10-461 Fearless Frost Dragon

This was a series, I think by Ral Partha, called Sculptors Row. It is my favorite White Dragon that I have, I doubt that the WOTC White Dragons are going to ever make me feel differently, though the white dragon head on the Aspect of Tiamat does look very similar to the artwork of the 2E compendium sheet for White Dragon.

I read on one of the various 3E message boards I sometimes visit because a google search for something has brought up these 3E punks complaining about how stupid and awful 2E is and I need something to distract me momentarily from my very bad habit of reading conservative political blogs to get my blood pressure rising. Not that high blood pressure over D&D is any better than high blood pressure over politics, but at least it is easier to dismiss as fantasy than RedState.com...anyway, I digress.

I was reading one of these message boards and they were talking about how the recent trend by WOTC to standardize dragons in order to more effetively enforce copyright and trademarks for specific dragon characteristics was having a negative effect on the variety of possible looks for dragons.

I'm a little torn. As you know, I am committed to finding figures that look like TSR artwork (and thankfully, WOTC figs often bear a passing resemblence), but I agree that it would suck if I felt like the above dragon wasn't really a White Dragon because it had two horns and not one bony fin. I also don't want to feel like I need to sell my black dragon from the Krynn box just because its horns are straight and not curving down in such a way as to pose real problems in eating like the WOTC official Black Dragon does. So, I think in my world there will be a little more variation than WOTC would like...and the main identifying characteristic of a dragon will be its color, rather than its trademarked physical features. If a dragon is white, no matter what else it looks like, it is probably a fair bet that it will hit you with a cone of cold rather than a gout of acid.

Maybe you want me to say, well, white dragons look like WOTC say they do, but what you have here is clearly a Frost Dragon, like the box says it is.

Fine. Call it a Frost Dragon, then, but the stats, background, and ecology of Frost Dragons and White Dragons are going to be exactly the same and I'm not doing a seperate sheet in the compendium for it! So there.

I'm going to scan this compendium sheet now and then go up and re-read Life is a Dream, since I'm teaching it to a dramatic lit/theatre history class in about 4 hours.