AuldDragon's AD&D Blog

I’m taking a short break from gods to focus on something else for a bit: Dinosaurs! I’m working to revise the AD&D statistics for dinosaurs with modern facts and theories, as well as adding and interesting species. Stay tuned!

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