D&D 2024 is redesigning the Dragons part of Dungeons & Dragons
Both dungeons and dragons have evolved in Dungeons & Dragons. Design goes back and forth. In D&D 2024 (the don't-call-it-a-new-edition of D&D 5th Edition), all the dragons were taken back to the drawing board: red, green, blue, black, and white dragons, as well as brass, copper, bronze, silver, and gold dragons.
You may be thinking to yourself, redesign? Why redesign? Aren't they all just re-stickered variants of one another? A free mod on Dragon Nexus? What could possibly be the difference between a red dragon and a gold dragon besides maybe a $5 DLC reskin?
Oh ho ho, my friend, there are plenty of differences. And the artists drew from myriad inspirations. The gold dragon, to hearken back over 50 years of D&D, blended recent designs with original designs from the 1970s and '80s. Now it looks like it's swimming in the air as much as it looks like it's flying underwater.
The black dragon looks lean, hungry, with a Punisher logo face, sawblade spine, and spider-leg extensions on its wings. The artists went back to the black dragon's stat block to come up with the acidic, faster-moving redraw. Now it looks like a good and proper thing to have creeping in the dark places no one talks about anymore.
Red dragons, while they may not have undergone the most plastic surgery of the bunch, is promised to still be that iconic apex predator we've come to expect from a game called Dungeons & Dragons. The red dragon has already lost the mammalian beards it used to rock in the '80s and '90s, and is now more of a Tyrannosaurus Rex with perma-angry eyebrow horns.
Sure, all the talk of new Monks, new Rangers, new Bards, new Sorcerers and what have you is pure excitement for players. But Josh Herman, the art lead talking on this redesign, is looking at dragons not as "creatures," but as characters. It's exactly what dragons need in D&D. Because even for someone like me that's been playing for four or five years now, how many dragons, exactly, have I run across or ran for my players? I can embarrassingly count the number on one hand. Hardly acceptable. Intolerable, really. So, I'm ready to give my players a healthy does of Beware What You Wish For.
If you preorder the D&D 2024 Core Rulebooks—the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual—you'll get a digital art book of these dragon redesigns with 100 pieces of art populating its pages. Each has spectacular final pieces, but it also showcases the concept art that was, in a sense, the journey the artists and game designers took during the redesign process. Also, showing those initial sketches goes a long ways towards combating generative AI accusations. Because, so far, AI art doesn't gin up sketches of what it has hodgepodged together.
