Be Not Afraid (of These Dragons)!

Yes! Time to make an empyreal dragon "Grandma" NPC who lives in a cabin. She gives you tea and cookies upon arriving, and listens to your stories while knitting and saying "That's nice, dear".
All throughout her cabin are super rare artifacts that upon questioning, she'd say "oh it's just stuff my kids found and don't use anymore. You can have it sweetie".

Somehow she has your macaroni necklace you made in kindergarden.

HUZZAH!
The fact the Halo can be its own thing that transports the aura. :3

I love the idea that they go out of their way to make their lairs lootable to the right people. I'm imagining one who is disguised as a humanoid listening to the stories of a new adventuring party about how they "braved the dragon's lair" and came out with treasures that helped them save the village, and the dragon fighting so, so hard to not accidentally burst their bubble and tell them how proud it is.

I like the look of those wings and the horns framed to look like they hold the halo up is great. The body is a bit lanky looking and the side view of the head just makes me think "unavoidable chin move".

Benevolent, gold and strives to protect innocents. So it's basically a combo of the only metallic dragons most people could tell apart.

Empyrial dragons are going to be interesting because they're one of the main dragons that (MOST) parties are going to be allied with, rather than fighting against.

Love them. Was scared they might end up with good = boring, but this is fun

Are these the remastered Golds?

I think it's a bit of both gold and silver? The two were kind of close anyways in behavior I think.

I'd like to see a riding dragon in Pathfinder at some point that's scaled to make mounted combat on dragonback a viable play style - dragonriding is a huge fantasy trope but dragons in TTRPGs tend to be so powerful that the rider is practically an irrelevancy, rendering riding on dragons something more akin to being chauffeured somewhere by your mother than to riding an immensely powerful mount into a do-or-die roll of the dice against evil.

So does this change Mengkare from being a gold dragon to an empyreal dragon?

I love these new Dragons, and this one in particular is great! However, whenever I look at the divine tradition dragons we've seen so far, especially if this one is meant to be connected to Heaven, I can't help but think "why didn't they just do the Infernal and Paradise Dragons?". I'm curious if the planar dragons still exist and how they'd differ from the new ones.

So does this change Mengkare from being a gold dragon to an empyreal dragon?

No. The previously written dragons are staying the same, from what I understand, but they're being treated as individuals rather than as a member of a specific draconic ancestry. Mengkare isn't a gold dragon anymore, now he's a dragon who happens to be gold in color, instead.

Nameless Henchman wrote:

So does this change Mengkare from being a gold dragon to an empyreal dragon?

No. The previously written dragons are staying the same, from what I understand, but they're being treated as individuals rather than as a member of a specific draconic ancestry. Mengkare isn't a gold dragon anymore, now he's a dragon who happens to be gold in color, instead.

Not exactly, it's just the old dragons haven't been updated yet. Formerly Green Dragons are now Horned Dragons who happened to have green scales.

Empyrial dragons are going to be interesting because they're one of the main dragons that (MOST) parties are going to be allied with, rather than fighting against.

...as opposed to the Conspirator Dragons, which you will be allied with, fighting against, buying information from, and trying to avoid the notice of, all at the same time. Most likely you won't know that it's all the same dragon, but....

Perpdepog wrote:

Nameless Henchman wrote:

So does this change Mengkare from being a gold dragon to an empyreal dragon?

No. The previously written dragons are staying the same, from what I understand, but they're being treated as individuals rather than as a member of a specific draconic ancestry. Mengkare isn't a gold dragon anymore, now he's a dragon who happens to be gold in color, instead.

Not exactly, it's just the old dragons haven't been updated yet. Formerly Green Dragons are now Horned Dragons who happened to have green scales.

I'm not so sure about that. Them mapping up sounded more like a happy coincidence from the blog, and James also had this to say about dragons.

We'll eventually figure out how to remaster and re-present the OGL dragons, I suspect, but that's not a day-one goal of Monster Core and the rest of the remaster project.

In the meantime, any in-world dragon who has a name, such as Kazavon, stays the same. We won't be telling stories involving them right away, but their historical and canonical roles are unchanged. If/when we stat them up, we'll do so as bespoke stat blocks that don't include OGL elements, but still allow them to function as they always have in the setting.

Over the course of 1st edition, we introduced dozens more dragons beyond the OGL classics. The ones in Monster Core follow that tradition; they aren't REPLACING anything that's come before in the setting, but we're taking advantage of the remaster to re-focus all of our content, including dragons, on our own creations.

Nice!!

I guess a question I have about these tradition-based dragons is:

Do they inherently have spells that relate to their various traditions? or is the tradition less about the magical essence of the dragon and more about their role in the world? Will we get lots of caster dragons that study different traditions of magic than is their core essence?

Not exactly, it's just the old dragons haven't been updated yet. Formerly Green Dragons are now Horned Dragons who happened to have green scales.

Specific NPCs don't need to fall into any specific bestiary category though. You don't have to put "[adjective] dragon" in Mengkare or Choral's statblock anywhere. Mengkare's existing statblock has three "as gold dragon" entries referring to the original bestiary, but if you were going to reprint him or do Choral you could just refer to something in the Monster Core instead (or just say explicitly how Draconic Frenzy, etc. works for this individual.)

Like the purpose of the Unique Tag is that you can do just whatever.

Ooh! Yes! Good! More creatures with support kits, please!

I guess a question I have about these tradition-based dragons is:

Do they inherently have spells that relate to their various traditions? or is the tradition less about the magical essence of the dragon and more about their role in the world? Will we get lots of caster dragons that study different traditions of magic than is their core essence?

They have the trait associated with their assigned tradition: Adamantine has primal, conspirator occult, etc.

They don't have spells as a default, but there is a sidebar for adding spells to each of the dragon types. I am only 100% on what spells are in what tradition, but on quick glance the suggested spells seem to follow their tradition assignment, as above.

Since they're connected to Heaven, I wonder the relationship with Paradise Dragons will be..... Also, mostly because the difference in lore, I like to imagine the old Planar Dragon's main difference with these divine dragons is that the old Planar dragons spread the influence of their homes, while these newer ones embody their home and often serve it's will....

Also in the book there is a term called Archdragon, what is that?

Since they're connected to Heaven, I wonder the relationship with Paradise Dragons will be..... Also, mostly because the difference in lore, I like to imagine the old Planar Dragon's main difference with these divine dragons is that the old Planar dragons spread the influence of their homes, while these newer ones embody their home and often serve it's will....

Also in the book there is a term called Archdragon, what is that?

My theory is Archdragon is the new Great Wyrm category.

Haos52 wrote:

Since they're connected to Heaven, I wonder the relationship with Paradise Dragons will be..... Also, mostly because the difference in lore, I like to imagine the old Planar Dragon's main difference with these divine dragons is that the old Planar dragons spread the influence of their homes, while these newer ones embody their home and often serve it's will....

Also in the book there is a term called Archdragon, what is that?

My theory is Archdragon is the new Great Wyrm category.

Indeed!

I'm wondering, will the other Planar Dragons (aka Paradise Dragon, Apocalypse Dragon, Bliss Dragon, Crypt Dragon, Edict Dragon, etc etc) still be a part of the new Core?

I'm wondering, will the other Planar Dragons (aka Paradise Dragon, Apocalypse Dragon, Bliss Dragon, Crypt Dragon, Edict Dragon, etc etc) still be a part of the new Core?

I feel like the bright line standard is anything that requires the OGL to exist on Golarion (Owlbears, Drow, etc.) is gone in the sense of "We're never going to mention it in an official publication" sense. But everything else pre-remaster is fair game for them to reference and use. Like I doubt the Monster Core has all the ancestries added in the Mwangi and Impossible Lands books, but the Anadi and the Kashrishi are still canonical.

It's much like how the Thaumaturge and Inventor aren't in Player Core 1 or 2, because they didn't really need updating to be fully usable with the remaster.

Wait, Drow are gone? Huh...do they get replaced with anything? Is it possible they can just be renamed and rebranded as something slightly different?

Wait, Drow are gone? Huh...do they get replaced with anything? Is it possible they can just be renamed and rebranded as something slightly different?

Serpentfolk will do the bulk of the heavy lifting of the primary antagonist ancestry of Sekamina. We'll also be building more lore up about Ayindilar elves (aka "cavern elves") as an elf ancestry that lives in the Darklands, but they'll fill a very different and non-antagonistic role and won't have much in common with drow other than they're also elves who live underground.

The "Return to the Darklands" article in Pathfinder #195 goes into more detail about how we've got to adjust the Darklands to move away from OGL content; That region, more than any other in the setting, relied HEAVILLY on OGL content, and we haven't really done a lot of expansion or exploration of it at all during Pathfinder 1st edition (with the sourcebook and Adventure Path that focused the most on the Darklands coming out before the RPG, during our 3.5 OGL era).

At some point I'd love to have Paizo do another big Darklands book or Adventure Path—being the primary author for the first book, it's always been a region I really enjoy and have a lot invested in, but at this point we've got nothing of the sort announced.

I'm wondering, will the other Planar Dragons (aka Paradise Dragon, Apocalypse Dragon, Bliss Dragon, Crypt Dragon, Edict Dragon, etc etc) still be a part of the new Core?

As of right now they are not, however other families of dragons are brought up as still existing in the book so it's possible we'll run into them again.

I will say that I actually do enjoy the idea of the divine planes having more than one type of dragon that defines the realm. Given that even amongst the Archons, devils, and Aeons and the alike that they can be very different.

I'm wondering, will the other Planar Dragons (aka Paradise Dragon, Apocalypse Dragon, Bliss Dragon, Crypt Dragon, Edict Dragon, etc etc) still be a part of the new Core?

In all likelihood, specific OGL dragons will probably be "subsumed" as variants of the Remastered dragons. The horned dragon blog post makes this rather explicit: "Their personalities are relatively the same, their other abilities such as their poison breath and twisting tail reaction are still around, and they still generally live in forested regions and swamps." (e.g., swamp dwelling horned dragons with darker green/black scales) and "While the horned dragon in Monster Core is green and lives in forests, there’s a decent chance you could see a blue horned dragon that lives in a lake or a tan horned dragon that lives in a desert sometime in the future!"

For the planar dragons, variants of diabolic and empyreal dragons living on other planes (with minor differences in appearance and a couple tweaks to their abilities/powers) are something that most GMs could handle on their own without "official" versions being published to pad content.

Be Not Afraid (of These Dragons)!

Will Save: 1d20 + 2 ⇒ (17) + 2 = 19
OK I'm not afraid of These Dragons.

The other dragons that's a different story, I'm definitely very afraid of the other dragons.

With dragons spanning the traditions in MC, I'm wondering about the implications on classes that draw from dragons for power.

Currently that's mainly Arcane (with some Divine, for the Wyrmblessed bloodline and such), but would Barbarians and Sorcerers in PC2 be able to draw on Occult or Primal with their draconic options?

(And also Summoner, though it's a bit stickier for them as they're not getting reprinted in PC2)

And Kobold ancestry.

We will have to wait for PC2 to see exactly how that is all going to play out.

As for Summoner, I expect it to get further errata when Monster Core and/or PC2 drops.

At some point I'd love to have Paizo do another big Darklands book or Adventure Path—being the primary author for the first book, it's always been a region I really enjoy and have a lot invested in, but at this point we've got nothing of the sort announced.

We'd definately love another adventure path in the Darklands James! Maybe Thais could make her triumphant return in it as the herald of the accidential god aiding adventurers to help Golarion avoid a catastrophe?