More on Dragons

If there was one thing that the Rankin-Bass animation The Hobbit got right, it was the monsters (if there were two, they would be the monsters and the soundtrack. we must away ere break of day to seek…). Smaug is an excellent dragon. He incorporates elements of the bat, the lion, and the wolf, and his eye is both feline and reptilian. When he comes on the screen, you know that either shit’s going down, or he’s playing with his victim. His appearance is fearsome, demonic, and utterly reprehensible. His character complements it nicely, and it seems almost as though his face is an extension of who he is. You can make anything look cute with a slight tweak of the eye, but you know that if this thing did it, he would tear you limb from limb the second you got close. His age is indeterminate- ageless. He could be a young upstart dragon to the untrained eye, but if you know anything about his history you can feel the centuries in his gaze. In the picture he seems to be looking at something else, but that just makes it scarier- you could take advantage of his idle distraction, but what good could you possibly do? Obviously, his attention is everywhere, regardless of where his eye is. He knows exactly what you’re doing.

 

 

 

And these guys. They are cold-blooded all the way through. They carry a different form of danger from the mammalian shrewdness of Smaug. Who knows what they could be thinking? You have absolutely no references for cold-blooded intelligence. It simply isn’t something in human experience. Their hissing, grinning faces are masks of impenetrable plates, their eyes are heavy-lidded but certainly alert, and you can tell without any sort of reference that they are huge. Despite their bulk, they are without doubt no lumbering beasts, but can obviously rush towards you faster than you can think. Do they play with their food? Who knows? With these guys, you know that no shit will go down until the shit flinches. Then, they will destroy it and resume waiting. They can slither on legs. They are the essence of Chaotic Evil- whereas Smaug himself might even be said to be Neutral Evil. I must admit that I have never been a large fan of Erol Otus. Much of his stuff is quite good, but I don’t actively seek it out. This, however, is awesome. Suck it, cover of the 1981 Basic set edited by Tom Moldvay!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Both of these pictures now occupy a place in my heart, competing for the ‘best’ spot with each other and the Tudor Humphries illustration that I mentioned.

On the nature of Dragons

When you think ‘vampyre’, do you think of the old English terror in the night,
The shrouded blood-drinking ghost, or do you think of Edward Cullen and Angel?
Right now there are hundreds of people on the net mocking and defaming Twilight,
and trying to bring the vampire back to its roots. Fine.

But the Dragon has undergone a much more widespread, and less protested,
Gimpification- google image search ‘dragon’ and you will no longer find primal terror-
Instead, the dragon is now an almost noble looking creature, and bland, too- they are no longer monsters.
The so-called, ‘Honky Dragon’, as I so call it, no longer looks fearful even when portrayed
with proper respect in such bastions as Heavy Metal cover art. It’s just weak.

Forget the ridiculousness of color-coding dragons according to alignment,
I don’t feel they should be even possibly good.
The best Dragon I’ve seen recently is the one on page 21 of the childrens’
book ‘curse of the ring’, illustrated by Tudor Humphries. Unfortunately, I
was unable to find a copy online, so here are some pictures that seem to me to be helpful
in explaining what I mean.

mainly for the claws. look at those things!

several core principles, repeated many times over.

A Dragon is not noble. A Dragon is scaly, evil, a writhing Wyrm,
A wracked and ruinous form of life!

When I see a dragon like this:

It just twists my heart with the thought of what we’ve lost.

Our culture is so oversaturated with this kind of dragon
that it isn’t even cool anymore; when you see a guy with a silver dragon ring, which is closer to your first impression: “bitchin’!”, “how long since HE dated”?

How am I supposed to scare my players with this?
In earlier editions (or so I have heard; I don’t have enough personal experience to be OFFICIALLY a Grognard) dragons were treated to fear and awe- but perhaps it’s more of a cultural paradigm shift than it is the fault of the RPG industry.

Clearly, though, this is one of those times when Tolkien’s “childrens'” book The Hobbit seems closer to the ideal RPG mindset than any D&D book published later than 2e.