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Wardog
2014-01-07, 06:39 PM
Something I was wondering the other day:

What is the inspiration for the various dragons in D&D?

The Red Dragon seems to be very heavily inspired by Smaug.

The Black Dragon, I realized while watching a clip on Youtube, is probably based on Maleficent from Disney's Sleeping Beauty (colour, horns, and green fire that could easily be reimagined as acid).

And the Green Dragon seems to be a fairly typical mythic/folkloric dragon (poisonous breath probably being about as common as fire breath in old stories).

But what about the others?

Where did the lightning and ice-breathing dragons come from? I can't think of any examples of them outside modernt fantasy fiction.

Or the metalic dragons? (I think I once saw some art of a Gold Dragon that made it look like a Chinese dragon, but most of the current art is the more typical Western style).

Not to mention all the other sorts that pop up from time to time as though someone was rolling on a "random material or colour" table.

Calen
2014-01-07, 08:28 PM
Possibly once they saw that they had 3 of their magic elements and 3 distinct colors the designer said "Alright lets fill in the rest!"

But I think there might be legends of dragons that lived in ice or in the arctic (something norse maybe?) and the lightning could be from the legends of the thunderbirds?

Metallic dragons are just a sideways look at many dragon legends "coats like iron and claws like swords" etc.

jedipotter
2014-01-07, 09:33 PM
I don't think you can trace the idea for the 12 core color dragons to other media. They were all made in the late '70's, well before a lot of other media.

The generic dragon idea is of course Smaug: a large four legend monster that sits on a huge pile of gold. It is safe to say that anyone who wrote anything for D&D had read The Hobbit.

The different breath weapons are just for pure combat spice. It would have been boring to just have ''fire breathing dragons''....why not ''have them breathe other stuff too''.

Kitten Champion
2014-01-07, 10:26 PM
European heraldry used all sort of colours and metallic textures for dragons, if I recall correctly.

I think Fafnir was a black dragon who spat poison and greedily guarded a horde of treasure, although that might have just been the television adaptation of the story.