Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Dragons are a metaphor to the Extremes of Human Nature, and Dungeons and Dragons has always played into this in the past, each Dragon type was a specific human personality taken to the Extreme of the concept.
D&D Creators like Pointy Hat hate Dragons and think they are bad creatures because they are Kaiju of the week, and not a proper story element. And the current iteration of D&D sort of does this to Dragons unintentionally. So I am sure Antonio’s experience has felt like that.
Problem is, Dragons are not Kaiju of the week, and the retcons and reduction of Dragon lore in D&D has really hurt the one monster type in the game that should be expanded on not reduced.
The nature of Dragons should be a relatable person, who seems overly focused on one idea.
The “Evil” dragons ie Chromatic Dragons (I hate forced species alignments) they are noted for aggressive selfish pursuits.
Red Dragons are loners who want more gold and jewels, greed and vanity are really the personality trait of Red Dragons. Some of the big named global leaders in our world today are perfect examples of Red Dragons. Make the unhinged ruler of a Kingdom a Red Dragon in human disguise. He’s always trying to invade other lands, trying to get others to pay for his wars, while stealing all the gold in the kingdom.
Black Dragons are masterminds, they are like the leaders of Drug Cartels, they hide in jungles with armies of Mercenaries, while controlling vast empires of Crime and smuggling.
Blue Dragons are controlling, they love desert environments, and need the world to be orderly and controlled. Think of them like a Middle Eastern Dictator who requires absolute obedience in their people.
Green Dragons are the crazy Hippy types, crazy about conspiracy theories, secrets, living deep in the woods hiding from spying eyes, they are the ones who constantly would be convincing people that the King is actually a Githyanki in human disguise. They are the unhinged people who convince others of the craziest ideas. And they are so egotistical you can’t prove to them the world is actually a flat plane inside a crystal sphere. (Old D&D lore)
Whites… well they are in fact Kaiju of the North, specifically think of them as very large flying wolves. Who are only a bit smarter than a wolf.
Purple (aka Deep Dragons), purple, lives in the Underdark, has fungus growing on them both as camouflage and a weapon. Absolutely hate Illithids and their kind. Knowledge is their passion, these are the Incels of the Dragon world. They can easily befriend mortals, but you serve them and their needs.
Then there are the Chromatic not seen in 5th. Brown (sand), Grey (Fang), Yellow & Yellow (Salt), Pink (which may have been intended as a joke but were kind of interesting)
The Metallic Dragons (“Good”)
Gold, these are the Gandalf, and wise leader of a magical college type Dragons, they often hide their dragon aspect to interact with people. (well until 5th edition) Gold dragons in the lore are almost always the Druid who helps you, the King who helps, the Paladin who guides you until you are ready.
Silver Dragons usually live among humans, are friendly love to chat and be friends with people, usually the kind lady in the Magical shop in the Elvin Capital, the Person who listens to your stories in the Corner of the Tavern. While they love humanity, they enjoy being on the outside looking in.
Bronze these guys are… well us. Think War Gamers who love to strategize and make plans, they min-max has a hobby. They will be first responders, they often feel the need to help and protect mortals. But they usually do this in human disguise. So that fire fighter who saved everone and the cat, that cop who changed your flat, the sea captain who saved the people on a capsized ship. Often times is a Bronze Dragon being the unsung hero.
Copper, the tricksters, the party pranksters. They are fairly greedy, and love pranks. The good natured thieves guild leader who loves stealing things and pranking people is a copper Dragon enjoying a good laugh.
Brass, this will break your heart, as the most sympathetic dragon of all time was a brass. They are social outcasts, they love making friends, talking, telling stories, hearing your stories, and planning parties for adventurers who never return. Brass Dragons live in the Deep Desert, usually near oasis and hilly areas in a desert. Think the kind lady who runs the all you can eat dinner and truck stop in the middle of the New Mexico desert.
Platinum the God Dragon… Bahamut and the pantheon of good dragons are all platinum dragons.
The lost Metal dragons
Mercury if the MCU Loki was a Dragon he would be a Mercury dragon, they are chaos, smart, transactional, and greedy. They also prefer to live as human, but will change shapes to match their wild moods.
Electrum are peaceful dragons who live on the outside of society, collecting coins and helping people in need. The 5.5e Spirit Dragon fits the Electrum description well except the colors and looks.
Ferrus Dragons (subset of Chromatic who tend to also be more lawful than good, oh and they all are ruled by Iron Dragons)
Chromium tend towards evil, live in arctic areas.
Cobalt outcast evil dragons who hide from other dragons, they are noted for being good parents, but hate outsiders. Think the racist uncle who lives in the backwoods of Arkansas.
Steel (aka Greyhawk)… these guys are basically player characters. They will create a persona and live the full life of that persona, never breaking character if they can. Note while named Greyhawk Dragons they are found in all settings in the lore. 3 are known to live in Waterdeep.
Iron, the leaders of the Ferrus Dragons, self appointed rulers of the known world. Think most US presidents in the last 130 years. (not the most recent, he’s mentioned already)
Nickel weak, small timid lives in swamps, think Black Dragon only not a mastermind but more a guy in Louisiana who has a shack a swamp boat and hunts gators.
Tungsten these guys are the White Knights of Dragons, and yes the annoying type of white knight. They are do gooders who may fail at nuance. They live in the bad parts of the world, wastelands and deserts, so think a paladin living in the Fallout universe… yeah The Brotherhood of Steel if they think they are doing good.
This is just a partial list, there are also Planar, Gem, Lung, and many other types of Dragons.
My personal favorite of the True Dragons who are not in the line up of official dragons, but got named with the new Spirit Dragons are the Song Dragons, they are a subset of Metalic Dragon, who are noted for living as Humans in Cities. The traits they have are unique to them, and the new Spirit Dragons have none of these traits.
Song Dragons present as female Humans or female Elves, they often times have inns, and love music. One of Elminsters daughters is half human half song dragon, and she is full rogue. Lore has it that long ago a human maiden was blessed by a goddess and turned into the first Song Dragon, they are sometimes called “weredragons” and fall into the “Half-dragon” label at times.
Note there are several very distinct species called half dragon, everything from a child of a human and a true dragon, dragonborn, Zerkyl rare group of drow dragon hybrids, actual weredragons, and wizards who became dragons…
Off the top of my head the only thing I could offer was something about a green dragon. Old Gnawbone(Claugiyliamatar) matches up pretty good with what you say about greens. She is described in Rise of Tiamat where it is plain to see she is in fact a crazy, egotistical, forest dwelling conspiracy theorist. As she knows the goals of the Cult of Tiamat, it is more of a fact than a conspiracy though!
I think this is a failing of some DMs, not a failing of Wizards. It is abundantly clear Wizards is trying to push play patterns in line with your thread and has provided considerable resources to this end.
Each dragon’s individual page gets information on their individual personality and their motivations. Wizards released Fizban’s, whose 5.5e canon was recently reaffirmed, has an entire chapter on how to roleplay Dragons exactly along lines you suggest. Dragon Delves provides an example of how to do a mini campaign showcasing each of the chromatic and metallic personality types. Two whole books and a decent chunk of valuable MM space is more than any other monster type by far. I think anyone trying to place the blame for “dumb dragons” on Wizards is ignoring overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This really comes down to a DM and player pop culture problem and a pop culture problem - if problem it can even be called, as ever DM has the right to use their own lore. Dragons are depicted in so many different ways in popular culture that every single person comes into D&D with their own preconceptions, and either through deep seeded understandings or lack of reading those available resources, those preconceptions are often not dispelled.
I haven’t checked out pointy hat, so maybe I’m missing some context.
Similar to what caerwyn is saying, it seems like they’re only kaiju of the week if that’s how the DM plays them. Really, there’s nothing stopping a lich or aboleth or emperyan from also being just a monster of the week. By the same token, a gnoll can be your BBEG. One of my favorite NPCs in my world is an awakened shrub who leads a band of eco-terrorists. Seems like if you want dragons to be a story element, maybe be just make them one?
It seems like the root of a complaint like this is, WotC isn’t giving us enough lore, which I understand can be a real issue for many people, particularly new DMs. Personally, I prefer little-to-no lore, as I’m just going to ignore it anyway and make the monsters work how I need them to for my world.
I think the problem comes from three things: D&D 5e isn't very good at teaching about encounter design, nor does it have a concept of monster roles, and the expected use of dragons happens to be in an area where that lack is most problematic. To go into more detail:
When designing an encounter, you really need to think about how the encounter fits into the adventure as a whole. If I'm running the PCs through a gauntlet of minor fights before the encounter the big boss, each of those fights should be low complexity -- give it one special trick to make it slightly memorable, and other than that it's fine for the monsters to be super straightforward, because I only care about entertaining the player for half an hour to an hour. On the other hand, if the PCs are expected to be coming in to a big boss fight that they've spent multiple sessions working up to, that may well be a 2-4 hour fight, and thus it needs enough complexity to keep the players engaged and entertained for the entire duration -- say, it's a three stage fight or something, and each stage has its own signature trick.
On the opposite side from that, you don't want the complexity to vary that much with the number of monsters -- a boss fight should be equally complex whether it involves a half dozen different monsters, or one single solo monster. 5e partially recognizes this -- monsters intended for solo boss use are likely to be legendaries with legendary actions -- but even then it's rarely past the complexity level of a midboss, stat blocks with complexity appropriate to final boss uses are generally multi-page monstrosities that only appear in adventure modules and would be kind of unusable if you didn't intend for the creature to be a final boss.
With a lot of legendary monsters, it's easy to fix that added complexity -- sure, a lich stat block isn't all that interesting by itself, but throw in a lieutenant, a bunch of minions, magical traps, and weird arcane rituals to foil, and you've got plenty of stuff for a BBEG fight. The problem with dragons is that we expect it to be a big event fight, and we expect it to be a relatively pure solo boss fight (no swarms of minions to add distractions), and dragon stat blocks in 5e just aren't up to the job. However, make them up for the job and they're not suitable for any other use case; in a high level campaign an adult dragon might just be a lieutenant or underboss and we don't really want all that complexity.
If all games were milestone based by default instead of still even offering the option of grinding XP like an arcade score, this "kaiju of the week" issue would be lessened.
But a significant chunk of people would get angry if they couldn't "kaiju of the week" their way to winning at points.
Also, some player blocs & sects demand to be told how to roleplay things, then other blocs & sects(overlapping way more often than you think with the previous ones) demand NOT to be told how to roleplay things if said encouraged roleplay doesn't match ALL of their headcanons at once.
& these problems affect dragons most of all(Any long-existing creature suffers from this).
OP didn't need to tack on "Spirit Dragon retcon bad" to discuss the roleplay vs rollplay issues with Dragons in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition due to a signature outdated redundant method of player advancement being maintained by TTRPG cultural traditionalism on multiple levels, tho. The potshot detracts from the more productive aspects of the subject.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Nah, while not using XP does reduce the incentive to have a bazillion trash fights, the core problem is just that dragon stat blocks, without extensive customization, are boring, and have always been boring (though not customizing wasn't really an option in 3e; any high CR dragon had a mess of feats and sorcerer spells to pick).
This is one of the things I am most excited about with the new D&D team. It is pretty clear the old team was just… bad at making monsters. They might have done a good job preserving the lore from ages past, and at least through 2024 legendary actions for adults and larger, added more of that lore to the stat blocks… but they still are some of the least mechanically interesting monsters in the game.
A lot of the new hires come from third party publishers whose strength is their monster design. Powerful, better balanced against CR, and with abilities that actually feel unique. Hoping some of that monster creation talent translates into official content now that they poached some of the creators.
I find it amusing that so far, people have only responded to the above content of the post, ignoring about 90% of the posted content. I feel like the OP had an interest in sharing and discussing Dragon Lore. Maybe I'm WAY off base and they were looking to encourage exactly the discussion being had currently.
Either way, to the OP, genuine thanks for your interesting post!
The reason I haven't bothered replying until now, is because yes, dragons are a wide topic, I feel the social aspect of Dragons is just as important if not more so than the stat lines in a monster manual. It's why I will always rant about the new spirit dragon, as they came up with a great idea, then tied it to two well established dragons with very specific cultures and personalities.
Dragon lore, and the use of dragons in a campain doesn't need to be a Kaiju of the week, there are plenty of monsters for that. Hells they don't even need to be the BBEG, even the evil dragon types don't need to be that. They are extrems of human personaility, and should be used as normal NPC roles, and story hooks. They should be woven into the tapestry of roleplay, both as companions and quest givers. Hells there are three types of Dragons that are specifically designed to be player characters if the DM is willing to do that.
Dragons are wonderful creatures in D&D that get religated to a boring stat line.
I generally agree - I think the social aspect is far more important than their stats. I think Wizards agrees as well, since throughout bot 5e and 5.5, showcasing the personalities of the dragons has been front and center, while their stat blocks got the same lackluster attention of any other official monster.
Which makes me genuinely curious about the DMs you are encountering. I primarily play in very longstanding groups where, far more often than not, I am DMing. In my groups, dragons either follow the specific lore or their deviation is something notable and abnormal. Even when used as a “monster of the week,” their presence is notable and their personality is used to base their tactics and behaviors.
All that is to say, I am not seeing the same problem as you - folks in my groups are actively interested in dragon lore and 5e Wizards has not made it difficult to find. It seems your DMs are struggling on that point, and I am interested in your theories on why that might be the case, given how many resources on personality are available. I am also curious if the problem seems to be alleviating itself in 5.5, given Wizards at least added some of the personality to the stat blocks (even if I still find them underwhelming).