The shadow dragon is a traditional monster in both fantasy fiction and role-playing games.

The shadow dragon is one of the smallest and nastiest breeds of dragons. Their very bodies are translucent from birth and enjoy lurking in shadowy places and killing as many creatures as possible. The see-through body of a shadow dragon makes it near invisible when lurking in darker areas. These dragons originated on the demi-plane of shadow where they are extremely common, but now they exist in the real world as well.

Shadow dragons are hatched from eggs and they come out colorless and translucent. Light passes right through them and thus they tend to look the color of whatever happens to be behind them at the moment. They have the ability to breathe out a terrible cloud of darkness that blinds their enemies and saps their very life energy. This ability becomes more and more powerful as the dragon ages. A hatchling can barely blind a good sized frog, while ancient shadow dragons can blind other dragons and leave entire human armies dead from a single breath. As they age these dragons gain the ability to exert more and more control over darkness. Most shadow dragons are also decent spellcasters as well.

Shadow dragons almost always make their homes in dark and shadowy places, such as ruins and dense ancient forests. They greatly prefer shadow to darkness and will go out of their way to create shadowy areas in any way that they can. Shadow dragons will never venture outside during the middle of the day, instead they prefer to do their hunting at night and during the evening, blending into the shadows as they stalk their prey.

Shadow dragons do not form mated pairs. The male of the species leaves the female as soon as they have mated, and the females abandon the hatchlings as soon as they exit the eggs. Because of this fact shadow dragons tend to be very solitary creatures and rarely even form alliances with other evil creatures.

Most dragons can eat anything and shadow dragons are no exception to that rule. They prefer to eat rotting meat, and will usually allow their kills to become rancid before eating them. If rotting flesh is not available then rotten vegetation is a second choice.


My monster nodes are usually based upon material in the various AD&D rulebooks. But they are my own work, as I often expand the information. In some cases I will blatantly disagree with the source material. None of these nodes are cut and paste. You are free to use my descriptions in any material of your own (even commercial material), as long as I am credited as the source.

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