Hello. My name is Jared. Great site here, btw. I am a little confused by the sizing of some of the dragons from the Elemental Evil and Rage of Demons sets. I was wondering if anyone here might be able to enlighten me. A few of the dragons (black, green, and blue from EE, for example) are medium-sized. The only medium dragons from the 5e Monster Manual are wyrmlings, which these don't appear to be. I don't have the adventure modules that match the sets. Does anyone know, are these dragons meant to be wyrmlings or are they just small dragons? Not that it really matters. I'll adjust them to my needs. I was just always curious why they were so small.
Icons of the Realms Small Dragons
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT! Please read.
Tue, 12/31/2019 - 15:53
#1
Icons of the Realms Small Dragons
There have been a fair number of minis over the years that don't seem to match their base size well, and those dragons are good examples. If you try to picture them sitting on their bases with their wings folded, they might fit the Medium size category, but for whatever reason they're a little on the large side.
For categorization purposes, I've gone with the 1" base size as an indication of the Medium size category.
I have two theories as to why earlier editions of Icons of the Realm had bases that didn't fit the mini. I don't have anything to conclude whether or not those theories are correct, but if they are, it means we won't likely be seeing any more problems like this in the future.
The first is that Wizkids began finalizing the production of the first couple sets before the rules were finished. They released Tyranny of Dragons in July 2014, and I believe the Monster Manual didn't release until October 2014. There was likely some things that changed that Wizkids couldn't fix, like the size of giants and whatnot.
The other one is Attack Wing. From Tyranny of Dragons through Rage of Demons, Wizkids had their miniature game Attack Wing, which released expansions in conjunction with the Icons of the Realm sets. Wizkids used the same sculpts for their Attack Wing line, and included nearly every flying miniature at the time, most specifically the dragons. The bases for the game were fairly large, and these dragons had to reasonably fit on these bases. What's more, the "character cards" that gave these dragons their abilities in the game identified the same model as both and adult dragon, and as a young dragon. Therefore, Wizkids needed to make the model big enough to be both large or huge, depending on which character card you used. For Elemental Evil dragons, I believe it was the same thing, but young or wyrmling, although I'm not 100% on that.
I'm hoping that there'll be a new release of dragons in the future to "fix" this, since the Attack Wing game is now defunct, but who knows?
There used to be eight age groups of dragons which started at the small size for Young Wyrmlings and went up to Gargantuan for Old Ancient. 5e simplified this into four age groups and the smallest of which is Medium for Wyrmlings. Same thing happened with giants where they used to be half large and half huge, but at all now huge in 5e. You have to remember that development of an individual mini starts a year before you actually can buy it. Therefore the early sets were based on 4e.