No matter which version of D&D you play, you can’t have Dungeons & Dragons without either the dungeons or the dragons. So it’s a good thing that the next set of D&D core rules introduces dragons to players here, there, and everywhere – they’re on the cover, they’re in the stat blocks, and, if you like, everywhere in your sight if you’re already preparing to take the new books.
All three new core D&D rulebooks – The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, and The Monster Manual – are currently available for pre-order through D&D Beyond ahead of their release later this year (and in early 2025). in the case of the Monster Guide) and that gets you a bunch of bonus goodies, including a new dice skin for use in D&D Beyond, a digital gold dragon miniature for use in the upcoming Beyond Virtual Tabletop when it goes into beta. But it also comes with The Dragons of D&D, a digital art book dedicated to the titular creatures in all their forms – and to celebrate, io9 has a first look at some of the art from the section dedicated to the Green Dragons of the D&D multiverse.
Largely solitary creatures, D&D’s Green Dragons are known as masters of conspiracy, tricksters who delight in manipulating and deceiving their prey – and stalking any poor adventurers who wander into their forest domains with meticulous cunning until they can they strike at the best opportunity, tearing out teeth and claws and spewing streams of poisonous gas from their mouths. And while that doesn’t change in the latest iteration of Dungeons & Dragons, they do get a bit of a design update to better suit their duplicitous nature.
“For the green dragon, we made some big changes to its design, hoping to better show the dragon’s personality,” Josh Herman, head of the D&D art team at Wizards of the Coast, told io9. “We also wanted to give the green dragon a new movement style unique among the cast of chromatic dragons. Their movement shows the cunning and duplicitous nature of the green dragon, while also tying into a more serpentine form.”
Herman and the art team looked to the original stat block for Green Dragons in the Fifth Edition Monster Manual as a starting point for how they wanted to approach redesigning the beast for this new age. in [the Monster Manual] it says green dragons are “The most cunning and insidious of the true dragons, green dragons use misdirection and deception to gain the upper hand against their enemies,” explained Herman. “This is such a wealth of information! It also states that an ancient green dragon has an intelligence of 20, meaning it has the highest intelligence of all the chromatic dragons.
“Those two things alone told us a lot and spoke to what we would like to see in the updated design, as well as a lot to how this creature might function or act in the world,” Herman continued. “Being more intelligent than other chromats and being the most manipulative animals in the real world that we associate with these traits, like a snake.”
Read some more of Herman’s insight into the development of the Green Dragons art design below, and click through to see some more exclusive creature artwork from Alexander Ostrovsky making its debut here on io9!
I like to imagine that a green dragon would constantly be plotting and scheming to seize power, but since he doesn’t have the raw power of a red dragon, he would have to execute those plans in a different way. So instead of breaking down the door and burning down the city, he would lure the people into the woods where he could manipulate and deceive them, telling lies about why they were brought there and telling tales of how they should help the dragon. The green dragon would use his intelligence and other area effects to appear as invisible as possible because he knows that being forward about his goals won’t help him achieve them.
Green dragons love to collect sentient beings and enjoy corrupting them and bending them to their will. This felt like a great tie in with a more serpentine design that you can imagine the dragon slowly encircling and wrapping around someone until it’s too deep to escape.
For the project as a whole, the green dragon was also the first dragon design to land on the dragon project. Early in the process we worked with several artists, but the person who made this one “click” was artist Simon Lee. Simon is a traditional sculptor who sculpts in clay and has made many small clay sculptures exploring how dragons can move and how they can express their personality.
He created a sculpture of the green dragon that had this long neck with a compact body and a long tail. We were drawn in right away – it’s a visual we’re familiar with dragons but haven’t seen in D&D dragons. It also opened up and solidified the idea that each dragon could have a different body shape or something special about it from a physico-biological point of view.
Big thanks to Simon for working on this project, along with all the other artists and illustrators!
The new Dungeons & Dragons core rules are available to pre-order digitally and physically now via D&D Beyond – you get access to the Dragons of D&D digital art book and the aforementioned exclusive digital dice and Gold Dragon VTT miniature as bonuses – ahead of their release later this year starting with the Player’s Handbook on September 17th, the Dungeon Master’s Guide on November 12th, and the Monster Guide early next year on February 18th, 2025.
