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Back when the first Forgotten Realms came out (late 1E), I made a young blue dragon named Arcomanxiohergramin (or Arcomane, for short). That dragon has some of the best staying-power around, as she has gone through 1E, 2E, 3E, and is now very much alive and well in 4E as an Ancient blue dragon who controls a huge area of Icewind Dale.

She had a small cult of followers that started in early 2E (when she reached adulthood) that has now grown to one of the largest dragon-cults in my FR games. She has survived turf wars with red dragons and white dragons, a brief mix-up with a dracolich, an infestation of displaced demons, and dozens of adventuring parties. She had the nerf-bat taken to her pretty severely for 4E (as did all dragons), but she still holds her own and hasn't even come close to being killed yet (well...close is a relative term, isn't it?).

In other words, I have absolutely no good answers for your questions, but felt like sharing a dragon-story for the sake of doing so.

Jun 29, 2010 -- 11:18PM, Eazy_E wrote:

Methinks Hocus-Smokus is trying to get his post count up to 5k :P

Seriously though, was Arcomanxiohergramin known only to her? Or did she keep it a secret?

Her cult knew her full name, as did some of her rival dragons. Some people knew it, but got the information from either studying the cult or consulting her rival dragons. I never made it a secret, but the fact that she lived in a fairly isolated area in the far north of Icewind Dale made it so that not many knew her nickname, either.

The only times I used aliases with old-E dragons was when they assumed human(oid) forms and didn't want to be called by the name of a dragon that was probably being hunted. There was never any "magic" to it, so to speak, like the old-E thing about knowing the true name of a devil giving you power over it or anything like that.

I handle dragon names for the same reason that ChrisTheS described: the existence of true names. In my game world, I have it flavored that extremely long-lived species are much more protective about their true name than a shorter lived race like a human would be. Dragons are very much static in a large sense, often remaining the same over the course over hundreds of years. That's not to say that dragons don't change, they can, and do, but it's at a much slower rate. A true name is intrinsically tied to one's sense of self, thus, dragons guard their true names far more vigilantly than other beings do, sense a human's sense of self is constantly changing, even though their name might remain the same.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is, I use names like Jim Butcher does in the Dresden Files series. So all of my dragons have their actual name, which is the usual twenty-letters-or-more, as while as a shortened form of it, or else a nickname or title that they find amusing. This is why I have dragons named Razorthorn and Nalliyatirieldurmielashtar, in the same world (she goes by Nalliya, in common conversation.)

If you're in a low magic world... I suppose you could easily come up with any number of reasons why a dragon would guard their name. Perhaps it's simply a matter of pride; a dragon considers it a grave insult to have their actual name spoken by lesser beasts, so a dragon that isn't known by some title or alias loses prestige, maybe. Maybe it's part of dragon psychology; to have a being's name is to wield some measure of power over it, even in a nonmagical sense, which is something that dragons cannot tolerate. There's a lot you can do with it, really; personally, I'm growing more and more partial to the arrogance aspect, which I might just introduce into my game world now that I think about it. Hmmm.