Dragons & Dragons #1: The Missing Missing Dragons Intro

    I like the dragons from Dungeons & Dragons, like, a LOT. They're a thing where it's multiple versions of the same base thing with different colors and with each color having its own special properties, there's multiple groups of them with different themes that are roughly comparable, they fill out an alignment chart for the sake of filling out a chart... they're god damned DRAGONS... it's just all the best, most effective, and frankly kind of cheap ways of tickling my brain in that way that never fails to get me obsessed with something.

    For a basic run down of like the bare minimum D&D dragons 101 class, and the stuff most are likely to already know, there's 15 main core dragons that anyone knows or cares about unless you're a completely hopeless dork like me. These 15 are neatly split into 3 septs of 5 dragons each based on their color scheme and alignment. You have the 5 evil chromatic dragons, who are red, blue, green, black, and white in order of descending power, the 5 neutral gem dragons, which are amethyst, sapphire, emerald, topaz, and crystal dragons in descending order before 3rd edition where everything got all twisted up with the topaz dragon being top tier all of a suddenly, and the 5 good metallic dragons listed, again, in descending order before later editions fucked it up, the gold, silver, bronze, copper, and brass dragons. Each of these types of dragons have unique personalities, different layers and breath weapons, and for the gem and metallic dragons, special features unique to the whole family. Metallic dragons have two breath weapons and can all polymorph, and gem dragons have psychic powers and are literally so interesting to talk to that you have to make a save or be entranced.

    Sometimes you will hear people say that the gem dragons are not part of the core, main groups, but these people are wrong and stupid and should feel bad about themselves. For one thing, you can't have an alignment vacuum in D&D, the game just doesn't work like that, no one writing for a D&D book has ever said "let's NOT forcibly add something to the game it doesn't need for the sake of there being a place to do it." It's simply not done. Second, the fact that the gem dragons usually come later doesn't mean they're not core dragons, both 2nd and 3rd editions both added the gems later and after that all 15 are talked about in one breath as if that's all the dragons there are. You can prove this by pointing to the 2nd edition campaign setting Council of Wyrms, which included, as playable races, the 15 mains types of dragons. In 2nd edition the gems didn't appear in print until MC14, the Fiend Folio appendix, yet were reprinted in 2nd edition's version of a proper Monster Manual as one of the three subcategories of dragons. Also in that book? The yellow, brown, deep, steel, mercury, cloud, mist, and shadow dragons. Guess how many of those breeds are detailed as a player race in Council of Wyrms? None. Not a single one. The only reason gem dragons get released so late in the first place is because they're psychic and need the psionics supplement to be published first before they can be done justice. This is why they haven't made a full appearance yet in 5th edition, however, it is coming, and we know this because the sapphire dragon, or at least an adult sapphire dragon, finally was printed. 5th edition is lazy and bad with supplements and I have a lot to say about that, but, this isn't really that article.

    So that's just the basics. The truth is, just those dragons don't even scratch the surface and I could literally go on all day about D&D dragon trivia but basically, there are literally hundreds, there are many more septs, and it is incredibly confusing. I can sum up how convoluted D&D dragons get with one simple question: what's a brown dragon?

    One of my favorite additions to the expansive world of D&D dragons is the article "The Missing Dragons" printed in issue 37 of Dragon Magazine in May of 1980. This article makes the simple observation that the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue, but that the Monster Manual failed to show us the yellow dragon, but did give us a secondary dragon, the green one. From there it posits what kind of dragon would need to hybridize with a blue dragon to get a green dragon, and then what would happen if that dragon crossbred with a red dragon, and finally used those same formulas to crossbreed the red and blue dragons. The way they went about it was kind of brilliant, it's very clever, it fills a vacuum, and the coolest part is the resulting dragons are really unique and interesting. This, of course, blew the doors wide open on the concept of dragon crossbreeding and that, to me, is a dangerous sort of train of thought to get started on. Because as much as I love the yellow, orange, and purple dragons with gave the world, it BEGS more investigation. Where's the grey dragon? What happens when you crossbreed metallic dragons? Or gem dragons? Does this mean there are tin and zinc dragons out there somewhere? What about all the other yellow, orange, and purple dragons, how do they figure into this? What about the crossbreeding rules in the 2nd edition Draconomicon?

    Enter my steadily growing obsession with needing to remake the draconic bestiary to make it all more consistent and symmetrical. There's also the matter of the rock dragons to discuss, we haven't even gotten into that. But for now, the reason I'm introducing all this is to bring attention to the project covered here. Basically, I'm going to actually make these things and post them here as blog posts. To do that, we're going to have to cover one thing at a time, so that means for our first project here on my little series I'm going to call "Dragons & Dragons" we're going to go back to patient zero of my crossbreeding fixation and fill in the very first blank that immediately presents itself: the missing missing dragons, because if there are primary and secondary dragons, surely the black and white dragons are also capable of birthing crossbreeds, and so there must be tint and shade dragons out there as well.

I. Playing by Lloyd's Rules

    Richard Alan Lloyd, the author of the original article, makes his deduction process pretty clear. Since the green dragon is smaller than a blue one, the yellow dragon must be smaller still, therefore to make crossbreeds the way Lloyd did we need to find the midpoint between the raw stats of the dragons. I should also bring up now that I'm doing this for multiple editions. Because OD&D is just 1st edition but written poorly, at least as far as the dragon stats go (they're almost exactly the same), and because 4th edition is SO different and they specifically point out that dragon crossbreeds don't work like that in Draconomicon 1, I'll be making these dragons simultaneously for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th edition.

    There are three issues to sort out: 1. all of Lloyd's dragons are listed as very rare for background reasons, which matters... so so very little at all. You don't surprise your party with a random dragon, you pick and choose when a dragon is there because they're major plot elements, not something frivalous to fill out an encounter table, but for the purposes of this write up... sure, fine, they're all "very rare." The grand arch wizard Filmorion from the continent of Greebagork from the Whiteland campaign setting hasn't seen them or... whatever. 2. Dragons fit into nice power levels that are... unfortunately, kind of whole numbers, which means it's easy to make a yellow dragon on par with a black, but for orange and purple you end up with half one thing and not quite the other, so you need to sort of pick and choose things, which leads to 3. the attack damage listed for the orange and purple dragons is straight up whack and shows that Lloyd didn't really seem to understand the numbers listed were dice rolls because they're just weird ranges that are impossible to actually roll, I mean unless you have 5 d5.4's lying around somewhere. So we're not going to go that crazy, but, for HD at least, Lloyd rounds down, so we'll calculate the damage output the same way he did, but round down to the nearest thing that's rollable without damage bonuses. So for example, by Lloyd's figuring, the gray dragon's bite would do up to 17 damage, but we're making it 2d8 because we're not monsters.

    The real problem, though, is figuring out what their breath weapons are. In the original article, the reasoning is that crossing a yellow dragon with the two plasma-based breath weapon types splits the salt into sodium and chlorine weapons. So in the spirit of the original, we're not really dealing with chemistry here, but nor are we really dealing with simply combining the two, either. The black dragon's breath weapon is thankfully pretty easy to nail down, because it isn't going to be hydrochloric acid or else we'd get repeats of the chlorine gas breath weapon, therefore it's gotta be sulfuric acid. Because those molecules have three types of elements, they could be broken down in 6 ways, just hydrogen, oxygen, or sulfur, or hydrogen and sulfur, water, or some kind of sulfate. So far as I know, all these various chemicals, including compounds with sodium and/or chlorine, will at most create poisonous or acidic substances, so, as a weapon, we're kinda left with three forms of sulfur. So the maroon dragon gets a sulfurous flame that's cyan in color, the navy dragon gets a cloud of a yellow, poisonous, probably sulfate sort, and the, I guess I'm going to call it citron dragon because "olive dragon" is a little confusing, would exude a deadly blood red acid. All three of these should be poisonous, like the breath weapons of the sulfur dragon, which is a subject for a later time.

    The white dragon though, that's tricky, because based on the way Lloyd interpreted the plasma weapons, the faithful white dragon crossbreeds would likely treat it as "freezing" the other weapon, but that's a hard thing to quantify because two of those are plasmas and one is already a solid. This would also sort of imply the breath weapon of a grey dragon is chunks of brimstone, which is odd but then again there's weirder out there. Fire and frost should either create steam like a dragon turtle or maybe high winds? Maybe give the pink dragon steam and the periwinkle dragon the high winds? For the... either cream or ivory dragon though I'm not crazy about either name, you could maybe say like... shards of ice? The other idea is to take the white dragon's breath weapon as something to do with liquid nitrogen, then get some sort of compound out of that. All I could figure out is something called nitrogen trichloride, which is an irritant, can be used like tear gas, and explodes when exposed to heat, light, or pressure. These are really cool effects, and there's kind of a symmetry here with the orange dragon so we'll go with that. One last idea for the pink dragon is that maybe the fire and frost simply cancel each other out and that dragon has NO breath weapon... or maybe the nitrogen mixes with the hydrogen the red dragon uses as fuel and it has an ammonia breath weapon... though I think these two possibilities aren't really in line with Lloyd's original article.

II. Draconomicon

    In 1st edition alone there are 2 yellow, 2 orange, and 2 grey dragons, or rather, a "grey" and a "gray" dragon, and this isn't counting the fang dragon or that endless well of confusion that is what the hell "brown dragon" means in D&D. 2nd edition cranks things up by adding more yellows, purples, grays, and of course browns to the mix. While the original yellow, orange, and purple missing dragons do reappear in issue 248 of Dragon updated for 2nd edition, they're... different in ways that aren't really sensible. For example, the yellow dragon no longer has any wings, and the orange doesn't look anything like either parent. This is a middle step in the transition to no longer being crossbreeds. Essentially, in the original article, Lloyd points out that the Monster Manual says that Tiamat spawns ALL chromatic dragons, yet also says dragons can mate with others of their own kind to produce offspring, and therefore, a third way of creating new dragons that follows from the second seems plausible. The 2nd edition version called "The Return of the Missing Dragons" apparently responds to the idea that these dragons don't exist because the colors of Tiamat's 5 heads imply that those are the original breeds of chromatic dragons, made in her image. To counter this, Lloyd invents what is to date my absolute favorite of all "phantom dragons," that is, types of dragons alluded to in text that have never been stated out in any sort of official D&D source, the yellow, orange, and purple headed dragon known only as "Tiamat's Sister."

    The article in issue 248 adds this admittedly hilarious explanation onto the previous idea of simply having the chromatic primaries be RYB and the others are crossbreeds, and by their 3.5 conversion in the Dragon Compendium this story of Tiamat's Sister is stated as a matter of fact, completely erasing the whole reason these dragons were invented in the first place. This change is likely a response to the contents of the 2nd edition Draconomicon, which kind of destroyed any placement of Lloyd's RYB dragons in the canon of the existing campaign settings, or at least Forgotten Realms. It did this in two ways:

1. By introducing its own rules for crossbreed chromatic dragons, effectively confirming that the heads of Tiamat do reflect the original breeds, and that the chromatic dragons use RGB as primaries instead of RYB, and...
2. The introductory paragraph to the third monster called a yellow dragon in D&D claims that its existence was predicted "based on theories of primary colors," a direct call-out to "The Missing Dragons," while featuring the stats of a dragon that, frankly, couldn't possibly be any less like the yellow dragon featured in said article. Okay well maybe it could, but clearly what's happening here is a really nerdy way of telling someone their fan theory is wrong.

    Now, in addition to changing the game to make things now RGB based, the crossbreeds are no longer just the averages of the stats between the two parents, and can in fact take a whole range of possible forms, and so the section on creating these dragons is given as a table for the size and breath weapon type and specific rules for other things. To go over each quickly:

Color: Always a blend, no patterns.

Size: A range between within 10% of the size of either parent, there's a table for this.

AC: Same as one of the parents.

HD: Average of parents, rounded to nearest half, where half equals a +3 bonus.

THAC0: Average, but rounded up to the next whole number.

Damage: Claws and bite determined separately, equal to either parent.

Breath Weapon: One of the parents for damage, type of weapon can be either one of the parents or a combination. The combinations it uses as examples are totally divorced from the vaguely chemistry based weapons of the RYB dragons, instead literally mixing the two things together, so it's half of each damage type and how it looks is just kinda up to the DM. I definitely preferred the more clever approach Lloyd took but sure okay that's what the big bad fancy Forgotten Realms canon source book say so let's go with it.

    Where this gets really confusing, though, is the existence of the yellow dragon revealed just a few pages later with the primary color thing directly called out in its description. What are we supposed to do with this? The yellow dragon is evil and chromatic and even lives in the same environment as blue dragons, and they just gave us canon rules for crossbreeding two chromatic dragons, right? So okay, then... are there two green dragons, too? What about the brown dragon? So the "greater desert" brown dragon of Forgotten Realms has one parent that's a blue dragon, which implies it, and its whole species, then, are crossbreeds. If you wanna go based on pigments then we could say a blue and orange dragon could make a brown, but the rules also say that crossbreeds are infertile... so... okay? I'd be happy to just throw away the chromatic dragons outside the main 5 if it weren't for the fact that a brown dragon is specifically said to have a blue dragon as a parent, but that doesn't work by the rules we're given. So someone is wrong.

    But what's especially baffling is whether or not we're supposed to treat this system as RGB or still as pigments. The assumption is to believe that the crossbreeds of the red, green, and blue dragons should come out yellow, cyan, and fuschia, but the rules for crossbreeds throws a wrench into that by namedropping a purple dragon. Purple is just dark fuschia, or "magenta" if you're dumb, and getting a shade when mixed implies we're dealing with the color of these dragons as mixing paints. Certainly the yellow dragon given to us in the same book isn't anything like what the crossbreeding rules tell us a red/green hybrid should be. So if it's still pigments it's really more of a lateral move, and it would make the dragons a brand new teal and brown or russet and a slightly different purple dragon.

    So, at this point, we have two options for our RYB crossbreeds: either go with the rules from the Draconomicon, or go the old fashioned way and just do averages for everything. For my purposes, I'll acknowledge the rules of the Draconomicon when it comes to RGB crossbreeds, which is an entirely different article (seriously we're looking at 7-12 types of dragons here), as that's the assumption those rules were written under, specifically that the primaries are indeed red, green, and blue. Therefore, I view the RYB dragons as different conceptually and will treat them like the original article in Dragon #65 did.

III. Everything is Anything

    3rd edition never gave us any official rules to work with, and as I said by this time the original 3 missing dragons were now being treated as unrelated to Tiamat's children and were said to simply by a different subgroup of chromatic dragons, but there are rules lurking around in some OGL stuff. Specifically, The Slayer's Guide to Dragons opens it up wide by extending its rules not just to chromatic dragons, but to metallics as well (and, if they were part of the SRD, the gem dragons would likely be there too). This is essentially a reworking of the 2nd edition system with a series of tables and variable results. To go over them quickly:

Stats: The size, HD, AC, attack bonus, save bonuses, etc. are that of one parent or the other, not a mix. This keeps it simple from the perspective of a DM, just being able to use the stat block for one or the other, throw a new coat of paint on it, and make the breath weapon weird.

Breath Weapon: Again, like in 2e, it's either one parent, the other, or the two smooshed together, doing half damage of each damage type with the description left up to the DM. A special note is made here for metallic crossbreeds, where the status effect secondary breath weapons simply combine, so that an billon dragon under this system has a secondary breath weapon that both paralyzes and slows... which is a little redundant, sure, but you get what I'm saying.

Special Abilities: Either parent, a mixture, or ALL special abilities of both parents.

Spell Resistance/Caster Level: One or the other.

Alignment: One or the other or a mix, with neutral being overwritten and G/E or C/L clashes coming out as neutral.

Color: Things get a lot more interesting here in ways that will actually carry over into 4th edition. So color can be a mix, one parent or the other, or a pattern of the two. So a rose gold dragon might be copper with gold strips, and a pink dragon might be red. Furthermore, other than the color, the differences in appearance with the horns or the like can also go any which way, being just like one parent or the other, or a mix. So you could have a dragon that looks just like a blue but is bronze and has two breath weapons. This sort of grab bag of traits and mixtures is really cool for giving players who've memorized the Monster Manual something truly scary and unknown to deal with, and will keep them from taking anything for granted. It's a great idea that was taken to a more lame extreme in 4e where any dragon can look like any other dragon or mix of dragons, but their stats are always specifically one existing set, no mix n' matches. That's great and all, but it's not really what I'm trying to do here, so we're going to move on.

IV. I Love an Olive Dragon

    The last thing that needs to be addressed is the colors themselves. Tints and shades don't really have consistent names and usually something like "dark red" gets the point across just fine, it's mostly just hues that get distinct color names. There are exceptions, of course, cyan and teal are pretty clearly differentiated - you wouldn't call something teal cyan - but generally these aren't great for clear names. What we can say for sure is the maroon, navy, periwinkle, and olive dragons are pretty clear cut. You could go with "indigo" for the blue/black hybrid, but indigo is really a hue between blue and violet and since these are my dragons, I want as much as I can to make the names accurate, at least in my write up, and then anyone who wants to use them can call them whatever they like. Similarly we could call the periwinkle dragon the "azure" dragon but... if you know me, you know calling azure "blue" is one of my instant rage buttons so like yeah we're not doing that. I will go ahead and call the red/white a pink dragon mostly because "pink" is a kind of wishy washy term that can mean anything from fuschia to light red depending on who's using it and why, which I really don't like, but I feel like it means so little that the alternative of having a "salmon dragon" can't really top it. We could change the olive dragon into a citron dragon, but I don't... really want to? For what it's worth, my olive and navy dragons are going to take full advantage of their weird names, so if it sounds silly on paper, just know that in the next part, where I post the actual stats for these dragons, it'll make more sense.

    And that just leaves the yellow/white mix. I want to stay away from things like tan and beige because those are desaturated and really feel more like they should be a brown/white mix. That said, a tan dragon would lend itself to being something like the 2e yellow dragon, a kind of sand dragon who's skin actually blends in with the dunes it dwells in. The two names for light yellow that I'm aware of that are totally unambiguous when used as color terms are cream and ivory, though. "Cream" sounds a little too... well, unintimidating, and the ivory dragon really doesn't sound like a chromatic dragon at all and more like some sort of forest dwelling fang dragon of sorts. I'm going to go with ivory dragon because my back is kinda up against a wall, and I'll make it work, but I just want to spell it out right here that I'm not super happy with it and I wish there were more color names that weren't just things-that-are-that-color.

    Tune in next time for when I post the stats. What stats you ask? I'll be doing all 10 of the missing dragons - including the three Lloyd already made with minor tweaks - and the 6 shade and tint dragons, and of course the gray dragon. Also expect the true power of Tiamat's Sister to be revealed, and a special bonus dragon that I'm not going to reveal here. You'll have to read the post when I'm done with it!