scaled from and the one fact that makes it checkable; see the gurps-animal-sanity-check skill for the bands.
• 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.
• 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 50 feet 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.