Pickpocket Tales

A black dragon has been living inside the Tarrasque for 80 years, eating everything it eats. A homebrew D&D story with a ready-to-run Tarrasque dungeon, gut lair actions, and a Tarrasque-dragon hybrid boss for 5e.

Free DM kit

Steal This

1. The hook is a monster that's rampaging for a reason. Give your players clues before you give them answers. It gets thinner every day. It eats things it can't possibly need. And if someone listens closely, it has two heartbeats.
2. The Tarrasque is a dungeon. Run it in three zones. The throat: a Strength save, or the muscles carry you down faster than you'd like. The gullet graveyard: wrecked barges and caravans full of salvage, and whatever else got swallowed alive down there. And the stomach swamp, which is the dragon's lair. Acid pools, difficult terrain, and treasure on every island.
3. Give the stomach its own lair actions. The Tarrasque hiccups, and everyone makes a Dexterity save or gets knocked prone. The acid rises a foot. Or something new falls in from above. A cart. A cow. One very confused ogre.
4. The dragon lies. The truth is the opposite of what it says. Kill the dragon, and the Tarrasque eats its fill and goes back to sleep. Kill the Tarrasque, and the dragon walks out as a hybrid. Let a sharp-eyed player notice the tail is feeding, not dying.
5. Two fights. Inside, it's an adult black dragon rooted to the wall, and the stomach is its lair. Outside, it's something else. Take the Tarrasque's carapace, its regeneration, its siege-monster strength, and a few spells from the wizards it swallowed.
6. Scale it to your table. Swap the Tarrasque for a purple worm or a giant crocodile, and the adult dragon for a young one. A lower-level party gets the same story.
7. The egg. Whoever stole it now carries the next campaign in their backpack.

Stat blocks

Chapters

• 0:00 Cold open
• 0:40 The second heartbeat
• 1:35 Eighty years of stolen meals
• 2:39 The swamp in the stomach
• 4:38 What walks out
• 5:58 Steal This

The DM kit includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2 ("SRD 5.2") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.