Dragons of Bestiary 6

Thursday, April 6, 2017

It should come as no surprise that, in Bestiary 6, when you turn to the "D" section, you'll see some welcome and familiar reptilian shapes. I'm talking about dinosaurs of course. Who doesn't love dinosaurs?

OH! There's also true dragons.

One of the increasingly tricky things to do with true dragons is that we've established them as existing in families of five—not six, not four, but five. So when we do a set of true dragons in a book, that's pretty much it for that category, which means the next bestiary that comes along has to have a new category. Fortunately, there's a LOT of really cool categories to explore when it comes to true dragons, and with Bestiary 6 I was able to explore one that I'd been itching for since Bestiary 2, which presented dragons associated with several of the inner planes.

I'm talking, of course, about Bestiary 6's planar dragons. At first I wasn't sure how to pull this off, since there are, after all, nine significant outer planes, each of which map to one of the nine alignments. Doesn't that imply that there should be 9 planar dragons? Perhaps... but in the end I decided it did not. Instead, I picked five alignments out of nine. These planar dragons include the crypt dragon (representing the neutral plane of the Boneyard*), the havoc dragon (representing the chaotic good plane of Elysium), the infernal dragon (representing the lawful evil of Hell), the paradise dragon (representing the lawful goodness of Heaven), and the rift dragon (representing the chaos and evil of the Abyss), yet the role these dragons play is not "Dragons you meet on the outer planes." Instead, they're dragons that you'll normally encounter on the Material Plane, after migrating there via portals or other methods with a singular goal—to reshape a material plane lair to reflect their home planes. In this way, we give this group of five dragons a unique shared trait beyond "they're all from the outer planes," in a way that doesn't make a potential future category of other planar dragons from existing. We'd just need to figure out a different theme or niche other than "dragons who come to the Material Plane to colonize" is all.

The fact that this gives GMs one more vector to include other-planar elements in Material Plane adventures without resorting to the old trope of "a wizard conjured things" is icing on the cake.

Pictured below are three of the five planar dragons. You'll need to wait for the book's release to check out the havoc and infernal dragons, of course!

Illustrations by Leesha Hannigan

James Jacobs
Creative Director