Expanding monster lists

[KittenMagician]

i found it wierd/dumb that as every new "monster book" such as mordenkainan's or volo's would expand gloriously on giants, demons, devils, undead, ilithid, kobolds, gnolls, orcs, and many more groups, but not once anywhere do they effectively give us more dragon options. it's kinda disappointing that the title creature of dungeons and dragons gets so little love from the expanding lore and options of the game.

As such i am working on my own expansion of dragons. im stumped as to what to do for lair actions for these dragons. so far i only have Mithral dragons done but im working on more. Any help or pointers or suggestions are most welcome. please ignore the partial stat block at the beginning as that is a WIP.

https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/rkY1eoOkE

[sandmote]

I think they're not sure how to combine the whole "this is the simplistic edition" with the volume of material they have to write up for a true dragon's multiple age groups. Most of the CR range is covered by various MM true dragons, so the crunch would mostly be a new breath weapon, new lair actions and some changes to the resistances on an otherwise near-identical stat block. Which is a lot easier to justify for well known legacy content or the base of a group that can have specialized stat blocks published to later.

Also note that dragons are usually working on their own or as the ringleaders of non-dragons. Compare those featured in Volos where most of the monsters getting detailed published writeups are the ones that can form an entire army for PCs to fight instead. Beholders and hags are the only ones likely to fall in the same "boss without others of their type" bucket as a dragon, and their information includes some more information for negotiating with one, which makes me think they made the cut so players can get stuff from semi-hostile NPCs. Similar writeups for dragons are likely to be harder (because dragons are more varied in how this would go) and less useful (because the dragons with stuff to negotiate for are at much higher levels when such characters have likely already been established).

Although I've had a similar concern involving dragons. I've made some here, if the shameless self plug isn't too egregious. Relevant to the link, I think breaking off some of the weirder true dragons into other draconic creatures (lindworms/wyverns/amphipteres) would help make a larger number of dragons still feel distinct.