“You don’t.” would be the easy answer I imagine. And one of the two that is not helping me.

Ok, from the beginning.

A Dragon, let’s call him Perianwyr, gets arrested by a great dragon, let’s call him Ghostwalker. How can you keep a dragon imprisoned? It’s not like a dragon is just a big fat troll, or just a humble, mortal mage. It’s a fucking magical flying lizard, older than written history. Knowing stuff you can’t even imagine and wielding power you can’t even grasp.

So yes we are playing around in Denver. And I wanna tell/run a story about shadow runners that free a dragon. A dragon who is imprisoned thanks to this shadow runners. But I have no I dear how to pull it off.

How do you look up such thing? And how can a great dragon fail to keep this flying lizard looked up? How can a runner team bust out this worm?

Force him to assume human form and put him into an orbital satellite.

Then make it so that returning to his dragon form would shatter the room he is in,
sending him hurtling down to earth.
Descending through the atmosphere might get too hot, even for a Dragon.

As far as I know, Magic does not work in space,
even astrally projecting might kill him.

I think the dragons are a bit more formal and for them jail is probably more like a time out (yes, a very Looooong time out, but a time out none the less) where they get sent to their cave with provisions and told to meditate on what they did wrong.

What is to stop them from leaving the cave? Their own code of draconic honor and the fact if they break that honor they are no longer protected by it and it's probably a kill on sight order for the rogue dragon.

So maybe the runners were involved in a run that ultimately pointed the finger at Peri who gets sent to his cave.
Stewing about it as he actually was innocent of that particular charge, he was guilty of other monstrosities that particular evening but wasn't caught for those, so he sets the runners to finding the real culprit so that he might get back his freedom.

or if you do want to play up a dragon jail, it could be a remote valley somewhere with Dragon sized wards keeping the wayward wyvern wannabes inside.
The wards will stop a shapechanged dragon but normal metahumans can pass through freely with supplies/messages for the bound dragons.

@Bertram I think the orbital room would have to be low orbit as they are dual natured so unless they were just inside the Gaiasphere the void would tear at them.

Send it Astral and then sedate / move / obscure the body !
OR
leave the body on show in a museum, with the sword of Damocles hanging over the silver thread ...
Dragon spirit tries to move into the building and it gets severed from it's body

Scaly dude is in for a LONG ass time wandering around with nothing but boring spirits to talk to !

Your runners could either accidentally kill a ward that is hiding the body .. something simple ... with mad repercussions

OR the dragon manages to contact them in disguise and convince them that LOTS of treasure awaits whoever steals the sword

You appeal to his sense of Honor. Should be enough usually.
Ghostwalker is a kind of precedent, in that his astral self was kept prisoner apart from his body on a metaplane.
Magic DOES WORK in space as far as the rules are concerned. if your magic is big enough. Space is just a -12 mana void.

I haven't read the fiction so spoiler alert it if you will, but Where was GW's body ?
(if you say on Halleys Comet .. I'm gonna be stoked!)

No, it was in a cave in the UCAS. A bit north of Denver if i remember correctly.

well, opportunity missed I Say

"Year of the Comet!" and GW just happens to pop his head out ? ... or would that have been far too cliché ?

following spoiler from the SRR DLC: Dragonfall

Yes, magix works provided that you maintain a positive magic attribute within the void. Unfortunately mana voids have additional effects upon purely astrally present beings, astrally perceiving beings and dual natured beings while staying in the void area. Don't know about 4th Ed and onwards but in 3rd it was a "mere" 14D per Combat Turn spent in the void that must be resisted with Willpower + Astral Pool ... non-great dragons will have a hard time dealing with that for longer periord of time.

Thanks for the answers.

@Sendaz
Just trust me, if I say that it will not be possible to prove that Perianwyr is innocent.
He was set up, and sentence guilty by some arbitrary laws.



Hmm splitting the astral and physical body, this would be deadly for most mortal.
On the other hand it sounds interesting. “Vessel Trading” could place him in another living body, a sedated one. I imagine that it is pretty hard to sedate a dragon. And it has the advantage that when the runner free the dragon (human) and unite him with his dragon body, he would be up to go. And not a big drugged meatball.

In SRR Dragonfall, IIRC, Firewing was "imprisoned" by the way her spirit was separated from her normal body during the Dragonfall (the historical event from which the game takes its name,) and was later forced into a mortal's body. Then, presumably, they prevented her from astrally projecting and reclaiming her own original somehow.

So that's one way to do it.


Of course, if the imprisoning party is the Great Dragon Ghostwalker, that offers up a much simpler means of imprisoning a lesser dragon: Point to a cave, tell him to go in and stay there until he's permitted to leave, and if he steps so much as one claw in sunlight before that time, he's toast.

As for how you break a dragon out of such a prison, that's easy. Or rather, simple.

You get the Great Dragon Hestaby, the Great Dragon Celedyr and the Great Dragon Rhonabwy to turn up in Denver and tell Ghostwalker in no uncertain terms that they will no longer put up with this shit and unless he's ready to throw down right now, Peri is leaving with them.

This sounds suicidal³. How do you get a meeting with a great dragon and convince him to intervene in the business of another one. How do you do that 3 times in somewhat short time … like 1-4 weeks, without leaving Denver. And I think that the names and places of great dragons is not common knowledge for shadowrunners.

I said it was simple, I never said it was easy, or not fraught with danger. That said, if any three Greats were going to strong-forelimb Ghostwalker to intercede on behalf of Perianwyr, the generally nicest dragon left in the world, his fellow music lover, and the netdragon who's on good terms with those other two, are your best bets.

Also, the general stomping grounds of at least those three dragons tends to be well-known to the general public. Dedicated Shadowrunners who are dealing on the level of interfering with the business of Great Dragons ought to be able to get a word into their ears.

And if they're not Prime Runners on the level of FastJack, they have no business whatsoever involving themselves in the business of Dragons, let alone Great Dragons, so the smartest thing they could do would be to leave Denver and burn their fake SINS and contacts lists, head to Seattle or Hong Kong and start new lives.

Hmm, depending on how exactly his astral self was bound to the body, simply bombing it into red mist might be adviseable actually . .
Destroy the vessel, free the astral self, have the dragon go back to his body, profit.

More than likely, it'd be a matter of honor, or maybe a game between dragons.

If a great dragon tells a non-great to jump, the only possible answers are "How high, master?" or lunchmeat. Between great dragons, it's a bit trickier. However, dragon culture is highly developed in etiquette, to avoid direct confrontation between greats. They taught the immortal elves how to play sophisticated games instead of fighting head on, and I get the feeling that games the IE's think are intricate and complex are basically the draconic equivalent of checkers or tic-tac-toe.

In this case? Peri might be in a challenge. He can't use any of his powers (except masking) to help the runners, or he'd lose the bet. Both of them have to work through proxies, and by custom, once the game is over the pawns are allowed to go home safely. Of course, the runners don't know that....

I imagine Great Dragons have access to crazy levels of magic we can only imagine. Store him in magical amber for a thousand years or some-such. Oh, or one of those GPS ankle cuffs!

Bury them seems to be the normal way of trapping a dragon. And as Ghostwalker has shown they can survive the separation of the astral form and body a lot longer, although that might have been a quality specific to Ghostwalker or Great Dragons and won't work on Pery.

Besides, do you have Stormfront? In that book a dragon, coincidentally named Perianwyr gets imprisoned by a great dragon coincidentally named Ghostwalker. It is also mentioned how he was imprisoned and how he got out. That might give you some inspiration.

The OP hinted at there being two solutions that don´t do the trick, and only specified one. So I guess this is what triggered the question.

Ghostwalker is the Go-to-Dragon for spirit stuff, and as far as I understand what happened to him was not involuntary imprisonment. So "bury in cave and seal with magic" seems like the safest bet. I´d likely add "put cave into dimensional pocket via ED-style City-in-a-bottle", then have the players search for the real-world anchor of that spell.

Ghostwalker could also drag Pery physically to a metaplanar plane and let some spirit he knows watch over him until he comes back to get him.

Going by the information given in the related novelization it was totally involuntary. The important part however is that his imprisonment was related to metaplanar travel and not mere astral projection. Metaplanar travels/quests can have durations that by far exceed the limitations of standard projection to astral space without detailed negative effects on the physical body. And Ghostwalker certainly acts as precedence for dragons being able to survive it not only for some days but literally thousands of years.

=> More than enough wiggle room for detaining Peri in similar fashion for quite some time - particularly if the captor is Ghostwalker.

Ok. So what happened?

Edit: You are speaking of "The Burning Time", yes?

Enough space, an astral barrier and walls and door thick enough is enough.

Why wouldn't it be?

All from a rather bad memory:




Should be the one ...

As a character that took part in "Mercurial" and "A Killing Glare", I thought Perianwyr is dead...twice.

Way better than mine. I remembered Ghosty going to the metaplanes freely, but not ending up imprisoned. But I agree that the very big white dragon is likely Ghostwalker. Thanks!

The nice thing about the metaplanar prison angle is that you can concentrate on breaking the mundane part of the "sending away" ritual, instead of facing stuff that can keep a Great Dragon in directly.