D&D 5E Classic Products from the Last 17 Years

[flametitan]

The only products I have from the 3e/4e eras are the draconomicon and Vor Rukoth.

The Draconomicon is a fun book if you want to learn about dragons (including details you might not think of, such as how dragon hatchlings are raised)

Vor Rukoth I wouldn't call a classic, but I am a little sad that the style of booklet it was going for (somewhere between the classic modules and a "micro"-setting) died before it really took off. It would've been interesting to have seen what else would've been made if they became popular.

 

[werecorpse]

Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury and Red Hand of Doom were all excellent.
The Dungeon magazine adventure paths (Shackled City, Age of Worms & Savage Tide) were also great but sadly will suffer from being hard to get hold of.

 

[TwoSix]

3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting
3e Eberron Campaign Setting
4e Dark Sun Campaign Setting
4e Neverwinter (best "campaign in a book", ever)
4e Monster Vault
4e Players Handbook 2 (not really a necessary book anymore, but the apotheosis of 4e design)

Red Hand of Doom, Sunless Citadel, Reavers of Harkenwold, and Madness at Gardmore Abbey are classic adventures.

3e Book of the Righteous is my favorite non-WotC D&D product ever, and a justifiable classic.

 

[billd91]

Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury and Red Hand of Doom were all excellent.
The Dungeon magazine adventure paths (Shackled City, Age of Worms & Savage Tide) were also great but sadly will suffer from being hard to get hold of.

Yep, tied up in rights ownership issues. Paizo might be inclined to republish, but they don't own the rights. WotC owns the rights but probably wouldn't republish.

Thankfully, there's still some other good Paizo APs. Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne both have Pathfinder-based compilations as well as 3.5-based serial versions (now only available via PDF - but, hey, still available via PDF is nothing to sneeze at). And both are excellent and easily qualify as classics.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't feel ready to think of any WotC D&D as 'classic,' the classic game will always be TSR in the 70s & 80s. ;(

But, for the sake of discussion...

The first module of each edition has been a sort of instant classic: Sunless Citadel, Keep on the Shadowfell, Horde of the Dragon Queen. (True, they may also have had their mechanical missteps as they adapted to a new system.)

Also, Heart of Nightfang Spire stands out for it's ability to cope with the 'broken' playstyles that quickly arose in 3e. Also, I'd disqualify Crystal Cave because it was a remake of a classic.

Those aside, a modern classic is, I assume, something particularly memorable. Those'd be Forge of Fury and Thunderspire Labyrinth. Both, not coincidentally, essentially dungeon crawls - because crawling through Dungeons and fighting Dragons is classically D&D.

Outside of modules, though, it's harder. WotC adopted a sales strategy of putting little mechanical bits to appeal to a wide range of builds in each supplement, which, at least for me, left all of them feeling a little unfocused and contrived.

 

[Zardnaar]

Fiendish Codexs (3.5)
Dungeon APs (Sunless Citadel, Age of Wurms, Savage Tide)
FRCS (3.0)
Inner Sea World Guide (Pathfinder)
Assault on Blacktooth Ridge (Castles and Crusades, available in 5E version)
Rise of the Runelords (Pathfinder)

 

[Ath-kethin]

Call of Cthulhu d20. Available for about 30 seconds back in 2002, and a masterwork of design and inspiration. One of the best RPG books ever printed IMO.

 

[billd91]

Call of Cthulhu d20. Available for about 30 seconds back in 2002, and a masterwork of design and inspiration. One of the best RPG books ever printed IMO.

It was a pretty nice example of how the d20 System could be used for other genres of games with few tweaks here and there. We played it in one of our CoC campaigns, but it never really did quite take the place of the original in our hearts.

 

[SkidAce]

Call of Cthulhu d20. Available for about 30 seconds back in 2002, and a masterwork of design and inspiration. One of the best RPG books ever printed IMO.

Still got my copy.

 

[Charles Rampant]

Call of Cthulhu d20. Available for about 30 seconds back in 2002, and a masterwork of design and inspiration. One of the best RPG books ever printed IMO.

Biggest problem with it was the classes - they felt odd and didn't justify their existence, being difficult to use to describe literary characters that you might want to play. I've heard that D20 modern cracked the classes thing for modern day games, but I've not read that one. Perhaps a combination of the two would work.