Everyone hates the dragons. The slugs have ritual magic? Typically some precedent or time would show development.
many years ago, The Stranter gifted the Slugs ritual magic, I can go find the quote
Year 27: The Stranger decides to spice things up. Dark figures approach the Dukes of the slugmen, and offer them the secrets and rituals of a slow but powerful form of magic capable of causing anything from natural disasters to singular, specific deaths, to creating Eldritch Abominations, to anything you could imagine, provided the ritual is right, and the price paid is high enough.
That’s 60+ years of precedent, occasionally interspersed by rituals focused on the central lake from which they were birthed. The arrival of the dragons represents a very solid and real potential for the Dukes to lose their power and face cultural, religious, and judicial assimilation at the hands of the dragons, who in the eyes of a disunited group of small, independent states represent a vast and unstoppable force which could very easily stomp all over them, regardless of the actual truth of the matter. At the end of it all, even though they’re squishy, they have their rituals and spells that they’ve had almost a full generation or more to study and they will use them. In the interest of not making things bad, I have been quietly hoping that Lord_Lemonpie would roll for the outcomes of rituals, but I failed to communicate that, so I might as well mention it now.
Lord_Lemonpie, I would like to request that you in your infinite wisdom come up with a suitably interesting cost and success rate for the recently cast ritual, given that a spell with such an intent and with assumed countermeasures on the behalf of Tiamat would have unclear results and side affects.
Crow plague might be a bit far thoughEdit:
5 ninja posts?! How long did I take to write this?Edit 2, following a revision of the five ninja-posts: Tiamat hasn’t exactly been Merciless, they are at worst warmongerers and made a specific point of not targeting children and combatants, this is going a bit too far.