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There have been more releases to the Young Adventurers Guide Series! Today I present to you Dragons & Treasures. This book was written by Jim Zub, Stacy King and Andrew Wheeler. This Ten Speed Press book is copyright 2022 and focuses on all the Dragon types and their hoards. Dragons are a monster best known due to it being in the title of D&D. Growing up dragons were one of my favorite mythical creatures. This guide book has many images and facts dealing with dragons. This book is 156 pages cover to cover. Covered in this journal are Chromatic, Metallic, Gem and Dragonborn’s. Other fun facts include that of the skeletal features and diet of a dragon (for those children wanting to create a pet dragon), the life cycle from wyrm, to elder and beyond and the societal pieces behind dragon kind. There are also things for the inspiring Gm like Dragon lairs, hoard and magic items. The bards in the party will enjoy reading about “The Old Man with the Canaries” (Aka Bahamian), “Dragotha,” “Fyrnanth the Fate-Finder,” and “Io.”
As always I enjoy that there are danger levels to warn adventurers about the possible deaths and harm levels between the different dragons. The art work was stunning for each of the different dragons presented. The copper dragon on pg 25, the amethyst dragon on pg 33 and the icy scene on pg 86 are some of my favorite art pieces from this book. The tiny Tiamat on page 106 also was quite precious, and I wish I could give my classroom a book where the dragons popped out and flew around the reader. I also liked that they included a list of lesser dragons as Dragon Turtles and Pseudodragons usually show up in my campaigns.
This book series does really well with helping younger players understand things and as a GM I appreciate the “do this” and “don’t do this” lists that appear with some of the dragons to help understand how to better role play and interact with these creatures. Some are just silly (such as the don’t use water balloons on the Topaz dragon entry) where others provide useful information (such as offering gifts). There is also a favorite foods list for all of the metallic & chromatic dragons that is helpful for gms trying to figure out what types of bones might be found around a lair. This book was written informationally and even though there is a dragon fighting advice section there are also entries on how to use dragons as a mount, getting them as a familiar and more notes that doesn’t encourage violence against all dragons.
I encourage players to role play at my table, one of the things that caught my eye is the list of useful phrases in pidgin draconic and some sample vocabulary words. As a GM & player I would love to see more types of these lists for all of the fantasy languages. I also appreciate the draconic alphabet chart on pg 93 which allows for these runes to be added to maps/props/handouts for extra draconic flare.
The only thing that I wish the book expanded upon was giving us playable stats for the dragon items, weapons, power items, and wondrous items. Though there are very nice descriptions to help spark the imagination of the readers, the pieces aren’t usable by GM’s to add straight into the game. I would love to see an appendix at the end that gave the dragon stats and the item stats so younger players could have access to them.
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