Mad Gaming Madness

This one took a long time. I know it's not Monday, sue me. From Susan Lawson's article “There Can Never Be Too Many Dragons, Right?” in Dragon #96 (April 1985), it was never meant to be used in a regular campaign, just to end ones where the PCs had acquired several kingdoms' worth of magical items that made them otherwise untouchable -- by having the quazar dragon devour their home planet. Classic Old School methodology. Nevertheless, when I read SpectreCreations' Cosmic Dragon Breviary , the idea wouldn't let go of me, to convert the dragon and make it part of the Cosmic Dragon family. It fits really well with the rest of them, and would make a dangerous foe. So, here is the quazar dragon, in all his formidable glory.

So, when the blog went into hiatus, I had been wrestling with the Pink Dragon. I was trying to combine two different pink dragons from comedy articles: The pink (candy) dragon from Rick Reid's scenario “The Caves of Confection,” in Polyhedron issue #051 (January 1990). The pink dragon from Jeanne McGuire's entry in Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium in Dragon #156 (April 1990). Both of these had humor elements, but still had (I judged) some gameplay value and I felt it would be good to combine them into one fully-fleshed out creature. But making a full stat block for a new type of dragon in D&D 5E is hard . You can go simple for Lair and Legendary Actions, but that feels like a cheap copout. And I'm a huge fan of Spectre Creation's Cosmic Dragon Breviary , and in that one he statted out five full new species, with new Lair and Legendary Actions. So, when I came back to the blog, I felt I needed to finish this guy before moving on; he'd been waiting long e...

So, I got sidetracked a few months ago, and managed to miss posting for a while. I'd try to remember to post, forget it on the Monday in question, then put it off because, "It's Monstrous Monday! Not Tuesday!" That's a great way to procrastinate yourself into never doing something. So, today's ridiculous monster from the "Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium" article from Dragon #156 is the paper dragon, which is actually one of my favorites and one that I've used more than once. It's a great critter to put in an abandoned wizards' library, or similar location.

In 3rd edition D&D, the designers introduced "Dragon" as a type of creature, which is a design element that has endured through to the current edition. This is a key idea -- that being Draconic is as fundamental to a creature's make-up as being constructed (Construct), born (Humanoid, Beast, some Monstrosities), or being made of the stuff of a highly-magical alternate plane (Elemental, Celestial, Fiend, Fey).  However, there's a further distinction. Creatures such as wyverns and lindworms  have the Dragon type, but the game recognizes that they aren't as iconic as "actual" dragons such as Smaug or Fafnir ; these latter are referred to as "True Dragons." As befits a game with the word "Dragon" in the name, D&D has had a huge number of True Dragons over the editions. As D&D players are big fans of dragons, these dragons have frequently been updated to later editions, but there are always at least a few new dragons for each...