D&D 3.x 3E/3.5 collecting

[Lanefan]

Is there anywhere a price guide for 3e-era books and modules similar to what acaeum.com does for 1e?

 

[Staffan]

I've been collecting various D&D editions. Recently I decided to start looking at 3.0. I played very little during this era. I feel like I missed out seeing all the material that was released for this edition (3e/3.5). I just bought a first printing of the 3.0 PHB, the book is in great condition. I noticed in the very back of the book there is a DMG/Monster Manual primer. I never knew this was included in the phbs. I owned a copy back when it was current but I don't believe it was a first print run. I don't recall seeing this small section in my copy.

Yeah, this was specifically in the first print run, since the DMG and MM were released as subsequent monthly intervals. The idea was basically "here's some basics to tide you over until the real book is released."

Three Forgotten Reams Books from the end of 2E are great, and actually not too many mechanics to translate iirc. Lands of Intrigue, Empires of the Shining Sea, and Sea of Fallen Stars. All by Dale Donovan and Steve Schend. Those 2 guys had a great FR run 95-2000

Lands of Intrigue is on my hate list, though that's probably more due to novel-based metaplot advancement than any inherent quality issues. The 2e FR box described Tethyr as a country torn by civil war, where the royal family had been assassinated ~20 years ago and the nobles had been fighting with one another since then. I thought that seemed like a good place to run a campaign, so when I see there's a box set out that's supposed to cover Tethyr (and Amn, but that's less important) I buy it... and is presented with a Tethyr where The Rightful King (who was in hiding as Elminster's scribe) and his Amazeballs Queen has returned and pacified all the nobles and instituted just rule where everyone is happy except the few bad nobles who got exiled. I think that's also where my distaste for metaplot emerged.

Other than that... most of the Eberron books are amazing, if that's your jam. The campaign setting itself of course, but some of the other books are also stellar.

Sharn: City of Towers has a fantastic approach to making a city sourcebook: instead of trying to map out a gigantic city, it focuses on describing various districts and what you can find there. There's also a really meaty chapter on how various things work in the city. You want entertainment? That's mostly found in these districts, with more of X over here and more of Y over here. Oh, you meant "entertainment"? That's over there. Interested in scholarship? Morgrave University's the place to be, even if they have a bit of a shady rep compared to other universities. Stuff like that. It does have one flaw in the modern day and that's how the district system relies on a DMG web enhancement which I don't think is publicly available anymore (though it can probably be found with some googling – the name is "building a city" so googling that plus "web enhancement" should probably find some place where it's archived).

Player's Guide to Eberron takes a similar approach to parts of the Sharn book in that it has a bunch of short sections (2-4 pages for the most part) on a vast variety of things in the setting. The Last War and its effects, Magical Traditions, Society & Status, The Dark Six, Dragonshards, The Blood of Vol... a whole lot of things that benefit from some more info than what's in the ECS but maybe doesn't need a full sourcebook.

After that it kind of depends on where one's interests lie. Most Eberron material is good (though Forge of War perhaps less so). I'll give a final shoutout to Faiths of Eberron because of its focus on actual religion instead of gods. The gods of Eberron do not directly interfere with the world, at least not in measurable ways (though their followers believe the gods aid them in everyday life – when the hunter comes home with a deer to cook, they believe Balinor helped their arrow strike true, and when the soldier is facing an enemy charge they pray to Dol Dorn for courage), so you won't find any stats for gods or avatars here. Instead you'll learn what the people of Khorvaire actually believe, the differences and similarities between belief in the Sovereign Host and the Dark Six, and how they often intermingle, why people would follow an undead-focused faith like the Blood of Vol, and so on.

Looking at more generic 3e books:

Tome of Battle provides some martial classes and a system of martial pseudo-magic: special maneuvers these classes can use that make their fighting a little more interesting than determining how much power attack to use on a particular target. In many ways, this was a predecessor to some of the good stuff in 4e.

Expanded Psionics Handbook is probably the mechanically best implementation of psionics rules in D&D, if you like that sort of thing.

Magic Item Compendium both provides some patches to the regular rules about magic items (most notably, letting you combine a "bonus to important game stat" item with a "lets you do a neat thing" item without paying a surcharge for combining effects in a single item slot), and provides a fairly large number of low-level magic items that are otherwise missing in 3e. If you're planning to actually run the game it's an excellent book to have, but it's not a particularly exciting book.

 

[Emerikol]

Sharn: City of Towers has a fantastic approach to making a city sourcebook: instead of trying to map out a gigantic city, it focuses on describing various districts and what you can find there. There's also a really meaty chapter on how various things work in the city. You want entertainment? That's mostly found in these districts, with more of X over here and more of Y over here. Oh, you meant "entertainment"? That's over there. Interested in scholarship? Morgrave University's the place to be, even if they have a bit of a shady rep compared to other universities. Stuff like that. It does have one flaw in the modern day and that's how the district system relies on a DMG web enhancement which I don't think is publicly available anymore (though it can probably be found with some googling – the name is "building a city" so googling that plus "web enhancement" should probably find some place where it's archived).

I like a map, which is why to me Ptolus has no equal, but I thought Sharn added a lot of good info that could be useful.

 

[Staffan]

I like a map, which is why to me Ptolus has no equal, but I thought Sharn added a lot of good info that could be useful.

Well, it's not like Sharn doesn't have any maps. They're just really high-level maps, sort of like this Manhattan map:

But there aren't maps that show individual streets or towers or stuff like that, except in a purely decorative fashion (there are towers displayed on pages 37, 43, and 49, but I feel the main point of them is to show that the towers are narrower at higher levels and merge at the lower). So no "The Mighty Manticore Tavern is on the corner of the Street of Silver and Selduth Street, and on the same block on the corner of Selduth and the Street of Silks is The Curious Past". Instead you'd look in the book and see e.g. that The Drunken Dragon is located in Clifftop, which in turn is in Upper Dura.

Personally, I prefer this, because it doesn't lock things in before they're needed. It tells you "These are the kinds of things you'll find in this district, and here are a few specific examples." It treats the city like a city, and not a dungeon.

 

[Echohawk]

Yeah, this was specifically in the first print run, since the DMG and MM were released as subsequent monthly intervals. The idea was basically "here's some basics to tide you over until the real book is released."

I remembered this content being in the book, but your post made me curious what it was replaced with in the second print. So I investigated...

1st Print PHB 3.0 (released August 2000)
This has a sixteen page supplement (with its own page numbering) titled 2000 Survival Kit. It has the following content:

• The first page is mostly a summary of the contents of the DMG and MM, with a note that the extracts provided here aren't final.
• The last two paragraphs of page one and the whole of page two explain how to award experience points.
• Pages 3-8 contain full monsters stat blocks for a red dragon (mature adult), gelatinous cube, ghoul (and ghast), goblin, hell hound, ogre, and skeleton.
• Page 9 and half of page 10 have abbreviated stat blocks for ten more creatures (badger, dire rat, dwarf warrior, dog, hawk, hobgoblin, human warrior, orc, unicorn, and zombie, followed by very abbreviated stats for eight familiars (bat, cat, owl, rat, raven, snake, toad, and weasel).
• The other half of page 10 through to page 14 cover treasure and magic items. Most of this text is explanations of how magic items work, but there are a few examples of each type provided.
• The last two pages are a "Do-It-Yourself Dungeon". Page 15 gives a five step process of building a dungeon, as well as a sample encounter table some sample traps and a tiny bit of advice on running a dungeon. Page 16 is a extremely boring, utterly featureless sample dungeon map.

2nd Print PHB 3.0 (released November 2000)
The sixteen pages at the back now contain content labelled as Bonus Supplement. This consists of:

• Two pages of creature statistics. There are short-form stat blocks for familiars (bat, cat, hawk, owl, rat, raven, snake, toad, and weasel), one animal companion (a wolf) and some summoned creatures (badger, dire rat, dog, hawk, and tiny viper) as well a notes on modifying those to be celestial or fiendish.
• Nine and a half of the next twelve pages are reprints of some of the Sage Advice content from Dragon Magazine issues #274-#277. This is a curated and edited compilation of most (but not all) of the questions from those articles, rather than a straight page-for-page reprint.
• Scattered in between the Sage Advice extracts are full page adverts for D&D Miniatures and the RPGA Network and a half-page advert for Dragon Magazine.
• The last two pages are a filled-in character sheet for 1st-level Regdar.

There are some odd choices in both of these "supplements" (why include stats for a unicorn? or a character sheet just for Regdar?) but the 2000 Survival Kit wasn't a bad way to deal with the slightly staggered release dates. I'm not sure it would have been enough for an inexperienced DM to actually run a game absent the DMG/MM, but it certainly feels like a better use of sixteen pages than the Bonus Supplement that replaced it.

 

[Staffan]

There are some odd choices in both of these "supplements" (why include stats for a unicorn? or a character sheet just for Regdar?) but the 2000 Survival Kit wasn't a bad way to deal with the slightly staggered release dates. I'm not sure it would have been enough for an inexperienced DM to actually run a game absent the DMG/MM, but it certainly feels like a better use of sixteen pages than the Bonus Supplement that replaced it.

I think a unicorn featured fairly prominently in the D&D Adventure Game (the Starter Set of its time), as someone to be rescued. So maybe they thought they should include stats in the supplement.

As for Regdar... there's some history there. 3.0 started the trend of including "iconic characters" – a set of characters to be used in most/all illustrations and examples. In the 3.0 PHB, these were Kursk the Barbarian, Devis the half-elf Bard, Jozan the human Cleric, Vadania the half-elf Druid, Tordek the dwarf Fighter, Ember the human Monk, Soveliss the elf Ranger, Lidda the halfling Rogue, Hennet the human Sorcerer, and Mialee the elf Wizard. You also had Nebin the gnome Illusionist (presumably because someone noted there wasn't a gnome iconic and they might as well stereotype him and make him an Illusionist) and... Regdar the human Fighter. The reason for Regdar's existence was apparently that someone in marketing decided that the game needed to have a Human Fighter as its "face character". For example, you had big cardboard standees featuring Regdar sent to game stores. But the creatives felt Regdar was forced on them – they already had a fighter iconic, Tordek. So throughout 3e and even into 4e, you'll find pictures of Regdar dying in various gruesome ways.

Speaking of iconics, there's also a series of Youtube videos out there called "D&D PSAs" featuring some college students pretending to be these iconics and talking about random stuff. They're most notable for featuring Clinton Boomer (who'd later go on to write a bunch of Pathfinder stuff) as Hennet the Sorcerer, wearing belts all over himself. And a super cute girl playing LiSNEAK ATTACK!

 

[Echohawk]

I think a unicorn featured fairly prominently in the D&D Adventure Game (the Starter Set of its time), as someone to be rescued. So maybe they thought they should include stats in the supplement.

That makes sense. There is a significant overlap between the monsters in the D&D Adventure Game rulebook and those in the back of the PHB 3.0 (including the unicorn). Both products released in August 2000, so they probably just reused that content.

The reason for Regdar's existence was apparently that someone in marketing decided that the game needed to have a Human Fighter as its "face character".

I remember the iconics well, but I'd forgotten about Regdar being largely a marketing gimmick. That does indeed explain why only he appeared in the back of the 2nd print PHB 3.0.

 

[Emerikol]

Personally, I prefer this, because it doesn't lock things in before they're needed. It tells you "These are the kinds of things you'll find in this district, and here are a few specific examples." It treats the city like a city, and not a dungeon.

I got value from it but not as much as Ptolus. I'm never bound to what is put there as a DM but I like having something there when I don't want to make it myself. I do my own creations this way myself. I'm already good on creating theme and flavor. I tend to need details fleshed out.

 

[roachgod]

Is there anywhere a price guide for 3e-era books and modules similar to what acaeum.com does for 1e?

Bumping this question, curious if this exists for 3.x. I usually just base my buy range on eBay prices sorting by recently sold comps. I went to a used bookstore in my area recently (McKay's), and their prices were ridiculous. $60+ for good to played copies of the 3.5 PHB.