Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons (D&D Rules Expansion) [ハードカバー]

If you are playing a character in DnD who looks to the dragon as a sorce of inspiration and power, you may be tempted to get this book. Don't. There is no useful information in here for PC characters. No feats. No powers. No paragon paths, or epic destinies. In other words, there is quite literally nothing that your character would find useful in this book.

On the other hand, if you are a DM who is anxious to put their low level players against some dragon or dragon-like figures, but who knows that the dragons in the MM would destroy them in two rounds. You WANT THIS BOOK! It has dragons and dragon-like monsters in here of every level, from the White Dragon Wyrmling, to Tiamat himself. It also has set ups for dragon lairs, and everything else you need to build dragon encounters that your party will not soon forget. By all means, buy this book!

The 4e revamp continues, and as with previous editions, ranges from the good to the indifferent to the downright dippy. In brief order:

The Good:

Art values, binding and layout are again high. This is a handsome book and the production teams deserves kudos for aesthetic design and plain readability.

The old Orbs of Dragonkind reappear here, rather than sized by age category, now color coded for your convenience. Only the Blue Orb is described, but it's a lengthy description, and any DM worth their salt can swap a color and an energy type and have all the different orbs, and this is even suggested. Far better use of space than cut-and-pasting huge swaths of the same boilerplate.

The Orb is part of a large section on treasures, explaining how to build a dragons hoard, with useful tables such as the latest iteration of the old Art Objects table which was included in neither the Dungeon Masters Guide nor the Adventurers Vault.

There is also some nice logical reimagining. For example, the old lightning-breathing blue dragon is now also known as the storm dragon and gets a camouflage bonus when flying against a cloudless sky, something that makes sense from both an evolutionary and aesthetic perspective. And the new brown dragon takes the blue's old niche as the desert dragon, with a magical sandblasting breath weapon, which again makes sense. It's a useful dragon and makes as much sense as any of the old chromatics.

Also on the "makes sense" end, the old faerie dragons and the newer mirage dragons have moved to the Feywild, the old shadow dragons and the newer blight dragons have moved to the Shadowfell, there's a wonderful profusion of undead dragon types to warm the heart of any evil wizard who can't choose between being a necromancer or a dragon cultist--you can be both!--and finally there's the wonderfully named "squamous thing," which is what happens when dragons get corrupted by the Far Realms.

The Indifferent:

Chapter 3 is "Dragon Lairs" and it takes up 75 pages. They're prettily designed with maps and everything and range from low to high level, but if you're the type of DM who likes to design his own, they're rather a waste. On the other hand, if you like having prefab adventure settings, they're great.

The Draconic Rituals of False Aura and Aura Mask are lovely reimaginings of the old 1st ed standbys, Nystal's Magic Aura and Nystal's Undetectable Aura, and are now things that any wizard would be proud to have in his spellbook. But what particular use are they to dragons, especially when the ritual component is a silk blindfold to make it the most useful? One can't really imagine a dragon going to the bazaar to buy scarves or even demanding them as tribute: "And, my lord, the dragon stipulates that the sacrificial virgin not only be nubile and comely, but she must be wearing a silken blindfold worth at least 100 GP and nothing else. Kinky." In other words, they're nice wizard rituals shoehorned in with the dragon stuff because they didn't have room for them in the PHB, and they'll eventually be reprinted with the inevitable Big Book of Magic Stuff (with a better title).

The Gray Dragons, the second of the promised Three New Chromatic Dragons, also go in the Indifferent pile: They're the old Fang Dragons, but now elevated to full stepchild status by Tiamat, with the old dumb fang dragons being killed. Of course the new Gray Dragons breathe acid slime which at higher levels can petrify victims. Which is okay, but not as iconic as fire or ice or even burning sand. They're your B-list dragons.

The Dippy:

Purple dragons. You heard me, purple dragons. The third of the dire prophesied chromatic wyrms are Purple Dragons!

The artist does a nice job of making them look cool and sinuous, and the intro text has them living in the Underdark, and describes them as looking black in the shadows. But then you get to psychotropic breath weapon and it's time to queue the sitar music.

Yes, this is the Opium Dragon, if opium got to exist in D&D instead of tepid made-up drugs. Admittedly they're the evil dragons from a bad opium trip, but if you run into a bunch of stoned adventurers in the Underdark who say they're "chasing the dragon," it's not just a metaphor.

It gets dippier. The dragonspawn (who were never a good idea to begin with, unless you really liked furries with scales) now have the Purplespawn Nightmare, who from the description is a cross between a purple dragon and a drow, are culturally filled with shame over this (and well they should be, except it will be roleplayed as drow angst), and moreover have a "compulsive need to steal." That's like...oh, the Kender. They're a cross between purple dragons and drow, with the mental patterns of bad Kender, and will--as soon as they convert to Bahamut, and I know there are players planning this now--become the characters of choice of a certain stripe of gamer.

What could be dippier? Try the Frostforged Wyrm, which admittedly has a cool name, but the reality is somewhat of a letdown: It's a white dragon that went to Hell (here called by the Abyss, to avoid offending fundamentalists) and got locked into a cross between spiked armor and an iron maiden, and is driven mad with pain because even if it manages to scrape the armor off, it's immediately bolted back into place by a riveting crew of tiny demons and no, I am not making this up. Someone else did, but I didn't.

Of course the musical dragon hookah from 3e was left back in Song & Silence, so I suppose there is some small improvement over the previous edition.

Summation:

As with previous editions, there's some very good stuff, some rather indifferent stuff, and some incredibly dippy stuff. It's a book for DMs rather than players, except of course those players who want the slim list of rituals, which will be a lot of them.

So, as with many things, a mixed bag.

As a DM, I always love books that are for *DMs*. This book is, and I love it. There are no contrived player feats or other such fluff filling these pages - it is all dragons, all the time. There are new chromatics like the gray and purple, and there are wyrmlings for all chromatic types, in case the youngest of the MM aren't quite low enough for you. Additionally, there are a bunch of planar type dragons, undead dragons (not just 1 or 2 types like in previous editions), and a few surprises. If you're into dragonspawns there's a few of those as well.

There are a few lairs detailed out, much better than the lairs that were in the 3e draconomicon.

All in all, this is one of the best 4e books I've had so far.