One of the oddities of the Dungeon of Descent is that the same dragon is on every level, from 1 to 20.
His name is Otto. Otto is actually in two rooms on each level, which means that there are forty of him, as you can actually have encounters with all of them simultaneously if you have a big enough party.
Otto is a Morbius dragon, one of the weirder types of dragons in Wizards and Weasels.
Before I explain Morbius dragons though, I should probably go through at least a high level explanation of how monsters work in Wizards and Weasels.
Most RPGs have some variation of a challenge rating for their monsters. In super basic terms, an Orc is challenge rating 1, which means that a party of 1st level characters have a good shot of defeating it. An Ancient Red Dragon is maybe 15 or so, which means it eats first level characters, but a party of fifteenth level ones stands a chance. Make sense?
Great.
This is not the way it works in Wizards and Weasels. Monsters can be anywhere from 1 to 20 in challenge rating, but crucially, any monster can be any challenge rating. Bob the Orc could be challenge rating 1, but his cousin Randolph could be level 20. And, this is important, you really can’t tell the difference just by looking at them. Or, more to the point, a 1st level dragon doesn’t look any different from a 20th level one. Both are huge, ferocious looking beasts. It’s just that the 1st level one is rather shit at being a dragon, while the 20th level one is pretty great.*
And Otto, being a Morbius dragon, simultaneously exists as two separate instances of Otto at each level. Specifically, there’s a 1st level and 20th level Otto on level one, and a 1st level and 20th level on level twenty. Filling in the rest of levels I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader.
This is really only interesting for two reasons. The first is that my adventuring party is very likely to run into one of the level 1 Ottos soon (which one is always random) and that I recall my father mentioning his boss, who always sounded to my young ears as something of a psycho (I had not yet learned how important sociopaths are to modern management theory), and that his name was Otto.
I thought it might be a good idea to try and find him, if I dared.
* My understanding is that Dungeon & Dragons solves this by having dragons age. So the 15th CR dragon is “Ancient” and the 1st level one is a Wyrmling. Or, in English, a child. A child suitable for 1st level characters to kill. The creators of this game are evidently monsters.
