Welcome to all the new folks, to Beyond the Horizon.
Did you cash in the link yet, with all the free stuff for FreeRPGday? If not, then you should get going with it, the sooner the better. :)
No, in all seriousness, please do - the discount only runs till the 24th of July, so if you miss out, you do miss out. :)
On the other hand, if you're new and like it here, I suggest you either sign up for the newsletter or remain signed up. Every 3 months, we'll be giving out a new free mini-adventure to those signed up, which we of course hope you'll enjoy. :)
Today though (and probably a lot of July if we're being honest), we're going to talk about Dragons, as we are part of the RPG Carnival, and this month's topic is the ever-fascinating draconic entities which is hosted by Rising Phoenix Games.
But first I'd actually like to go back in time a little, to a series of articles that new gamers might not have heard of called Wyrms of the North.
For those unfamiliar Wyrms of the North was a series of articles that ran for about 3 years in Dragon Magazine from 1996 to 1999 (and were later posted to Wizards of the Coast's website) that talked about all the dragons of the North in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, and introduced and fleshed them out, for use in your D&D campaign (3.5 at the time), such as Voaraghamanthar, "the Black Death".
These articles gave you the statistics (which were often unique) of these dragons, along with their combat tactics and unique items and spells. More importantly, they also covered the history of each individual dragon and explained how they fit into the greater narrative of the Campaign Setting.
And these are all things that I think are missing from the modern versions of the games, or at least from the first-party releases of Wizards of the Coast (Paizo is an exception here as they release a lot more material with these things in them, where WOTC is more reticent with these things). The feel, the history, and the character are in many places (not just Dragons) replaced with 3 paragraphs of short descriptions and stories and then a stat block. And maybe it's just me, but Dragons deserve so much MORE. They're THE iconic monster for Fantasy RPGs after all, and something just doesn't sit right with me on that front.
So for a few weeks (and if people like it, maybe we'll turn it into an actual book), we're going to be fleshing out dragons for both 5e and PF2, and looking at what makes these creatures so remarkable. And readding the magic into the souls of the Dragons.
So come back next week and have a look, yeah? :)