How to Kill a Dragon at Level 1 - Three Stories
To paraphrase Matthew Colville: A Sandbox is a game that tells you what to do, but not how to do it. A major souce of fun is to leverage random items with combinations and use cases no one saw coming.
Here are three short stories that exemplify what keeps me coming back to sandbox-style games. They all end in a dead dragon. Not all characters were level one in these stories, but none of the groups where anywhere near strong enough to face a dragon in a fair fight.
Out first story takes place in Alfheimr, an OSE campaign with a homebrew Norse setting GMed by Adam from the OSR Table Time Discord server. We explored the wilderness and found an oddly cold, snowy area in the middle of more temperate terrain. While exploring, we encountered rude Wereboars and had to flee. We scoured the campaign starting area for all the wolvesbane we could find and returned later with big bundles of around our necks, ready for revenge. What we found were not Wereboars though but a White Dragon. Due to the freshly fallen snow and really bad luck in evasion and pursuit checks we had a hard time escaping, the dragon swallowed multiple retainers and player characters whole. The session ended with a major defeat. Shortly after, someone asked the valid question in the Discord: "Wait, isn't wolvesbane poisonous when ingested?". The GM did some math, rolled some dice, and ruled that yes, very much so. We had brought the dragon within an inch of its life. We scheduled an extra session due to one-to-one time and healing rules and, armed with wolvesbane, we found the dragon in its lair, surrounded by Wereboar minions. We managed to fend them off thanks to our wolvesbane necklaces and killed the severely injured dragon in its sleep before it could wipe out most of our party.
The second story took place in a Wolves Upon the Coast campaign called Reavers on the same server, GMed by Canyon. We came across the lair of a serpentine dragon. I think it was worshipped by men in robes who brought it sacrifices - maybe we just joked about this.
Later on, we found a pirate town that had an opium problem. We bought as much opium as we could afford and a cow, sailed back to the dragon and offered up the cow as a sacrifice.
Aand... the dragon died. Just like that. That was the most hacksilver I made in one session in a very cash-poor campaign.
The third story I GMed myself. It was a Knave 2e after-school hex crawl for 5th and 6th graders. The first session I started with a one page dungeon about a heist in a sleeping red dragon's cave system. The idea was to start the campaign here, and end it with a boss fight against that same dragon. Session 1 ended with the dragon being mind-controlled by a potion in its own hoard to fly to the nearest settlement and burn it down while the party took what they could carry from the hoard. This seemed very funny to the acting player at the time. His only regret was that he had to leave the bigger part of the dragon hoard and an ore deposit at the cave entrance behind. He did change his tune when session 2 started in a refugee camp with burn victims and started to plot against the dragon. In session 3, the group found a tower on a floating island connected to the the ground with chains. It belonged to "Professor Graviton", a gravitation wizard and astronomer who wanted to count all the stars in the sky. The party asked if he could also make things heavier - "yes of course, but it will cost you!". Magic on that scale doesn't come cheap. The party offered what they had plus the profits from the ore deposit next to the dragon cave for a scroll that increases weight a hundredfold. Then they snuck past the dragon's kobolds with the luck of a die roll and cast the scroll on the cave above the dragon. Thus the suppopsed "BBEG" of a year-long campaign was dead and buried in session 3, along with its hoard. A Dwarven mining company ended up excavating the coins bit by bit.
And there you have it: Three stories of a dragon defeated by random items and events, combined cleverly by low-level parties to transcend the numbers on their character sheets.