[Penumbra] New "Bestiary" Preview Dragon

[Word]

Good day, readers!

You asked for it, so now you've got it; a dragon from the pages of The Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary is now available on the Atlas Games website . Click on over now and download Rick Neal's Northern Sea Dragon and it's fearsome illustration by Brian Figur. This is the pre-release version, remember, so a few tweaks may still be made between now and the book's release.

Let us know what you think of this preview and keep your eyes peeled for next week's free monster, too.

Thanks much!

word,
Will Hindmarch
Atlas Games

 

[spacecrime.com]

DROOOOOOOOOOOL!

(Oh yeah, and I liked the dragon too. )

cheers,

 

[Nightfall]

Not a bad dragon. Like to see it and Kadum's Levianthan duke it out (From Creature Collection 2)

 

[Eridanis]

Cool monster - but why does the illustration have wings and no extra flippers, when it doesn't have a fly speed and the description specifically mentions the flippers (and no mention of wings)?

Not a big deal, since WotC sometimes can't its illos right, either, but if you have a chance to catch that error now...

 

[Word]

Wings but no wings

Ah, yes, the wing issue. I could speculate: the volume of illustrations in the book meant that we had our artists on something of a brutal schedule, so we had to be more flexible with what we had coming back from them; in this case an illustration that is atmospherically perfect (frigid, frightening, isolated and desperate) rather than anatomically so.

I could also ask our Art Director, Scott, as I'm sure there must be a story behind that illustration.

Lastly, I could rationalize: those aren't wings, really, but enormous fins with a wing-like appearance stemming from a relatively short evolutionary period between flighted dragon and flightless dragon. What do you think?

word,
Will

 

[Eridanis]

How 'bout the vestigal wings are hidden until the dragon fills them up with seawater, which it then expels as its breath weapon? That should work.

Also, am I right in that the symbols under the stat blocks have some meaning in catagorizing the monster? Like the dragon's head means it's a dragon, the mask means it has ways to conceal itself, the flaming hand means...

 

[JohnNephew]

Here's a key to the symbols:

http://www.atlas-games.com/besticon.html

Some of the samples have just had all the symbols. (As we're doing the final passes through the book, we're removing the inapplicable ones. That's one of my jobs as I'm proofreading.)