The Ferrous Dragons

In issue #170 of Dragon magazine, a new subgroup of dragons was presented, the ferrous dragons. Unlike the metallic, chromatic, or gem dragons, they did not share an alignment axis. To be honest, there’s always been something I felt was lacking about them; they aren’t unified enough, and the name is rather a misnomer, as ferrous should apply only to iron and iron alloy metals. The dragons presented were the Chromium (Chrome) Dragon, the Cobalt Dragon, the Iron Dragon, the Nickel Dragon, and the Tungsten Dragon. Knowledge of most of these metals is fairly recent and can’t easily be accessed or identified without fairly modern scientific methods; of course, wizardry could easily identify different metals and could be used to replace modern smelting and chemical processes. It also seems like being metals should put them squarely in the Metallic Dragon category, or at least being *almost* Metallic (as Steel, Mercury, and Electrum Dragons are). All that said, I decided to use them as test candidates for creating my own versions of the Monstrous Compendium sheets. These sheets are formatted for double-sided printing with a gutter to allow for binding or placing in a three ring binder, although I haven’t really checked to see if there was enough space for any of that.

The Ferrous Dragons

3 Responses to The Ferrous Dragons

  1. Gianfranco Tubino Bryce says:

    Thanks for this! They are really neat, I would just redesign their alignment to change it to good where they were described as evil or neutral, their personality would be a good-aligned version of whatever they were described as being, for instance, my version of chromium dragons would still be greedy and in love with wealth, but they would be very much dwarven like and even gnomish, even sharing features with halflings, they would be miners and traders in order to accumulate wealth. Thanks for your answers.

    • AuldDragon says:

      I think one of the ideas with this group was that there were already a “Good” group of dragons, an “Evil” group of dragons, and a “Neutral” group of dragons, so there was no need for another group that neatly fits into that mold.

      • Gianfranco Elio Tubino Bryce says:

        I know, but I agree with you that those metals are not really ferrous and that since they are metals they should be understood as metallic dragons.

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