Monday, July 19, 2021

Dragon + Article Gives Us a Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown of Fizban's Treasury of Dragons

 Once again, thanks to Nerd Immersion for spotting this. 

As the post title says, the latest digital version of Dragon Magazine has given us a very detailed, chapter-by-chapter overview of what we can find in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons.

Chapter One will be all about player options and character creation. This will include the new version of the Dragonborn race (again, if it's like what we saw in UA, I'm hoping I can convert my Fighter to this version). This will also include the Way of the Ascendant Dragon Monk subclass and the Drakewarden Ranger subclass. While not every "this class, but dragon-style" is getting a subclass, there are some suggestions of how one could still effectively have a dragon-themed class. Clerics of Bahamut or Tiamat could easily choose various domains, and there's a type of dragon in the book known as a Moonstone Dragon found in the Feywild that could be an Archfey patron. (I think you could totally have a Shadow Dragon as a Hexblade patron, or perhaps have some weapon imbued with a shadow dragon's power serve as the patron.)

Chapter Two will include a handful of dragon-themed spells, which we saw in Unearthed Arcana. Additionally, there will be new magic items that are dragon themed. One of the cool concepts being added is "hoard items." These are items that can be upgraded by attuning them to the hoard of a more powerful dragon. For example, if you find an item in a young blue dragon's hoard, it'll get better if you later defeat an adult red dragon and "steep it" in the red dragon's hoard, and some other properties might change, as the item will now have red-dragon magic as opposed to blue-dragon magic (I could imagine a weapon that deals lightning damage, but now does fire damage.)

Chapter Three seems to be a mix of lore and ways to give dragons unique personalities, with various tables to roll on. While the book focuses on mainstream D&D, it does mention a bit of Tarkir, a Magic the Gathering plane that has a strong draconic theme. Likewise, an old D&D setting called Council of Wyrms gets mention as well.

Chapter Four will be about lairs and hoards, and also seems to get into the lore surrounding dragons, including the idea that it was Bahamut and Tiamat who created the Prime Material Plane, and thus explains how and why dragons are so central to it.

Chapter Five is one of the two longest chapters, and goes into detail about different types of dragons and their personality traits and how to build a story around them. There will be a lot of tables here for the kinds of traits and ideals and such for different types of dragons. There's also some discussion about dragon alignment - even though chromatics tend to be evil and metallics tend to be good, dragons are not bound to these alignments in the same way that outer-planar entities like demons or angels are. Basically: "typically" does not mean "always."

Finally, Chapter Six will be the bestiary, which is another big chunk of the book. Here, we'll get new stat blocks for Great Wyrms of each dragon type. These are dragons who have connected to their other version across the material plane and achieved a tremendous power, and have the mythic monster features as seen in Mythic Odysseys of Theros and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. Additionally, we get the full wyrmling-young-adult-ancient-greatwyrm versions of the five types of gem dragons. There are also the aforementioned Moonstone Dragons, something called Deep Dragons, various dragon-related monsters, as well as a younger and also ancient version of the Dragon Turtle (the ancient dragon turtle is apparently enormous - the art depicts it as dwarfing a fleet of warships.) While the lesser dragon gods are generally being imagined as greatwyrms, the OG dragon gods, Bahamut and Tiamat, are getting unique statblocks to represent their aspects (I imagine we might just see a reprint of Tiamat's stats from Rise of Tiamat, which is the only other CR 30 creature than the Tarrasque. Hopefully Bahamut is comparably badass.)

As a DM who has always wanted dragons to have a super cool place in the mythos of his world, I'm actually very excited for this book. D&D has such cool monsters and concepts, that sometimes the eponymous monster right there in the title gets lost in the shuffle. It looks like this will be a great resource for any campaign that involves dragons even in a secondary role, so I'm very on board with this.

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