Line #35 Literature/TheYearOfRogueDragons


1	[[quoteright:314:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/year_of_rogue_dragons.jpg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:314:Cover of the omnibus edition]]
3	What do you do when every dragon on the planet starts to turn AxCrazy and threaten to kill everything else?
4
5	Well, if you're professional dragon hunter Dorn Graybrook, killing them all would seem to be the appropriate answer. Things are more complicated than that, though.
6
7	''The Year of Rogue Dragons'' is a trilogy by Richard Lee Byers. It covers the calamitous events of 1373 DR, the "Year of Rogue Dragons". Set in the TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms, it follows a group of adventurers as they wander Faerun trying to discover the secrets behind the Rage, when all of the Faerûnian dragons go berserk.
8
9	It has three books:
10	* ''The Rage'' (April 2004)
11	* ''The Rite'' (January 2005)
12	* ''The Ruin'' (May 2006)
13
14	It needs more love.
15	----
16	!!Relevant tropes:
17	%%zce* Artificial Limbs: Dorn is half iron golem.%%And?
18	* BigBad: Sammaster, the magical equivalent of an EvilutionaryBiologist and convinced that undead dragons are superior to regular dragons.
19	* TheBigGuy:
20	** Dorn, who can use his effectively indestructible iron golem half to tank incoming attacks.
21	** Kara, being a dragon, turns into one of the most powerful and destructive creatures alive when she switches to her true form.
22	* BroughtDownToNormal: [[spoiler:During the final battle Dorn takes a BreathWeapon blast from a rust drake that renders his golem half nearly useless. He's able to work out an alternate fighting style.]]
23	* ChaoticGood: Kara, InUniverse. Song dragons are relatives of metallic dragons and nearly always CG.
24	* ChaoticNeutral: Dorn, InUniverse, according to supplementary material.
25	* CometOfDoom: Invoked in the backstory in that the Dracorage is ''supposed'' to happen only when the King-Killer Star is in the sky. An important plot point is that this time, it ''isn't'': [[spoiler: the elves who created the Dracorage Mythal keyed it to activate when a certain striking comet could be seen in Toril's sky, but Sammaster has tampered with it]].
26	* {{Cyborg}}: As a half-golem, Dorn is a fantasy equivalent; armor plating on one side of his face, and an arm (with taloned fingers and possibly WolverineClaws) and leg both made of metal.
27	* DeathByOriginStory: The reason Dorn hates dragons so much is that his parents were killed in a red dragon attack that also cost him half his body.
28	* {{Dracolich}}: The point of [[spoiler:Sammaster's tampering with the Dracorage Mythal]] is to convince every dragon on Toril that becoming a dracolich is a good thing -- dracoliches are immune to the Rage. Why he thought turning them into liches was a good idea is known only to him (in a manner of speaking -- he thinks he is fulfilling a prophecy about dead dragons ruling the world, but [[spoiler: Sammaster]] is the only one that knows why he thinks fulfilling the prophecy is a ''good'' idea, except maybe to spite the proponents of the standard translation that insists the translation's supposed to be about dragons ruling the world and he stuffed up his translation).
29	* TheDragonslayer: Dorn and his group are professional dragon hunters. Dorn hates dragons due to a red dragon attack on his birth family; the others are OnlyInItForTheMoney.
30	* DragonVarietyPack: The story features an impressive selection of the dragons present in ''D&D''. Besides the basic AlwaysChaoticEvil chromatic dragons and AlwaysLawfulGood metallic dragons, Dorn's LoveInterest Karasendrieth is a song dragon, a rare type of metallic dragon, while the supporting cast includes a {{Fairy Dragon\|s}} and a smoke drake [[OurVampiresAreDifferent vampire]]. Their primary enemy is Sammaster's Cult of the Dragon, which creates {{dracolich}}es (the vampire smoke drake was a result of their previous effort) and engages the services of such creatures as a hidecarved dragon (a dragon who carved runes into his hide to aid in spellcasting), extraplanar Tarterian drakes, and a rust drake whose BreathWeapon ruins Dorn's ArtificialLimbs during the finale.
31	* EvilFeelsGood: The Rage actually feels good when dragons stop resisting it. Kara's resisting it so much while she seems to crave it speaks gallons about how heroic she is.
32	* TheFaceless: The wizard Scattercloak always wears a hooded cloak, veil and gloves, and never takes them off even at meals (he'll sit at the table, but he goes somewhere private to actually eat). He even masks his voice, speaking in an androgynous, accentless, possibly synthetic monotone. It's never revealed why he does it -- it could all be pure affectation for all anyone knows.
33	* HeadInTheSandManagement: The good-aligned metallic dragons' solution to the Rage is to put themselves into stasis until it passes. They either don't realize or don't want to know that [[spoiler:Sammaster has managed to make it permanent]]. Notably, not all the metallics agree with this: the ChaoticGood[[invoked]] ones (e.g. copper and song) want to actually stop it but are being overruled by the LawfulStupid gold and silver dragons.
34	%%zce* The Hero: Dorn.
35	* HeroicSacrifice:
36	** [[spoiler:Pavel gives his life to destroy Sammaster's phylactery and with it the Dracorage Mythal.]]
37	** Havarlan gives her life to ram Sammaster's heavily warded fighting tower in order to knock him out of it.
38	* HotInHumanForm: Karasendrieth the song dragon is indeed beautiful when she shapeshifts to human form. In book two, [[InterspeciesRomance she starts a relationship with the human Dorn]].
39	* InterspeciesRomance: Starting in book two, between Dorn, a human, and Kara, a song dragon.
40	* {{Irony}}: Dorn lost his arm and leg because a red dragon bit them off when he was a kid; the combination of this, the trauma of having iron golem limb replacements fused to his body, and being forced to fight in the arena for his master's sake is what made him become a dragon hunter by trade. He ends up in love with a female dragon.
41	* KansasCityShuffle: Sammaster is a master of pulling this. Pretty much every challenge the heroes face is this, while Sammaster tries to prevent them from finding out the truth about the Rage.
42	%%zce* The Lancer: Will.
43	* LightIsGood: Pavel is a cleric of Lathander, the NeutralGood god of the dawn.
44	%%zce* Lovable Rogue: Will
45	* MagicAIsMagicA: Byers works very hard at keeping the rules of magic consistent with ''D&D'' gameplay. Spellcasters have to memorize their spells and only have a limited amount.
46	* NeglectfulPrecursors: The Dracorage Mythal was created by the ancient elven kingdoms to win their war with the dragons for control of Toril. Unfortunately, hundreds or thousands of years later their own civilization fell apart in a period of CivilWar called the Crown Wars (set off in part by Lolth's betrayal of the elven TopGod Corellon Larethian, which led in turn to the dark elven race becoming the modern drow), which allowed humans to become the dominant species of Toril but also left the Dracorage Mythal a PointlessDoomsdayDevice. [[spoiler:Then Sammaster found the mythal's core and modified it.]]
47	* OurDragonsAreDifferent:
48	** Especially the Rage, a murderous berserker instinct that overcomes all dragons from time to time (though it is not a natural draconic trait, but rather something induced by ''extremely'' powerful globe-covering magic).
49	** More generally, Sammaster's forces include a bewildering assortment of the various dragons and dragon-like monsters in the ''D&D'' universe. Richard Lee Byers seems to have thrown darts at the 3rd Edition ''Draconomicon'' and used whatever he hit.
50	* OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame: The main dwarf character is Raryn, an Arctic Dwarf, which means he's a white-haired dwarf who wears as little as possible by preference to facilitate his love of sunbathing. He's also classed as a ranger instead of a fighter, favors spears over axes, and knows absolutely nothing about stonework or dungeoneering because he grew up on the Arctic tundra.
51	* OurLichesAreDifferent: Besides the previously mentioned dracoliches, Sammaster is a lich who uses illusion magic to pass for a mortal.
52	* OurVampiresAreDifferent: The group joins forces with a smoke drake vampire left over from Sammaster's previous attempt at creating undead dragons. He doesn't feed on humans, but that's mostly because they don't have enough blood to sustain a vampire his size (one scene in ''The Ruin'' has him drain a Tarterian dragon and complain in his InternalMonologue that the blood tastes bad).
53	* PlayingWithFire: Firefingers, the unofficial leader of the Thentian wizards.
54	* PowerLossMakesYouStrong: Taegan when his spells are dispelled and Dorn when he loses his metal limbs.
55	* PropheticFallacy: BigBad Sammaster's Cult of the Dragon seeks to turn all the world's dragons into {{dracolich}}es in service to an ancient prophecy that, so he thinks, says that dead dragons will one day rule the world. Other mages and sages argue that something got LostInTranslation in Sammaster's version, and in any case he's the only major character who thinks undead dragons ruling the world is a ''good'' thing.
56	* RolePlayingGameVerse: [[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons Well, yeah,]] but this series really does read like a novelization of somebody's D&D campaign in a way that its licensed novels often don't.
57	* RoyalsWhoActuallyDoSomething: King Gareth Dragonsbane of Damara is a badass paladin. Deconstructed in that it nearly gets him killed.
58	* ShoulderSizedDragon: Jivex is a faerie dragon, about the size of a dog with butterfly-like wings.
59	%%zce* The Sixth Ranger: Taegan.
60	%%zce* The Smart Guy: Pavel.
61	* SpotlightStealingSquad: Taegan. Every time he shows up, the scene is suddenly about him.
62	%%zce* Team Mom: Kara.
63	%%zce* Token Evil Teammate: When Brimstone joins them.
64	* ThreadOfProphecySevered: {{Invoked}}. Sammaster and his Cult of the Dragon are trying to forcibly fulfill a prophecy that (according to his translation) undead dragons will come to rule all of Toril. The protagonists are trying to prevent this.
65	* TurnUndead: Pavel is a cleric of Lathander and has this as one of his class features and a ChekhovsSkill. He threatens the aforementioned vampire smoke drake with it on their first encounter. [[spoiler:At the end of the trilogy he uses it to destroy Sammaster's phylactery and the Dracorage Mythal at the cost of his own life.]]
66	* TwistingTheProphecy: BigBad Sammaster's goal is to force the outcome of a prophecy that--so he insists--predicts [[{{Dracolich}} undead dragons]] ruling the world. Most of the other wizards who have studied the prophecy in question think [[LostInTranslation he translated it wrong]] and is trying to force an outcome quite different from what the prophet predicted, and in any case, they're all rather baffled that anyone could possibly ''want'' undead dragons to rule the world.
67	* VitriolicBestBuds: Will and Pavel, who refer to each other as "halfwit" and "charlatan" respectively.

Context Literature / TheYearOfRogueDragons