New DnD Green Dragon Revealed for 2024

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Let’s face it: you can’t have your Dungeons without your Dragons. In fact, these mythical monsters have become an integral part of DnD since the early 1970s, gracing not just the name of the game, but countless adventures, campaign settings and sourcebooks.

One of the most iconic of these legendary wyrms is the infamous green dragon, a creature known for its cunning, treachery and poisonous breath weapon. As part of the upcoming 2025 Monster Manual, Wizards of the Coast recently announced that they’ve significantly overhauled the green dragon for DnD 5e, unveiling new official artwork and hinting at some larger in-game changes.

So just what can DnD fans expect from this new draconic design? We go green and swoop in on all the details.

What are green dragons in DnD lore?

Green dragons (also known as forest dragons) are a type of chromatic dragon that’s appeared in every edition of DnD since the 1970s. Known for their cruel and self-serving nature, they are master manipulators who delight in corrupting lesser creatures.

Green dragons typically inhabited woodlands, jungles and bayous, creating lairs that are often hidden underground or behind waterfalls, and protected by magically grown plant life. Their lairs sometimes develop a harmful chlorine haze, and the dragon’s within can command roots and vines to immobilize intruders. Green dragons are also known (like many of their kind) for amassing vast treasure hordes, with a particular fondness for fine wood carvings, instruments, emeralds, and rare plants. Their favorite possessions, however, are they sentient beings they’ve enslaved.

Physically, green dragons are notable for the large, waving crest that runs the length of their bodies, as well as their exceptionally long forked tongues and scales that provide flexibility rather than full hardness. They also have elongated necks and unusually long legs, which allows them peer over the treelines of the wilds they inhabit. Their wings also tend to be dappled in color, allowing them to better hide among dense foliage.

In combat, DnD 5e green dragons tend to prefer ambush tactics and often leave survivors to spread fear and weaken the resolve of larger forces. They also often leverage their Frightful Presence feature, which allows them terrify enemies into submission. That being said, when challenged in battle, they are formidable opponents, capable of rending with tooth and claw and unleashing a cone of poisonous chlorine gas that can melt the flesh from the bones of their prey.

How are DnD green dragons changing in 2024?

While DnD’s green dragon has remained largely unchanged since it was first created, it’s going to be getting a major aesthetic upgrade in 2024. In a recent interview with Gizmodo, Head of Art for D&D Josh Herman explained some of the new design choices that underpin the creature’s reimagining.

“For the green dragon we made some large changes to its design, hoping to better show off the personality of the dragon,” Herman says. “We also wanted to give the green dragon a new movement style unique among the cast of the chromatic dragons. Their movement shows the cunning and duplicitous nature of the green dragon while also tying into a more serpentine look.”

Herman adds that he and the art team looked to the green dragon DnD 5e stat block, to further influence their design choices, particularly in terms of the creature’s high intelligence score, which makes it the most cunning of all the chromatic dragons and possessing snake-like traits (something that definitely comes through in the concept art that Wizards of the Coast has since revealed).

In the interview, Herman adds that much of the new green dragon design was developed by Simon Lee, a sculptor who works primarily in clay and has been involved in a number of major Hollywood projects. “He [Lee] created a sculpt of the green dragon that had this long neck with a compact body, and a long tail. We were drawn to it right away – it’s a visual that we’re familiar with for dragons but we hadn’t seen in the D&D dragons,” says Herman. “This also opened up, and cemented, the idea that each dragon could have a different body shape, or something special about it from a physical biological perspective.”

Notably, while Lee was responsible for the overall design, much of the new green dragon art that will appear in the new 2024 DnD materials, was created by Alexander Ostrowski, a noted concept artist and illustrator who is particularly adept at creating various monsters and mythical creature.

Herman also points that the green dragon was the first species to be updated as part of a larger dragon redesign for the revised version of DnD 5e. This makes sense given that we’ve also recently seen redesigns of both a new black dragon and a new gold dragon (notably, the gold dragon will also be available as downloadable component for the upcoming DnD virtual tabletop).

Final Thoughts

It’s great to see the Wizards of the Coast art team taking more risks in their work and trying to reimagine an iconic DnD monster in a new way. And while the visuals and overall design of green dragons has changed, it remains to be seen if the creature’s stats block will also be updated. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story in the days ahead as we get closer to launch of the new Monster Manaual, which is coming out on February 18th, 202.

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