“Of all the monsters in the world, dragons are the most feared”. That’s the opening sentence for this large multi-entry. One could also say that of all the D&D monsters in the real world, dragons are the most hyped.

They’re in the game’s title, of course, and have been a part of its bestiary since the very beginning. And while dragons have indeed always been dangerous, their stat blocks underwent a period of massive inflation starting with AD&D 2nd Edition, when Ed Greenwood’s extra-powerful Forgotten Realms dragons became the standard.

In my experience, all of this seems to have had the opposite effect to what previous designers intended. Dragons became so awesome in the minds of Game Masters everywhere that most never really felt their groups were up to the challenge. Though all campaigns had plenty of dungeons, many ended before a single dragon appeared. I know mine did.

I have a whole lot more to write about that mindset, but this is not the article for it. It suffices to say that the designers of Fourth Edition seemed to be quite aware of this problem, and so took some steps to address it.

This article will talk about the lore and mechanics for 4e Dragons in generic terms, and subsequent ones will look at each of the dragon varieties statted out in the first Monster Manual and Monster Vault.

The Lore

Like demons and devils, dragons also get a mythology sidebar in the Monster Manual about their creation myth:

Way back at the dawn of time, there used to be a god named Io. Io was a badass, and his arrogance was proportional to his badassitude. When the gods set about creating mortal peoples in their image, Io created the dragons. He meant them to be the pinnacle of mortal form (or at least that’s what dragons say). The power of the Elemental Chaos ran through their veins and surged from their breath, and yet they possessed keen minds and refined spirits that tied them to the Astral and the gods.

When the gods went to war agains the primordials, Io joined the effort but scoffed at the idea of teaming up with his fellow deities. He challenged the primordial Erek-Hus, called the King of Terror, to a duel. And the King of Terror split Io clean in half with a titanic adamantine axe.

As soon as the two halves of the split god hit the floor, they each became a new deity: the left half became Bahamut, and the right half Tiamat. The two new gods teamed up and killed Erek-Hus. When the dust settled, they took a good look at each other… and started fighting right then and there. For you see, each of them had inherited half of Io’s personality. Bahamut inherited his sense of justice and desire to protect creation; Tiamat his arrogance, selfishness and covetous nature.

The two fought so bitterly they ignored the pressing threat of the primordials until Tiamat ran away from the duel. And even after that, they still weren’t great team players. I’m guessing Bahamut is a little better about that these days.

Dragons come in a wide variety of types. Aside from the classic Chromatic and Metallic varieties, the MM also mentions Catastrophic, Planar and Scourge dragons (AKA Linnorms). We only get entries for the Chromatics in the first Monster Manual and in the Vault. The other types are covered in other books or in Dragon Magazine articles.

It makes sense for Chromatics to be first. Strongly associated with Tiamat, they’re common as dragons go and usually have the sort of foul disposition that makes them highly likely to get into fights with PCs. There are five types of chromatic dragon: white, black, green, blue and red, in order of power. Chromatic dragons have few allies but lots of servants, from kobold to dragonborn to fanatic cultists or other creatures that happen to share an habitat with them.

While the stereotypical chromatic dragon is still evil, it’s important to note that this is no longer universally true. It’s perfectly possible for an unaligned or good chromatic dragon to exist, and for dragons of any aligment to worship a non-draconic god (or none at all).

The Numbers

Gone is the notion that dragons are “extra special” monsters whom only the most elite of high-level adventurers can hope to fight. 4e dragons are still quite powerful, being the edition’s quintessential solo monsters, but now they span the entire level range. If you want your party of early-Heroic PCs to fight a dragon, they dang well should be able to fight a dragon. In fact, the PHB text describing what PCs at the three tiers of play look like also has a description of what the dragons they face look like at that tier.

Aside from color, dragons are also divided by age, with a smaller list of age categories than in previous editions: Young -> Adult -> Elder -> Ancient. The books contain a stat block for every combination of color and age category, which all in all have you covered from early Heroic to mid-Epic levels.

The Monster Vault is even more spare here, containing stat blocks for Young and Elder dragons of each color (with one exception). This makes sense if you consider an Adult to be an up-leveled Young dragon, and an Ancient to be an up-leveled Elder, though you’ll have to do the leveling yourself.

As it happens with most solo monsters, if you want to use them to build a good “boss battle” you’ll want to use a dragon that’s about 2 or 3 levels higher than the party, or give a weaker dragon some lieutenants that bring the encounter up to that level. Being MM1 monsters, our chromatic dragons lack much in the way of multiple actions and are somewhat vulnerable to conditions that further limit them, like dazing or domination. To counter these factors, the Monster Vault versions of these dragons would gain Instinctive Actions, which happened automatically at an initiative count 10 higher than what you rolled for the dragon. They also gain an Action Recovery that allows them to automatically recover from dazes, stuns, and domination at the end of their turns.