Dragons-Eye View: Dragons. Dragons. Dragons.

A Dragon’s-Eye View on dragons? While we saw the concept art in one of the GenCon keynote videos (or in person if you were lucky enough to go), it is nice to finally get a discussion on the look of dragons. Well the red dragon anyway, which is fine since it is both an iconic dragon–appearing on plenty of product covers–and is my favorite.

Personally I like both, though lean a bit more towards the style of Lockwood’s. While I can kind of see the “brute” as representative of a young red dragon (or, at least very angry), I tend to view the white dragon as the more simple, brutish types (and not just because that was their role in 4th Edition). Personality-wise, reds have always come across as more arrogant and confident, which is better exemplified by Lockwood’s rendition.

I find it interesting that he talks about making the smallest size category essentially Large, which is the approach 4th Edition took until they got around to releasing wyrmlings in the Draconomicon books. In 2nd Edition they could range from 4 feet, to just over 350 at their oldest (or 70 squares from head to tail if you wanted to try conveying this on a battle map). 3rd Edition had a similar ranges of sizes, from Small to Colossal (I think there was even a Colossal+).

In this case, size matters. If nothing else keeping the smallest size as Large certainly implies a sense of danger that you do not get from human or halfling sized dragons, which always seemed more appropriate for dragon-like creatures such as drakes. I think trying to determine the size range is a very important question, and was surprised that it was not a poll choice.

I think that one of my pet peeves is dragons having inherent spellcasting levels. Not spell-like abilities, but effectively having wizard/sorcerer levels; the idea of a dragon conjuring a Tenser’s floating disc or pew-pewing adventurers with scorching rays just rubs me the wrong way. Access to thematically appropriate magic or spell-like abilities is fine.

A good idea of what I am thinking are the dragonshouts from Skyrim (ironically probably the very game he mentions disliking for its ease of dragon-slaying). I recall something to the effect that a lot of magical writing was in Draconic, which meshes well with the idea of the dragon language being inherently magical (kind of like truenames).

Heroic-Tier Red Dragon

In line of the vampire class from Heroes of Shadow, here is a pdf for a heroic-tier red dragon race-class combo. Lemme know what you think about the powers, layout, progression, etc. If people like it, I’ll wrap up the paragon and epic tiers, too.