Black Omens: A Narrative Analysis

The dragon doesn’t move. The world begins to rot.

Black Omens: A Narrative Analysis is a system-agnostic tool for fantasy roleplaying. It helps you treat black dragons not as monsters to slay but as forces that demand consequence. When a black dragon rises, something’s swallowed. Light, memory, promise. The story doesn’t resist it. It sinks into what can’t be undone. This book equips you to treat black dragons as narrative infections. Use it in any setting where they linger, whether as ancient curses, living wounds, or hungers that make silence louder than fear. The focus is on rot, corruption, and inevitability.

This Book Contains:

Each section serves a purpose. Together, they offer a modular approach to storytelling that treats black dragons as presences that stain, fester, and remain. These aren’t adversaries. They’re endings that don’t announce themselves.

Narrative Framing: A series of tools to help you understand what a black dragon means in the context of your story. It explores what their presence dissolves, what festers in their wake, and how the world begins to forget itself. This framing gives the dragon weight as a story event and lets it erode meaning without raising its voice.

Scene Tools: Practical methods for describing black dragons as more than creatures. These tools help you capture dread, decay, and stillness. You can use them to mark the moment when absence becomes presence and everything starts to smell like rain on stone.

Character Archetypes: Ten examples of characters whose lives have been poisoned, claimed, or hollowed by a black dragon. These can inspire players, deepen arcs, or show what it means to carry silence that learned how to breathe.

Story Complications: A collection of narrative shifts that emerge from a black dragon’s presence. Each one lingers where memory was supposed to end. They introduce uncertainty, refusal, or consequence that won’t decay.

Worldbuilding Prompts: A set of questions designed to explore how black dragons are feared, hidden, or explained away in your setting. These prompts help define denial, taboo, inevitability, and what happens when the ground itself stops telling the truth.

Adventure Hooks: Ten scenarios that begin when the rot’s already spread. Each one opens a path to discovery, concealment, or resignation. They can collapse kingdoms, unearth forbidden names, or mark the moment someone understood they were already too late.

The dragon doesn’t rise. The land forgets how to breathe.