When I first got into D&D I didn’t have friends who played. I bought the brand new 3rd edition core books and had a lot of lonely fun reading the game before I ever played it. To my late-90s teenage mind it was analog Diablo . The biggest disappointment was easily the relative lack of dragons. This was Dungeons & Dragons , for crying out loud! Where where the dragons? So I did what any lonely teen would do—I added a metric fuck ton of dragons into my own D&D world.
The tl;dr pitch is this:
One of the biggest questions you get asked as a game designer is how you started designing games. That’s how I started in the RPG hobby. First by trying to reverse engineer the West End Games Star Wars RPG and then by hacking all eleven of the classes in the Players Handbook to be more dragoned up. Paladins didn’t serve gods, they were the hardcore enforcers of a dragon’s servants. Monks studied in monasteries to learn the secrets of the dragons, channeling their ki to bring their bodies and minds closer to