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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cleon" data-source="post: 7855068" data-attributes="member: 57383">I've long been of the opinion that it makes more sense to consider many groups of magical monsters as being regional or individual variants rather than species in their own right, on the basis that magical beings are highly mutable. So if a dragon grows up in a volcano it becomes a Red Dragon, but one that developed in a glacier became a White Dragon. Should they meet, mate, then lose their egg in a swamp the poor orphan will grown into a Black Dragon. The principle could apply to a bunch of creature types - what is a Bugbear but a large and sneaky goblin, after all. (Incidentally, that's the approach taken by 2E AD&D's Birthright Campaign for goblinoids - the Cerilian Goblin is considered one species whether it's a Goblin, Hobgoblin or Bugbear).As for diversity of dragons, I think it's a good principle to have diversity in monsters just for the sake of variety in encounters, but in practice I've often achieved that by using unusual characters or class/skill abilities - I tend to have only one or maybe two "unusual" monsters in a scenario, or even none. In the specific case of dragons, I can only remember using Black Dragons and a Red Dragon for the past decade or two and most of them are recurrent characters. Well, except for a couple of one-shot 1E adventures which included "dragon in a cave" type encounters which we ran for a nostalgia kick. Still, I like the idea of having lots and lots of different monsters in a scenario, providing there's some lip-service towards logic as to how and why they happen to be there. It's just more fun in a "you have no idea what horror lies beyond the next door" sense.</blockquote>

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