Dragon Delves Reveals "History Of" Pages for Dragons

A new preview of Dragon Delves has revealed a look at one of the "History Of" pages, showcasing 50 years of dragon art from the game. In the recently posted Dragon Delves pre-order page, Wizards of the Coast revealed a look at the History of Red Dragons that will appear in the anthology. In addition to the adventures themselves, the book will contain 10 galleries such as this one that showcase some of the artwork featuring various kinds of dragons. The Red Dragons gallery contains images from the Draconomicon, the original Monster Manual, and the D&D Magic: The Gathering set.

You can check out the preview page below:

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

I'm meh on this.

It's 20 pages of filler using recycled art.

That's a whole extra adventure the could have included or new monsters.

Don't get me wrong I like art retrospective but put that in books like Art and Arcana.

I buy adventures to run, not to read. It's made to be a resource at the table.

My thoughts exactly. This is nice but it could've been an article on DnD beyond instead and we could've taken those 20 pages and used them for some adventures themed around gem dragons or something else useful to running the game.

What this tells me is they didn't have enough content to fill 20 pages.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, but they could have added an eleventh adventure that included all 10 dragons! The ultimate adventure!

Touché.

 

[Parmandur]

I guess I am the outlier! I seem to be the only one glad to see these extra pages and they are the primary reason I am buying the book!

Mostly in for the maps and adventures, but I think this is neat.

 

[Bae'zel]

It never quite occured to me that the red dragon design was initially clearly influenced by Vermithras Pejorative (from Disney's 1981 Dragonslayer). The horns and frill especially. Neat.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Should point out that they are all getting more than 2 pages.

The ToC shows the break down, but the Red Dragon is page 99 to 103 for example, so it gets four pages.

 

[Azzy]

It never quite occured to me that the red dragon design was initially clearly influenced by Vermithras Pejorative (from Disney's 1981 Dragonslayer). The horns and frill especially. Neat.

I had a wizard character in 3e that had a psuedodragon familiar whose name was Vermithrax.

 

[Reynard]

Should point out that they are all getting more than 2 pages.

The ToC shows the break down, but the Red Dragon is page 99 to 103 for example, so it gets four pages.

Oh, good, even more wasted space...

 

[R_J_K75]

I can't read the ToC all that well. Zooming in it gets rather pixelated. I found the descriptions of the dragons in the new 2024 MM pretty lacking, and these 20 pages could've been a good place to expand on that. Not to say that they aren't doing that somewhere in the book, but I doubt it. I guess that after playing D&D for over 40 years it's hard to get excited for books anymore when most of them seem to be a reiteration of something that has already been done over the various editions in one form or another. Although I will say I don't recall there ever being an anthology of dragon adventures in one book, and it's a cool concept, but it's just not something I think I'd use. I'd much rather see 12 short books for each of the dragon types, that has expanded info and then a scalable adventure.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Yeah. I have bought so many adventures now and can't use them all anyway.

But saying, those 20 pages could have been another adventure is just incorrect.

Maybe the book should have been 12 pages shorter originally? Then they thought: instead of cutting content, we add nice pictures of dragons.

Probably untrue, but still, designing good adventures takes time. And time is a resource too.

I'd rather have 10 good adventures and some art instead of 10 good adventures and a crappy one.

 

[Nightfly]

Posters here be like: "If they didn't staple an actual red dragon in the book, I'm not interested".