Feb. 7, 2025

The Periodic Table of Dragons

...Okay, maybe not literally. But maybe yes, literally!

For my inaugural blog post, I'm gonna jump on the Blog Bandwagon, and the topic is Elements! Idle Cartulary wrote about how most elementals are boring and rely on the same small set of elements. While I can understand that opinion, I like to use what I already know where I can, and since I got my start with the most popular edition of the most popular fantasy RPG out there... Well, my worlds are probably going to feature elemental planes of fire, and earth, and whatnot, and the creatures that form when that primordial chaos spill over are likely to look like the elementals we're more used to.

...But what if we used elements we know now, and made another monster weirder in the process?

Enter the Elemental Dragons

Look, dragons rock. We all know this. Seeing the different takes that media has on dragons tend to capture the imagination. And what captured mine was how many different dragons there were even in one game. In the context of Dungeons and Dragons, 5th edition there is generally a split between chromatic dragons, which usually are villainous and therefore the targets of murderhobory, and the metallic dragons, which tend to be at worst ambivalent to the players, if not outright helpful. Now I'm sure there's a decades old reason for this, and I know that since the game took off several more dragons have been made mainstream, either by WotC or third party developers, all to scratch the itch of variety. Gemstone dragons, undead dragons, dragons made entirely out of these same boring four elements that we know, and I'm sure more besides. But we have modern science on our side as game designers, so let's do some silly stuff.

Living Alchemy

These dragons are inherently magical, because they are essentially living alchemical forces that turn a pure element into life. It happens occasionally out in the world; high concentrations of gold or copper or iron would form veins, then bones, then tissue, and over the ages, a complete creatures emerges. There's usually some magical chaos somewhere in there to start things off but who's to say a wizard somewhere couldn't do the same? Once they're brought to life, the dragon has needs like any other living thing, and so it hunts, and feeds, and grows, and alchemically transforms the things it eats into more of itself, the living embodiment of its material. If it can acquire more of its base material freely, since it's used the world over as currency, jewelry, weapons, or other such treatures, of course it would hoard it, to strengthen itself, create offspring, or prevent a rival from spawning. And if some royal treasury somewhere just keeps the stuff locked away without supervision, who's to stop the worst from happening?

This is easily conceptualized to the metallic dragons we're most familiar with, since metals are easy to wrap your head around and easily fill the slot of a generic "earth" elemental. But I said periodic elements, and I meant it. Metals are common, but they're not everything. So hey, want an air dragon? That's 70-odd percent nitrogen you got there. Make it 100% and you have a dragon that is so dangerous to character health that its teeth, claws, tail, and breath weapon can steal away the air they need. Play around with states of matter. A mercury dragon, holding itself together while otherwise liquid at room temperature? An iron dragon that's kept itself above its melting point? Maybe certain dragons made oaths to bond with others of their kind, so you can get alloys, molecules, whatever you like. Bonds get complex enough and you can pave the way back to "normal" color-based dragons, if you like.

Material is not Morality

A last clarification: setting up a metanarrative that certain materials are good or evil is unhelpful. I expect everyone has tried once to subvert that with the chromatic vs metallic dichotomy, so let's toss it. Most any dragon could be, ahem, materially helpful in some manner to your party, and if they're living alchemical engines, they probably know that. Bargain, barter, trade and cajule where you can for the favor of dragons. They live long, and a small loan of their body to your cause, even a few gallons of pure silver blood, can be reclaimed.