The Game Master's Book of Legendary Dragons: Epic new dragons, dragon-kin and monsters, plus dragon cults, classes, combat and magic for 5th Edition RPG adventures (The Game Master Series)

Every book in this series is worth every penny! Great writing, good art, and well thought out.

Ill be honest, the main pull for me is that each of these books is designed with fun in mind, and this one carries that on.The primary draw of the book is the 20-30, CR 18+ dragons. That are, in their own right end bosses for a party of high level DND characters.For those less inclined to run or DM a game of Dnd, there are player options, race/species options that allow one to be as close to a dragon as a player can get. Or the class option presented allows one to play as a dragon master riding your beast into battle, taking aspects of the cavalier and the drake warden and allowing you to fulfill your dragon rider fantasy.Finally there is the part that both DM's and players can enjoy with the new draconic components for spellcasting, each spell listed comes with a draconic material that can be used to change the rules of magic and allow for a bit of creativity.

Full Disclosure, I have never played Dungeons and Dragons before so for me, this was just a book of dragons to use for inspiration which is generally what I think the authors had in mind. The dragons featured in this book are meant for Dungeon Masters in D&D to use or at least inspire their games.For me, I use it for inspiration for more literary work. Naturally you shouldn't lift things even close to verbatim but they can inspire marvelous and useful ideas when creating your own stories. The artwork and lore within this book is excellent and there's many ways one can piecemeal these dragons together into something new for either a D&D raid or something more unique.

Seriously, why are gamers still paying twice the money for gaming book supplements that are half the quality of these. Beautiful art, wonderful descriptions, intuitive, easy to read stat blocks, inspiring background info, and crazy good random encounter, scenario generators. WOTC needs to start paying attention to how well these books are being done.

This book's artwork blows official 5e art out of the water. The lore on the dragons is excellent, and the dragons themselves look awesome to run!The sections on "Dragon Part Economy" and "Enhanced Spells" are worth the price tag, alone! And speaking of price, it's fantastic for the amount of stuff you get!The only issue I can see with this book is that the "lowest difficulty" boss is a CR 17 (I believe) dragon. Seeing as most 5e games don't make it that high level, I can't see the majority of game groups being able to really use these dragons to their full effect. But if you happen to be in a high-level game group, you really should consider this book!

This first 120 pages of this book contains 26 legendary dragons, all of very high CRs (21-30). Six are new in this book, the other 20 are from Jet Pack 7's book "Legendary Dragons." Each dragon gets a full-page picture, about 2+ pages of background info, and a full stat block for them. Most of them could be good campaign-long villains, usually pulling the strings of other creatures behind the scenes.In the last half of the books, there are stats for a new player race (the "Drakken"), but IMO it's not well balanced RAW (some of the color types only get +1/+1 to their stats and other colors get either 3 +1s or +2/+1. No explanation or counterbalance for this difference is given.) It will be very easy to allow players to add an additional +1 if one is missing, but this seems like a very obvious thing that should have been caught and balanced when the book was being written!There is an additional player class (the "Dragon Rider"), a martial class similar to the Cavalier Fighter in that most of his abilities are related to riding and controlling his (dragon) mount. This means they really work best if the campaign mostly takes place in outdoor environments where they have room to fly and maneuver (however, the dragon does gain the ability to shape change into a medium humanoid form that loses nearly all of its draconic powers, with the details of that single form chosen at 5th level.) But that would mean both the dragon and its rider would both be out of their element, not able to access many of their best abilities.The book also contains a few new drakes, 3 specialist kobolds (Brute, Schemer, and Scoundrel), several other draconic creatures, dragon cults, a few magic items, airship details and combat for dragon hunting, and a dragon parts economy (scales, eyes, etc) that includes item weights, prices, and a list of abilities/improvements that can be applied if specific dragon parts are used as spellcasting components. The book ends with 3 short mini adventures including maps and NPC stats.Overall, the book has a lot of great art and some good ideas, but the usefulness in your game is probably most related to whether you want details on the 26 Legendary dragons. They are not simply typical Ancient chromatic or metallic dragons, they are all specific creatures with unique breath weapons, magical abilities, and motivations. There is an undead Dragon Mummy, a 2-headed Dragon, and Jormungand the World Serpent, to give you an idea of what you can expect.

Love all these books

There are a few smaller CR mobs in here, but the focus of this book is CR18+ content. These are dragons with deep lore, purposeful hatred, and absolutely monstrous stats and size. It is worth every penny. If you're inventive, it'd be easy to take the lore and apply it to monster manual mobs, but boy are you going to want to use their stat blocks.They also include an economy for dragon parts, AND A WAY TO MODIFY ALL COMPONENT BASED SPELLS WITH THE PARTS! It is GREAT! A+++ book.