D&D 1E AD&D 1E Players Handbook In PDF

The AD&D 1st Edition Players Handbook has just his DnDClassics - which means that you can now buy it in PDF format. Originally published in 1978, with an iconic cover by Dave Trampier, the book is 128 pages and available for $9.99.

Grab it right here!

The 1st Edition Player's Handbook is back!

No more searching through stacks of books and magazines to find out what you need to know. The Player's Handbook puts it all at your fingertips, including: All recommended character classes: Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Magic-Users, and more.

Character Races: Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, Half-Orcs, Humans, and more.
Character Level Statistics.
Equipment lists with costs.
Spell listings by level and descriptions of effects (including many new spells!).

As a dungeon adventurer or Dungeon Master, you will find the contents of this book to be what you have been waiting for. All useful material is now compiled under one cover, especially for players!

Here's the iconic original cover:

Although I'm personally fond of this one:

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[mach1.9pants]

It does contain some errata, but it also contains a fair bit of OCR errors. Such as italicized 1's being shown as 7's. In the MM a Dwarf has 7HD! So it is not perfect, and sadly they didn't give a pre-copy to the dedicated people on the internet to catch all the errors for free. I still don't know why companies don't do that more often with RPGs!

EDIT: This is based on the physical books, I doubt anything has changed with the PDF!

 

[mach1.9pants]

First bit of errata listed on Acaeum is not included:

"Furthermore, clerics with exceptional wisdom (16 or greater) also gain bonus spells "
It should be 13 or greater, that was picked up by Dragon Issue 35 (March 1980)

Neither the next:
-Wisdom Table adjustments for Clerics and Druids
Or the next:
Half-orc max Dex on table 14 instead of 17

https://www.acaeum.com/library/errata_phb.html

Basically it has the same corrections as were included in the eighth print, I guess, without going through them all. This is the PDF BTW

 

[TheSwartz]

I guess I can only hope that after they finally release ALL the old stuff, they'll finally release 5e? So, at this rate, another year?

 

[Legatus Legionis]

.

 

[teitan]

5e I already free.

 

[TerraDave]

[MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION]: Thanks for the update.

Though I am not sure about your taste in covers.

 

[Imperialus]

Nice. So hopefully 2E and 0E will not be far behind...or even 4E, for that matter.

Isn't OD&D already available? Or is it one of the PDF's that they sold a few years back and then took off the 'shelf' as it were? I know I have the LBB's plus the 4 supplements as PDFs and according the the watermark on the PDF's I purchased them from RPGNow... I like having them as PDF's since my copy of OD&D is... well it's a hardcopy of OD&D, I'm not too keen on busting it out for a game session.

I don't know if I'm going to jump on the 1st ed PDF's even though it's the edition that I play. I have multiple copies of the core books, and this is back when they were built like tanks so they have cheerfully survived years of abuse. I'm always more drawn to the modules, since those tend to be harder to find in decent condition and with all the maps, not to mention a bit more fragile to actually use.

 

[Lalato]

Nice. So hopefully 2E and 0E will not be far behind...or even 4E, for that matter.

Yeah, I'm hoping for a 2e PHB. I would buy one on eBay, but in this case I would prefer the PDF.

 

[Lalato]

Sweet. Still waiting on the 2e World-builder's Guide, though.

They actually released this as a PDF several years ago, but it wasn't the best looking transfer. It could definitely use some cleaning up before they release it again.

 

[AmerginLiath]

As with the 3.5 books, I'm guessing that this is the version reconstructed for the anniversary edition (done for the Gygax Memorial fund), as those files would have created in a version (XML?) specifically compatible for a processable and searchable PDF file. I even recall that the specific 1-vs-7 OCR callouts were at issue in that reconstruction, so this seems to be the case. As such, the other two 1st edition handbooks should be following shortly along the usual release schedule; after that, there's no reason NOT to have the reconstructed 2nd edition books (also from this same rerelease line, with the preprocess files likely built from XML to PDF) in a few weeks to a few months.

It's a nice piece of work from WotC. In doing these rereleases as they did, the physical book sales would have been enough to basically handle the production costs of doing the file conversions. 2e and 3.5e already existed in computer files, so there was much less conversion (although 2nd edition likely needed to restore typesetting from RTF; 3.5 would just need to process the XML language and index the PDFs) while 1st edition was OCR. From there, we're seeing how they provided hard copies for those who wanted (some of which I still see available on store shelves) and now they have an evergreen product in digital format for each edition. While the errata situation is different that what is expected to the modern gamer, it might be curious to see if WotC is planning to post/repost any old errata articles from DRAGON on their website now for the release of these products – it might even help prime interest in sales!

(What I'm interested in seeing is how the OSR crowd responds to the new availability of the ruleset (along of course with many of the old adventures), especially since 5e has rebuilt a number of bridges)