Review of Premium Spell Compendium v3.5 by Wizards of the Coast

I recall always being frustrated by one aspect of Dungeons & Dragons, regardless of whether I was running 1st Edition, AD&D, or 3.5: There are just too many gosh darned spells! No matter which edition you name, there has always been a serious case of “spell creep”, with more and more new arcane, divine, and druidical magic finding their way into Dragon Magazine articles, modules, supplemental class books, and even a few Third Party Products.

For the first two editions I played – AD&D and 2nd Edition – sorting through new spells outside the Player’s Handbooks was such a pain: everyone coming to a game session, lugging along extra books, magazines, and photocopied pages, so that my magic-using players looked more like mad accountants at the table rather than all powerful sorcerers. Even for my own part, there always seemed to be a few new “cool” spells that were perfect for a villain that I just had to use during a play session - so I’d be just as surrounded by piles of apocryphal pages stacked behind the screen - and on the floor, spare chairs, and any other level surface within arm’s reach!

Thankfully, the developers of D&D 3.5 realized that “spell creep” was a serious and pervasive issue from edition to edition. In late 2005, Wizards of the Coast released the first Spell Compendium, gathering into one tome more than a thousand spells from more than a dozen sourcebooks and supplements and around two score articles from Dragon Magazine. I remember that book first appearing at my gaming table in the hands of two players shortly after New Year’s, and it truly made a difference by speeding up combats and resolving rules “discussions” with one irrefutable spell source.

And now, in keeping with WotC’s project to make older edition products available to current D&D players, a Premium Edition of the D&D 3.5 Spell Compendium was released only a few weeks ago, offering a new version of this book to aid 3.5 gamers with more spells than they will (probably?) ever use!

Premium Spell Compendium v3.5

• Designer: Matthew Sernett, Jeff Grub, Mike McArtor
• Illustrations: Mat “czarofhappiness” Smith (Cover); Steven Belledin, Mitch Cotie, Chris Dien, Wayne England, Jason Engle, Carl Frank, Brian Hagan, Fred Hooper, Ralph Horsley, Jeremy Jarvis, David Martin, Jim Nelson, William O’Connor, Lucio Parrillo, Michael Phillippi, Eric Polak, Wayne Reynolds, Ron Spears, Joel Thomas, Franz Vohwinkel (Interior)
• Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
• Year: 2013
• Media: Hardbound (288 pages)
• Price: $49.99 ($35.01 from Amazon.com)

The Premium Spell Compendium v3.5 is a new reprinting of the spell sourcebook released in 2005 for D&D 3.5. The book contains more than 1000 spells used in 3.5, collected from the Player’s Handbook and many more articles and supplements published during the 3rd Edition era of Dungeons & Dragons.


Production Quality

The production quality of the Premium Spell Compendium 3.5 is quite exceptional. The Premium version of this book has a new cover design, still evocative of the “tome” style covers prevalent throughout the D&D 3.5 product line. To this reviewer, the new cover design is considerably nicer looking than the first release, and feels more sturdy and robust. The cover is further enhanced by the decorative patterns and stylized rampant dragons (sort of a tribal style) which are actually impressed into the front and back cover, giving a pleasing tactile feel to the glossy surface.

The papers are the same high quality glossy type found in the previous supplement, and all the fantastic original artwork was used once again in this reprinting.

The spells are laid out in alphabetical order, for easy reference, and there are spell lists by class as well as domain information and spell sets found toward the end of the supplement. There is also a short bibliography at the end of the Spell Compendium detailing the various sources for the spells listed.


It’s not New… But it is Improved

As mentioned previously, the Premium Spell Compendium 3.5 still features over 1000 spells and still contains the original and very stunning artwork depicting a wide range of spells ruining the nefarious plans of various D&D monsters. In fact, this new printing of the Spell Compendium is EXACTLY like the old version, page for page, illustration for illustration.

(Yes, I checked. I do these tedious things so that you don’t have to do it.)

I have to mention one of the things I failed to realize when I bought my copy of the first release: there is a ton of art in this book! As I was going through the Premium Spell Compendium 3.5, I became suddenly aware of the fact that the illustration to page count for this book stands fairly close to 1:2. That’s a massive amount of great art for a single tome, and even though some of the images are small, it really makes leafing through a book of D&D spells a lot more enjoyable.

However, I must also point out that it is not an entirely faithful reprinting of the original text. When the Premium Spell Compendium 3.5 was released, WotC editors made sure to add in all the errata that came out after the release of the first version back in 2005. So now the information is completely accurate and up-to-date (well, as up to date as a previous edition supplement can be), and keeping a pesky errata sheet is not required.

Overall Score: 4.25 out of 5.0


Final Conclusions

It’s next to impossible to find much fault with the Premium Spell Compendium 3.5, being a “faithful” reproduction of the original with all the errata added in, and bearing an awesome looking cover. If you play D&D 3.5 or d20 variant thereof, I can honestly say this is one of those “must-have” products to keep at the gaming table just to help the session run smoother by having at the ready, a complete and easily referenced compendium of all types of spells.

So the real question comes down to cost: is it worth it to buy this Premium Edition when there are so many copies of the first printing out there for sale? I checked the prices at both Amazon.com and Ebay, finding the original version of the Spell Compendium (used) for $29.00 and $25.00 respectively. Of course, there is shipping involved in both cases. So if you don’t own the original sourcebook, the new Premium Spell Compendium 3.5 is a comparable buy (at least it is from Amazon.com after the discount). But even if you already own a Spell Compendium, the new Premium version is still worth a look – it’s a gorgeous book and very handy to have around when spells start flying around.

So until next Review… I wish you Happy Gaming!

Author’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of the product from which the review was written.

Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)

• Presentation: 4.75
• - Design: 4.5
• - Illustrations: 5
• Content: 4.5
• - Crunch: 5
• - Fluff: 4
• Value: 3.5

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[Orius]

Or the 2nd Ed Complete Spell and Magic Item Compendium series.

I'm assuming that's what they meant by the AD&D compendia. Like you said though, it's seven volumes in total, instead of the single 3.5 Compendium. But the 2e books included everything to a certain point, instead of just selected sources.

 

[Zdragnar]

I like them reprinting the books because i marked my old books with the spelling mistakes and stuff. That and my old books have seen hell amd back so its good they do it.

 

[Tom B1]

Hi,

The reprint looked nice in the store. I was pretty overwhelmed by the $50 store price, though. If there were a new book with a lot of great new content, I could accept the price. But for a reprint, even with the added errata, the price seems rather high. Since this is largely a reprint, won't many of the fixed costs already be recouped?

Thx!

TomB

Reminds me when they sold my AD&D 'Legends and Lore'. I saw it in the store because it had a new title and hardbacks back then were important. Got it home, found out it was a rehash with minimal differences of 'Dieties and Demigods'. Felt exceptionally much taken to the cleaners. Yes, I should have looked at it but previously every hard cover was a very different creature than any other... so I wasn't expecting a 'repackaging' which had little value.

Tom B1
(lol, yes, Tom B1 is responding to Tom Bitonti... I just noticed that...)

 

[Tom B1]

"For the first two editions I played – AD&D and 2nd Edition – sorting through new spells outside the Player’s Handbooks was such a pain: everyone coming to a game session, lugging along extra books, magazines, and photocopied pages, so that my magic-using players looked more like mad accountants at the table rather than all powerful sorcerers. Even for my own part, there always seemed to be a few new “cool” spells that were perfect for a villain that I just had to use during a play session - so I’d be just as surrounded by piles of apocryphal pages stacked behind the screen - and on the floor, spare chairs, and any other level surface within arm’s reach!"


Were you just not aware of the AD&D Spell Compendium series?

Most of the fun in early D&D if you got to any level as a magic-user was to design your own spells. So you'd then be outside the books... and some of the third party books were pretty awesome (one I recall using was a web-derived spell that created a web made of silver metallic strands - it didn't cling to you, but it was much harder to bash your way through to reach the magic-user... Silver Web... maybe from a White Dwarf?.... anyway the other aspect of it was that it was conductile so if the bad guys were trying to smash thorugh the web, pop a lightning bolt into the silver mesh and they'd get a nasty surprise... at least our DM let it happen).

We always found the best solution was a binder with some of those card pockets and just put the key parts of spells in those until you could get the books as PDFs and spreadsheets could then be used by pasting the spell descriptions into your mage's spell spreadsheet. Our mage had a laptop

Really, the one failure (in a sense) of D&D was not having a developed, on-the-fly spell effect engine that would make all spells envisioned and cast at the table - no book required. I always thought something like Mage: The Ascension's magic which allowed free form situational casting (no set details ahead of time, just guidelines for the GM to ajudicate) was the greatest goal. I mean, you want to talk about a powerful sorcerers... they ought to be able to tailor magic to their needs in the moment...

From a game perspective, you'd have challenges, but I walways felt it was one of the failures of D&D to manage such a system. And early D&D was insane... "Your only spell as a D4 magic-user is.... affect normal fires!" (player goes off to roll another character immediately....).

 

[Orius]

There's one thing that really bugs me about the 3.5 Spell Compendium -- the design team's inexplicable need to rename a number of spells. 3.5 already renamed a bunch of spells for some rather dubious reasons -- the 3.0 renames at least seemed to have been to to reduce confusing terminology for the most part -- renames seem to have been for the sake of renaming. Worse, some of the renames aren't very intuitive either. Really bothers my OCD, and it's going to make things harder when I get around to cataloging my 2e and 3e spell lists (especially the renamed spells that had existed in AD&D).