From where did your setting's dragon gather up his vast treasure?

This is why you don't let dragons in your Gambling dens. It's like the owner wasn't a former shadworunner and doesn't know any better or something.

This. Dragons are secretly pranking adventurers to steal their poop. Poop gold looks and feels like real gold but eventually biodegrades to lead after 100 years or so. Dragons play the long con.

The weaver king saw the land was dying, and won it his mortal son. So he reached down from the sky and scooped the earth and water and his kingdom into his palm, and kept them close on his workbench. But his work kept him busy, and the realities he wove together allowed beings to escape. And those with power and hunger found their way to his son, killing him on the throne and claiming the countless treasures the King gifted the Prince as their own.

There are two ways for a dragon to gather his hoard.

He either steals it from other intelligent races, or other dragons if he is truly despicable.

Or he gathers it "the old fashioned way." By Kobold. It's a great stigma if you have to steal your hoard, so all the other Ojou-sama dragons will HOHOHO at you if you are one of those "lowly dragons who can't even manage a Kobold den."

Primarily from the Dwarf and Kobold kingdoms.
But some from the race of man.

He's a golden dragon who sheds literal golden scales.

Banking.

One dragon in particular runs the continent's largest banking consortium. It's an excellent deal: people pay him to sit around on their gold, and he gets to charge high interest on any loans they desire (and if they don't pay, DRAGON).

This basically made him essential to the economy of several city-states and two empires, meaning nobody can touch him without everybody else coming at them for it.

Motherfucker.

Generally speaking, they laid ruin to a city or vault.

He doesn't have one. He so large that he's not actually able to perceive the mortals on the ground or their material riches.

He mostly just roams around the world looking for someone, anyone to know he isn't alone. To the people on the ground he's just a living natural disaster, as ice forms on his skin and wings, meaning he brings house-sized hailstones wherever he flies.

has kobolds mine it for him/her.

"Conquest of a dwarven citadel" is a classic.

He kidnaps princesses and ransoms them back to their fathers/kings. Or sells them to the highest bidder.

Don't ask what he does with princes. Especially the cute twink ones...

I am so fucking pissed off that they made Smaug a wyvern in the movies.

Fuck "anatomical correctness" it's almost as bad as "political correctness".

Oh look this retarded dragon classification meme again.

My PCs pointed out that his hoard was just going to be looted after his death, and after that, he'd be forgotten.

This unnerved him so much that he used much of his wealth to invent a magical internet.

Pornography was made readily available.

This

Nobody but the autismatrons give a shit.

They steal it. Either having someone more humanoid do it for them or they just build their nest on a destroyed bank/castle vault.

taxes

His father gave him a small loan of a million gold pieces

Tollbooths.

Dragons manage all border crossings, and keep the humanoid races from interacting with each other in any significant way, breeding distrust and xenophobia for their own ends.

If someone who pays the toll looks like a nice guy, they'll eat him and pocket the caravan.

He runs the mint and the cosmic banks. He's actually also a god, because he discovered the true worth of value in all things (A least Jewishly) so he has infinite value, so he stays in his mountain generating shekels, revenue, worship, etc just because.

Whenever a new dragon species is made, he mints a coin with one of his scales embedded into it, and that coin goes into circulation and takes the soul of who dies with it to be turned into the basis of the new dragon species.

He's called Rahabbus Gol'myurrkk Rabbi Goldmeer, geddit? Father of coin, and commerce. His priests are bankers and those who manage finance alike, as he manages what amounts to the cosmic scale of banking in terms of runescape tier banking.

When he's not doing money-things, he's making magical scripture and holy scripture, partying in that Jew-like way, inventing holidays, and also cooking, as he's fond of dishes, sometimes he's made entire cusisines and worked our the backwards racial compatibilities of all.

One of his quirks is that because he monetizes everything, he's pretty ammoral and can do some evil shit if he wants profit for profit's sake, and his parties border fun to Magnitude 8-10 on the cosmic degeneracy scale, and it's this lifestyle that earned dragons their reknown for sexual exploration, and crossbreeding.

Kek'd

The evil dragon god conquered a whole kingdom the day it ascended to godhood, and over time became richer and richer by being a cunning stadist that takes advantage of its territory's position as a crossroads between two major sub-continents; he's more a benevolent tyrant than a full fledged evil guy, but he's not nice either. The other kingdoms leave him alone only because he could buy half the armies in the world if he got an excuse to do so.
Every other dragon must plunder a hoard of their own, except those who are clever and calm enough to strike deals with mortals in exchange for gold.

my settings main dragon is bsically scrooge mcduck, complete with three "nephews" he looks after, so a lifetime of thrift and cutthroat business dealings .

>be polymorphed dragon in kingdom with insurance company.
>pose as a wealthy merchant in said kingdom and buy insurance for all the wealth I got from selling the equipment of all the dumbass adventurers that tried to kill me.
>Oh no ! A dragon managed to steal all my wealth when I was not around, good thing I got that insurance !
>make it known that dragon is on the loose with all of my gold and then wait and prepare for the inevitable next group of greedy dumbass adventurers.
>after killing/incapacitating them, steal there shit and move to the next kingdom.
>rinse and repeat until you've been in every kingdom with insurance.

They get it from the dragonborn, who travel to their libraries to write down everything they know as a coming of age ritual

Being the dragon deity of a decent sized nation and being 1400 years old (He was a god for about 200 of those years) gave him plenty of time to gather it up.

They're all gifts from her wizard husbando.

You forgot the legion of door-to-door insurance saleskobolds to profit from the dragon scare
Sell some juicy contracts to reasonable businesses, using the tragedy in nearby kingdoms as incentive
And then a dragon burns down your own insurance company, making you unable to reimburse your customers
Good thing you were insured by another company ...

Directing or acting?

Hes a Sorcerer-King, and the horde he possesses is all that remains of the vast wealth that once belonged to his now defunct Kingdom.

Yes

The Nazis.

She acquired her vast wealth from the Nazis. In return, she trained an elite force of Nazi supersoldiers.
Although, as the years went by and ahe focused on academia, she sort of forget where the remnants of the Nazis remain.

The party is unsure of how to proceed.