Fourth Wing: She’s Got a Dragon to Ride

I’ve been reading Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing series.  In all honestly, it’s not exactly my preferred flavor of fantasy.  That said, I know a lot of people love it, and as a DM, I want to be able to run the stories people want to play.  I’m going to be working on creating some content DMs and players we can use to inject a little, or a lot, of the world of Navarre into their games.

So, what are we going to need for playing in the world of Fourth Wing? The most obvious thing is dragons. Dragons in fourth wing come in a variety of colors: navy blue, black, red, orange green and brown. They also come with a variety of tails: morningstar, club, dagger, sword and scorpion. Then there are the young dragons, gold feathertails. Since all dragons in Fourth Wing are fire-breathing, I think the easiest way forward is to take the red dragon stat blocks and make some modifications. I’ll give them a few traits and some different ability scores to represent the traits of the different dragon colors and tail types.

Next, we’ll need a character class for Dragon Riders. I’m still thinking this through. In some ways, Eldrtich Knight springs to mind first for me. But, I’m not sure that really get to the heart of what a character like Violet Sorrengail is like. I’m tempted to make it a background. Then again, Violet brings a lot from her background that is important to her character. The concept of background in D&D would handle this really well.

A Setting for Fourth Wing

Last is the faces and places of Fourth Wing. One of the most important pieces of the setting will be the Basgiath War College. Most adventures are likely to start there. From the parapet, to hand-to-hand combat training, to the gauntlet and bonding, that first year is really critical to shaping the characters. I’m interested in adapting an idea from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC). In DCC, players start out with four level zero characters, most or all of which are expected to die. I’ll be back with more on a possible system for that in later articles as well.

Oh, and of course, we’ll need Venin and wyverns…

In the meantime, take a look at some great monsters that are already published for D&D.