Word of Wizards - Excerpts: Frostforged Wyrm

Draconomicon Excerpts: Frostforged Wyrm

The Frostforged Wyrm is a white dragon that has been dragged into the Abyss and encased with armor plates by spikes driven in by demons.

I'm expecting to see a abbysal rendition for each chromatic dragon after seeing the white one being tortured like this. The idea sounds pretty chilling but cool. Although I do wonder how demons would be able to drag a dragon just like that.

Compared with it's normal countepart, the adult Frostforged Wyrm loses a few things than an ordinary adult white dragon.

Although it's now 2 level higher than a chromatic white, it loses its solo template which lowers it's hitpoints tremendously and its action points.

The Frostforged Wyrm also doesn't have a Claw attack but I guess that is replanced with it's Pain Frenzy which I can see as the Frostforged randomly bites and slahses with its teeth and claw in pain and agony.

It has a better breath weapon that deals more damage (d8 vs. d6) and attacks the Fort defense rather than Reflex. It also has an additional effect of giving a -2 to attack rolls in addition to slowed.

Bloodied Breath and Dragon's Fury are gone, probably replaced by the mentioned Pain Frenzy. Instead of having it's Frightful Presence, they have Spikes of Pain which allows a demon adjacent to the dragon to deal it 10 damage and the Frostforged Wyrm can take a standard action.

According to the tactics of the Frostforged, the demons would be using this ability until it becomes bloodied, so this is a real painful death for the wyrm.

I have a couple of questions for this ability though.

Firstly, Spikes of Pain is an encounter power which I'm wondering if a demon can only do it once or the Frostforged Wyrm can only be spiked once? Let's say, I have a group of 5 demons that accompanied the Frostforged Wyrm, how many times can it be spiked?

Second, if the Frostforged Wyrm does die from Spikes of Pain, do the PCs get XP for it? I would think so normally but it does raise the question like how summoned monsters didn't in 3.x.