Among the many beasts you’ll find in Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts 1 is an exciting and unique assortment of dragons. These wyrms jettison the standard chromatic, metallic, or even gemstone elements you may be familiar with in favor of environmental origins. But nestled among the likes of sea dragons and wind dragons is a being that will quite literally send a chill down your spine, the Void dragon.

The Void dragon has a form that feels built directly from the night sky. A pair of bright white stars make up its eyes, while its body gives off the impression of more distant, faint stars. It’s like staring up at a constellation, just, you know, it has the potential to absolutely wreck your adventuring party.

• What We Love About Void Dragons
• Void Dragon Abilities to Use in Your Game
• Where to Use a Void Dragon

What Is the Void?

The concept of the Void is part of Kobold Press’s dark fantasy setting of Midgard. The Void represents the dark, unknown areas beyond the mortal realm, where one might find "dark gods" keen to bring about a "ruinous apocalypse." Tome of Beasts 1 stresses that one doesn’t need to use the Midgard setting to adapt the creatures from it into your D&D games. For a game set in the Forgotten Realms, the Far Realm could be substituted for the Void, or the Void could represent the furthest reaches of the Astral Sea, far beyond the edges of any known Wildspace.

What We Love About Void Dragons

Void dragons are quite literally cool, seeing as they live in the vast frozen space between the stars. But here are some other details about Void dragons that make them a particularly awesome addition to a campaign.

Intersection of Cosmic Horror and High Fantasy

One of our favorite things about the Void dragon is how well it perfectly threads the needle between the eldritch terror of a distant, unknown being with the classic fantasy elements of a dragon. The key to this intersection is that while the Void dragon is as keen to hoard treasure as its terrestrial kin, their most favored prize is knowledge. Thus, a party of heroes attempting to fill their pockets with gold may instead discover a horde of forbidden, incomprehensible, or forgotten secrets of the universe.

A Truly Stellar Set of Powers and Moves

From the Void dragon wyrmling, all the way to the ancient Void dragon, the stat blocks for these creatures are a sublime mix of all the elements you might consider for a being that lives between the stars.

The Void dragon’s spread of abilities includes gravitational forces, the persistent, impenetrable cold from the vastness of space, the fire of the stars themselves, and the infectious, inhuman madness from the kind of deep eldritch knowledge it collects. Each of these aspects on its own would make for an interesting and challenging monster. Instead, they’ve been expertly folded into each other to make an encounter that will be hard for your players to forget.

Incredible Impact on Your Setting

Typically Void dragons often make their lairs deep beyond mortal worlds, but Tome of Beasts 1 make it easy for a DM to imagine the impact a Void dragon can make when it chooses to nest elsewhere. These lairs can reshape the map of a game setting, such as by snuffing out even the brightest of nonmagical illumination, tearing the veil between planes, and creating areas of zero gravity.

Hoarders of Knowledge

The region containing a Void dragon’s lair also offers the opportunity to redefine a story by forcing secrets to the surface. Threads of information supernaturally become easier to uncover, and beings passing through a Void dragon’s territory gain an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Essentially, your party becomes a crew of Gollums and their "precious" is anything they don’t already know. They’re a living, breathing lore drop.

Void Dragon Abilities to Use in Your Game

Like most dragons, Void dragons have an impressive array of tools at their disposal, but here are a few we found particularly fun and challenging.

Gravitic Breath

A thematic twist on a dragon’s breath weapon, the Void dragon breathes out a shift in gravity within a 90-foot cube. The Gravitic Breath pulls enemies to the ground, potentially dealing out upwards of 20d10 bludgeoning damage. Creatures on the ground might avoid the falling damage but are restrained on a failed saving throw, and move at half speed on a success.

Void Twist

The ancient and adult forms of the Void dragon have a flavorful reaction that allows it to boost its AC by twisting reality to avoid being hit. To add insult to injury, or more accurately, injury to injury, if the attack misses by 5 or more, the Void dragon can use that rift to redirect the attack to a different target. This means your strongest attacks may end up hitting your party members instead.

Collapsing Star

The ancient form of the Void dragon carries a CR of 24 and for good reason: You may not survive the defeat of one.

When the ancient Void dragon dies, its celestial nature collapses in, unleashing an explosion that causes any creature within 1,000 feet of it to make a DC 21 Constitution saving throw, taking 10d10 bludgeoning damage and 10d10 cold damage on a failed save, or half as much on a successful one. Further, if a creature fails their saving throw by more than 5, the gravity of the Void dragon’s collapse pulls them in and ejects them on a random plane of existence, or 5d100 miles away.

We mentioned above that a Void dragon can greatly impact your game and its setting. Consider how the defeat of an ancient Void dragon could pull your party into an entirely different world and you’ll understand why.

Where to Use a Void Dragon

We’ve talked a lot about what makes a Void dragon cool, but where could it work in your game?

Spelljammer

Spelljammer feels like the first and obvious choice for a game setting where a Void dragon would slot in nicely. Their homes are typically in the spaces between the stars, making a Void dragon a perfect encounter for the crew of a spelljamming ship in the Astral Sea.

A Game With a Lot of Secrets

Imagine a campaign full of hanging threads that all get pulled at the same time in a chaotic tidal wave of knowledge. Alliances shifting, betrayals revealed, histories rewritten, all in one fell swoop. The presence of a Void dragon’s lair could serve as a fun, organic way to allow for a massive lore drop without it feeling like a lot of exposition. Instead, you’re unraveling secrets as the story unfolds.

Ravenloft Domains of Dread

If you’re looking to add a little cosmic horror to your Ravenloft games, the Void dragon’s connection to unknowable ancient secrets and knowledge is a perfect encounter to slide into that story. The presence of a Void dragon’s lair might work especially well with the broken reality of Bluetspur or the untempered dreams of I’Cath.

Where Not? It’s a Void Dragon!

Void dragons are by nature detached, aloof beings that sit beyond the normal borders of mortal encounters. The Void dragon is an alien being from the stars, so sometimes the best stories you can tell about such a being don’t require the adventurers to go where it can normally be found. Having a Void dragon show up somewhere it doesn’t belong is an excellent way to set up a Void dragon quest because its very presence creates a problem that needs to be solved!

Fill the Void

With CR ratings ranging from 24 for the ancients to 2 for the wyrmlings, with scalable impact for its respective abilities, there’s space for the thematic and storytelling elements of this unique dragon in any game. Do you see space for a Void dragon in yours?

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.