Dragon Delves is an upcoming adventure anthology for Dungeons & Dragons from Wizards of the Coast. Even if you have never played a game of D&D, you probably know that dragons are a big deal, and Dragon Delves features 10 short adventures, each one connected to one of the metallic or chromatic dragons of D&D lore and featuring a different creative team.
If you’re not steeped in D&D, you might not know the difference between those two dragons. Chromatic dragons are associated with colors: red dragons that breathe fire, blue dragons that breathe lightning, and black dragons that spit acid. Metallic dragons are associated with, well, metals: brass dragons like to hang out and learn from other species, and silver dragons participate in political coalitions. Oh, and also the chromatic dragons are almost universally evil, and if they’re not evil then they’re at least jerks. Dragon lore can get complicated in the worlds of D&D.
To learn more about Dragon Delves, I sat down with writer Justice Arman and artist Andrew Kolb to hear about their adventure “Baker’s Doesn’t,” which features a gold dragon. In D&D, gold dragons are beacons of hope. The recent Monster Manual opens its entry on them by saying that “gold dragons work to make the world a better place,” telling us that they “strive to protect that which is good and bend fate toward a brighter future.” What I have seen of “Baker’s Doesn’t” so far sells the brightness—it is a candy-colored land, with Kolb’s art pushing the saturation on what a D&D adventure can look like. “I love the food component of it, the storybook spirit of the whole thing, it felt right at home with what I’m inspired by and what I create,” Kolb told me.
When prepping for this interview, I was sent the images that you’re seeing in this article. I went in prepared with just one question, really: what the hell is up with the baby cyclops? “The character is quite centrally located in the action of the adventure,” Arman explained. “Its name is Bubba Wugga. It’s like a sapient doll, basically, that the characters have to get through in order to get to another phase of the adventure. Much like myself, Bubba Wugga has a bit of a sweet tooth, which should come in handy in this adventure.”
What comes in handy or not in an adventure is hard to predict, and Dungeons & Dragons has offered many different approaches to adventure design over the past decade in its anthology books. Tales from the Infinite Staircase went wide on solutions, Ghosts of Saltmarsh generally went narrow, and Candlekeep Mysteries offered all possible flavors. The 10 adventures in Dragon Delves take a variety of approaches, Arman told me: “There’s darker ones, there’s more lighter fare. There’s different genres of fantasy, and of course different fantasies associated with each of the dragons.”
This is maybe predictable—a smorgasbord needs a variety of flavors—but I was interested to hear how this turned into a practical art problem for Kolb. After all, if players have many different solutions to a problem, then the characters they meet will have different approaches toward them based on what the players have done. This means that the nonplayer character illustrations need to avoid casting those NPCs in a particular light. “I basically think about context. A hero casting a shadow is going to naturally look villainous, or a villain in a bright, open light can look heroic. Especially with this adventure, going back to the cyclopean doll, I think there’s a fun contrast in this horrifying thing rendered genially. I try to think of what is the natural state that you would see this image in, and then I follow that.”
Broadly, my conversation with Arman and Kolb made me feel that the design of “Baker’s Doesn’t” and the other adventures in Dragon Delves follows the recent D&D rules revision by pushing the game’s design in ways that the game has not necessarily gone before. Arman told me that “some of them have a very interesting format in which we allow people to play with just one adventurer or share the role of DM,” a notable shift in design assumptions with the game, and he specifically spoke to Kolb’s art as a way to bring people into the game: “I can tell you that having art like Andrew’s on the page inspires people to pick up and run these adventures. It makes it come to life for them. It’s easier to entice people to pick it up. When I was writing this adventure, I was thinking about running this adventure for my niece and nephews.”
I’ve been writing about Dungeons & Dragons for a decade. This is the first time anyone has talked to me explicitly about the product being aimed toward children, and the art is a keystone part of that. Moreover, Dragon Delves has what Arman termed “experimental presentations” in its formatting that seem to aim to make the adventures more immediately legible and runnable for players. “At the front of every one of these adventures is a new format for how we’ve abridged it,” he told me, “so that you can really read that first page and then start the adventure.” Compared to some of the prep-heavy books that Dungeons & Dragons has released in the past, that might be a sight for sore eyes for people who want to start playing soon.
In the end, it’s very clear that “Baker’s Doesn’t” and the other adventures in Dragon Delves have a goal of onboarding new players, entertaining old ones, and mixing up how people interact with the offerings that come out of the D&D brand. As Arman put it toward the end of our interview: “You might even hand this book to an aspiring D&D player and let them look through, and my hope is that they will see ‘Bakers Doesn’t’ and see Andrew’s art and say, wow, I really want to play that.”
