Explore Dungeons & Dragons‘ Dragon Lore with the New Dragon Delves Adventure Book

By Cameron Kunzelman | July 17, 2025 | 12:00pm

Tabletop Features dungeons & dragons

Explore Dungeons & Dragons‘ Dragon Lore with the New Dragon Delves Adventure Book

The dragon is a keystone creature in the Dungeons & Dragons stable. It is, after all, in the title, and many pages of the original Monster Manual were dedicated to elaborating what each dragon could do to an unsuspecting party of adventurers. The new adventure anthology from Wizards of the Coast, Dragon Delves, leans into this deep history of the game to highlight 10 dragons by creating adventures that center on them and their desires, thoughts, and actions in the world. Crucially, these adventures all stand alone on their own, and the book offers suggestions for a way of stringing them together into a campaign or simply slotting them into your existing plans as a play group.

Unlike in a lot of fantasy fiction, the dragons of D&D are not big generic lizards, and that makes their adventures unique. There are good dragons, the metallic ones, and evil dragons, the chromatic ones. This can easily be remembered with the rhyme: if a color do you see, the dragon evil it will be; if a metal’s shine you peer, goodly is that dragon dear. (This is an ancient rhyme and not one that I made up just now.) The reason this matters is that the adventures of Dragon Delves have a really great opportunity to show off what makes the dragons of D&D unique and special in an entire universe of different interpretations of dragons.

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First the good: there are some truly great adventures in here. They offer a very good mix of the more game-y parts of D&D, like carving your way through a dungeon of enemies and puzzles, and the role-playing elements, like talking to key NPCs and other townsfolk. They are presented in an extremely readable way, with the first page of each dedicated to a kind of “at a glance” snapshot of the adventure’s key players and what the gist of the experience is. Everything here is written to make preparation for a dungeon master easier and more efficient. The writing is clear and concise, sometimes to the point of being a little plain (more on that later). Overall, this is a document that is clearly meant to be used, hacked up, remixed, whatever; this is one of the best tools to come out of the D&D team in a minute.

I want to specifically call out a couple adventures that are notably written. I am a sucker for chromatic dragons (red, white, blue, black, and green) because they are all evil, selfish, and greedy. I like a dragon that is a little bit of a complete jackass to the point of undermining its own deal. I really enjoyed reading through “The Forbidden Vale,” which is about a complete asshole red dragon who is flying around a town called Arborean Springs and setting the wilderness on fire constantly; navigating the fires is just as important as dealing with the dragon, but also you do have to deal with the dragon. Oh, and there’s an ancient ziggurat involved! I love a ziggurat). I also thought that “Shivering Death” was inspired—players need to find a ritual that was tattooed on the skin of the dead giant Elakdras, who is entombed in the lair of a white dragon that breathes frost and dominates everything it encounters. These are both extremely strong hooks for my own (more dark fantasy) interest in tabletop games, and I enjoyed seeing this tone represented in an unflinching way in the book.

There’s a wide variety of tones present in the book, to the point where I would be shocked to learn if someone was equally interested in all of them. I am personally just not much invested in adventures where dragons are involved in hijinks or where the party needs to ally with dragons to accomplish a special goal, although these are certainly in this volume and make up the bulk of the metallic dragon adventures. There is some NPC writing that is a strong example for anyone who is thinking about writing their own adventures. The “in voice” descriptions from the final adventure’s mage Eldemere, for instance, really delighted me and gave some edge to the desperate rescue that makes up the bulk of it.

I do have some reservations about this book, though, and I think most of them point to a current struggle in the Dungeons & Dragons product around how the game is presenting itself to audiences. Each of the adventures has a section where they show the history of each type of dragon with some concept art, and I am elated to see Wizards of the Coast finally making a strong claim to the game’s history in the books themselves. At the same time, though, these sections are obviously missing the one-page writeup that tells you something deeper about the history of these creatures. The obvious reason that those are not here is that you are meant to get that by purchasing a Monster Manual product, and if that’s the case, then what’s the point of a series of images that do not equate to the “current” version of the dragons? The book wants to have its cake without baking it first, and it left me wanting more rather than actually appreciating what it gave me.

Another major issue in presentation is the tension between the development teams and the broader D&D product. Each of these adventures was crafted by specific writers and artists. They each have a very specific look and tone. Each of these adventures stands on its own in a way that very few of the previous anthology adventures have; they are each essentially a take on the specific dragon theme, and so they each have an angle and perspective that is affirmed through both the style of the writing and the kinds of images they show you. It is profoundly disappointing to me that the adventures themselves do not have a credit line for the teams that worked on them; instead, you just have to look at the massive list of “designers” and “interior illustrators” in the book’s credits and attempt to figure out who is who. I understand why you do this—it’s clear Wizards of the Coast wants people to buy D&D books and not Makenzie De Armas-written or Ed Kwong-illustrated adventures. From the corporate perspective, the brand is the thing you want people to key into, not personalities or individuals. However, it feels a little disingenuous to make such clear artistic decisions that lean on specific voices and styles and not put their names right beside the titles of the things they created.

Dragon Delves is a fun read, and I think all of the adventures have enough meat on their bones that they would play well. More than any of the other anthology adventure books, this one feels like it is the ideal present for a D&D-curious friend or family member, and I think that any table would be happy to cooperate with (or attempt to kill) a dragon from one of these adventures.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.