Draconians and Dragon-kin

I don't run a Dragonlance campaign, but I've got a lot of the miniatures, and WOTC is doing minis of each of the different types of Draconians so if I have complete sets of WOTC minis, then I'd have Kapaks and Baaz and the other Draconians anyway.

What I'm doing for the Draconians in my world is lumping them all together and using the stat sheet for "Dragon-kin" from the Dragon Mountain Box Set, with a few changes. All Dragon-kin are universally evil, they do collect treasure but never monetary--only armor, weapons, and in particular magic items. Only Dragon-kin born without wings (female?) are capable of actually using magic items and spells. Unlike Dragonlance Draconians, mine can breed, but very slowly, so that eggs are the greatest treasure. Here is the main deviation from the original Dragon-kin compendium sheet in my world:

"No one knows exactly how these creatures came into existence, though it is theorized that some form of magic or polymorph spell was at play, and so their very being is somehow tied to magic—thereby explaining their intense desire to collect magical items with an almost sexual fetish.

When a Draconian reaches 0 hit points, the skin immediately begins to dry and shrivel, cracking apart and falling from the bones of the creature for 1d4 rounds. At the end of this time, the bones explode in a violent eruption sending shards of bone fragments in a 20 foot radius in all directions, causing 1d6 points of damage to everyone within the area. Any item being carried by the creature during such a death event, or carried by anyone within the area of effect must roll against item saving throws for disintegration, their magical energies consumed in the death flash of the Draconian."

As you can guess, I'm working my way through the D secton of my Monstrous Compendium in Publisher 2000. I may be in D for the rest of my life with all the varieties of Dragon, Dragon-kin, Draconians, Spellscales, Dragonborn, Dragon Spawn...and don't get me started on the number of Deities there are from all the various pantheons.

Another big issue WOTC created for me, but that I'm actually kind of happy about, is their change from TSR's kobolds to their new and more draconic kobolds. This is the Ral Partha kobold created for the Dragon Mountain adventure. I consider it the high point of original kobold evolution. I also still have a bunch of the Grenadier kobolds with the red vests and axes. Original edition kobolds were more like a cross between dogs and lizards, and they made yipping, barking noises. The 3E version are clearly dragon offshoots and so different from the earlier kind that I have made them two distinct races.


Dragon-kin kobolds follow pretty closely everything set out in the 3E books, though with a few changes here and there.

I kind of did the same thing with Ghouls, Ghasts, and Ghoul Lords. I used to use the Cthulu ghouls, but when WOTC made their ghouls so human-like, I set out two types of ghouls, those which are monsters that breed true, and those that are transformed humans. I won't go into it too much here, perhaps I'll do a ghoul comparison entry down the road. Right now I should get back to text scanning the sheets in my D section.