Ah, the Draconomicon for 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons (2003). There’s a lot I don’t like about 3E, but many of the sourcebook were 24-carat gold. This is one of them.

Draconomicon is everything you could ever want to know about dragons in D&D, how they see, how they move, how they think. This is the sort of exhaustive creative work that reminds me of film production bibles and FX work, where the folks behind the scenes develop a cohesive, fully realized body of knowledge about their subject in hopes that it can come through on the screen without having to explain it. How much do you learn about the xenomorph in Alien just by seeing it move? That’s a practical kind of storytelling in the hands of creature designers and FX guys, and much of the movie depends on them doing their job so well you don’t even notice.

There’s a similar impulse at work behind Draconomicon. In giving DMs everything they need to know about dragons, by standardizing dragons in a biological sense, the DM has to do a lot less legwork to convey their awesomeness.

Todd Lockwood’s detailed art does a ton of heavy lifting here. You can see the amount of thought that went into his designs and I appreciate the care taken to make dragons biologically…if not feasible, understandable. Taking inspiration for their body structure and movement from cats, I think, was a stroke a genius. Especially if you’ve caught a cat looking at you in that way that makes you think they were thinking about eating you.

The downside of this is that artists today have less room to play with when illustrating dragons in D&D, and I miss some of the stranger variations that came with that. I love how each artist’s own style dictated a lot of the personality of dragons in 1E and 2E. And this is probably one of the best examples of a sort of fossilization of fantasy (art and lit) that has occurred as an unwitting side-effect of D&D formalizing and codifying its intellectual property. But that’s a story for another day.