2025 Gift Guide For Gamers: ‘Dragon Bookends’ From WizKids
by Anton Kromoff
Welcome to the table,
It’s one of my favorite times of the year! Those brilliant dark days of winter when the world gets a little quieter, the nights get a little longer, and I can lurk about my library like some holiday lich remembering all the fun TTRPG things I’m thankful have brought me comfort and joy over the dark days of this past year.
This is also an opportunity for me to call out some of the coolest stuff I have found for you, my dear readers, so you can possibly add these offerings to your gift lists, allowing you to serve as the true bastions of goodwill and usurp that awful elven abomination and his deer-drawn sleigh.
My pals at WizKids are always cooking up the most delightful minis, models, and accessories to elevate the gaming space, and this holiday season is no exception!
With the introduction of new dragon design refreshes in the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Monster Manual, WizKids is putting out some truly remarkable offerings based on the refreshed art within the books. We have not really seen any meaningful updates to the core chromatic and metallic dragon designs since 2000, when Wizards of the Coast took over full production of Dungeons & Dragons with the introduction of D&D 3rd edition.
Some of the best views of these new dragons, the chromatic ones anyway, can be seen in the sculpts from WizKids. Most notably, their official Dragon Book Ends.
Red Dragon
First up is probably the most recognizable of the chromatic dragons, the hot-tempered and always covetous Red Dragon. This crimson-scaled creature, crowned with curling horns and fin-like webbing around its jaw, screams forth in fury above a lava flow that oozes out of a cramped cave.
It looks like it’s about to hork a fireball at an unsuspecting party, and the lashing pink tongue is a really nice touch to add some motion to the sculpt. Sitting, 7 inches tall, like the other dragon bookends they have shown us so far, the resin bookend is sold as a single unit rather than in pairs, allowing you to mix and match dragon heads as desired.
Black Dragon
The Black Dragon Bookend is one of my favorite sculpts, due in no small part to the fact that I love these horned horrors, and the bone-like faces of these swamp stalking forces of nature make for perfect guardians for your book hoard.
The base of this bookend has a delightful black slick water like pool under the dragon’s head, really speaking to the environment these “party enders” call home.
Blue Dragon
The Blue Dragon seems to have undergone the most radical redesign of the various dragons, having its features elongated and sharpened, and its iconic horn shifting from a thicker rhino-like growth to something that more closely resembles that of a chameleon.
Blue Dragons feature very heavily in my home campaigns, so the shift in anatomical design is still something I am coming to grips with, but WizKids, as they typically do, has done such a great job with this one that I’m warming to it much more quickly than I expected I would.
You can score any of these over at the WizKids site or grab yourself one out in the wild if your local gaming shop is cool enough to stock them.
Until next time, I hope they do a dragon bookened for each of the chromatics and metalics, then one for Tiamat, and then start to work on the secondary dragons. A shadow dragon or deep dragon bookened would be niche as heck, but would totally work holding up my underdark tomes.
