D&D 2E [COMPLETE] Looking back at the limited series: Player's Option, Monstrous Arcana, Odyssey, and more!

[Scars Unseen]

For comparison, I loved Fantasy Flight Games' Dragonstar setting, which basically was a fusion of Council of Wyrms and Spelljammer. That product took the underlying ideas here - that of a dragon society that was barely held together in a truce - and took it to its natural conclusion, which was that when the dragons could actually bring themselves to put aside their differences (however begrudgingly) and work together, they were unstoppable. In that case, they created an empire that had already been around for millennia and was expanding throughout the galaxy...and had just now discovered your campaign world.

That was one of my favorite d20 games, and I still have all the books for it. I'd love to see an updated version of it one day. I remember trying to implement mecha from the d20 adaptation of Heavy Gear.

 

[Orius]

Ah, I recalled that when I was re-reading those, and then forgot to mention it here. In truth, I've consulted the Encyclopedia Magica books so much (which also put gp values on their items) that I'd forgotten that they originally didn't have them until I read that!

Well, I don't think other 2e products really started listing gp values until the release of the Encyclopedia Magica anyway. So this earlier work didn't really have much influence over the long run. Just shows how useful the two books weren't.

 

[RuinousPowers]

I had actually completely missed this release, and boy, I would have been very disappointed if I bought an encyclopedia that turned out to be an index!

 

[Alzrius]

Magica, oh Magica, say have you read Magica
Oh, Magica, with items aplenty
It has gizmos nerds adore so
As a reference even more so
Magica, oh Magica, that Encyclopedia

If The Magic Encyclopedia is an example of how not to do a multi-volume compendium of magic items, then surely Encyclopedia Magica must be the correct way.

At least, that's the prevailing opinion (as near as I can tell, anyway), and it's not hard to see why. Even the Encyclopedia Magica itself seems to agree, as its first volume openly references the major shortcoming of its predecessor - which was only barely in the rear-view mirror when this book came out; the second volume of TME came out in 1993, whereas the first volume of EM came out at the end of 1994 - saying, "The older encyclopedia is an index of magical items and where these PC trophies can be found among the myriad TSR products. Unfortunately, most of those older products are unavailable––many are now collectors' items. We decided to do something about that."

Certainly, I'm glad they did. As a reference work of truly expansive scope, this four-volume set is comprehensive in the extreme. Every item presented here is given with all of its original descriptive text (including new spells and/or monsters, if they had them), along with updated XP and GP entries, cites their source (and notes which items are new), and has a massive index of tables which can be rolled on if you want to use this to randomly roll up magic items for your party (which I first saw when it was published early in Dragon #217). It even has (and this, of all things, is what made my nerd heart sing when I saw it) a set of monetary conversion tables between the standard D&D coin conventions (i.e. platinum pieces, gold pieces, electrum pieces, silver pieces, and copper pieces) and those of Dragonlance, Dark Sun, and Oriental Adventure's Kara-Tur.

Calling this work a masterpiece isn't so much an opinion as it is a statement of fact (generously overlooking how the first printing of the first volume replaced "mage" with "wizard" in a find-and-replace that ended up being wildly overbroad; "1d6 points of dawizard per level" indeed)...and yet, I can't help but regard this product with the tiniest hint of disappointment.

I might as well get this out of the way now, since it applies to the next two entries in this overview as much as it does this one, but the incomplete nature of this reference work has always bugged me. The EM covers magic items through the end of 1993, and the fact that there are still nearly seven years of subsequent items that aren't here is something I can't seem to bring myself to overlook. As much as this a definitive collection of magic items for AD&D 2nd Edition, it's not truly comprehensive.

Now, I know I can't hold that against the people who made this series. A massive undertaking like this can only be justified while the game is still extant; even overlooking TSR's looming financial troubles and subsequent purchase by Wizards of the Coast, there's no way to justify doing something like this after a particular edition has been moved on from. And yet, I find myself wishing that there was one more book in this series: Encyclopedia Magica, Volume 5: Everything Else, covering through the end of AD&D 2E.

Which isn't to say that I don't love this series; I do. I wish it had done more, even though I know it couldn't have, but what's here is still a huge point of inspiration. I suspect I'm not the only person on these boards who enjoys pulling a reference work off of the shelf and flipping through it randomly, seizing on some point of inspiration. Or, if you have dice handy (and who among us doesn't?), actually rolling for a random magic item using those expansive tables and seeing what you get? This book is an idea-generator as much as a compendium (and exceeds the next two series in that regard, I'd say, since what's here isn't necessarily restricted to wizards and priests the way spells are), and in that regard I think that the print version remains far more useful than its PDF iteration.

It's a shame, albeit an understandable one, that no subsequent edition has tried to put together anything like this. 3E's Magic Item Compendium is a far cry from what's here, to the point where the comparison feels off (as that book had different goals than EM). And as noted before, the era of digital references means that we probably won't see anything like this again anytime soon.

But at least we'll always have the inspiration that comes from being able to flip through this series and give your party a ((rolls dice)) ...cheese of vile odors.

Oh Magica, you're the king of them all.

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[Voadam]

But at least we'll always have the inspiration that comes from being able to flip through this series

Yes. "We'll always have Paris."

 

[Orius]

Ah yes, the Encyclopedia Magica. I remember when I first saw this thing. I was still pretty new to D&D at the time mostly using a mashup of the Black Box and the 2e PHB when I visited the bookstore at a local mall and saw a brand new copy of the first volume on the shelf. The brown leatherette cover with the TSR logo embossed on the front, just an "Encyclopedia Magica" in gold ink on the spine, and the ribbon bookmark sewn into the spine caught my attention. It made the book seem special in a way that no other game book ever has. As I flipped through it and looked at all the stuff that was in there, it was kind of an eye opener to see just how many items there were for the game, and just what sort of things were potentially possible.

A few months later once I started building my game library, the third volume was one of my first purchases not long after the DMG and MM, and I got the first two volumes (yes, I have the dawizard printing) as soon as I could too. That issue of Dragon was the first I ever bough and it was for the EM's tables. I eagerly awaited the release of the final volume at the end of 1995. They're still one of the most valued parts of my library.

Sure, it only goes up to the end of 1993, and thus is missing more than half of what 2e would eventually offer, but that is a very minor quibble. More importantly, it's a look into the first 20 years of the game with all its rich history and just about all the stuff that existed in the original game, 1e, and the classic D&D game. They even slipped in stuff designed for a cancelled Spelljammer product, Infinity Spheres.

There's a few notable sources in the volume beyond of course really fundamental stuff like Greyhawk, Eldritch Wizardry, the DMG, and the various D&D sets. One is the Book of Marvelous Magic, a D&D supplement from 1985 by Frank Mentzer that had a big collection of items from A-Z. Those items are everywhere through the encyclopedia, and there's all sorts of interesting stuff to find. Another interesting source is War Captain's Companion, a Spelljammer supplement which I think was all about designing spelljamming ships and combat between them, but a lot of those items would work well for normal seafaring vessels.

And there's numerous tables and entries for customizing more unique items. Every weapon has a random table at the beginning of its section which lets the DM randomly pick a weapon type, so swords go anything from short swords to longswords, two-handed swords, scimitars, sabers, rapiers, katanas, and even more exotic stuff. There's a table of special abilities at the beginning of the first volume, and many standard categories has a table of quirks that can be added to an item. Overall, the final volume claims that with all the variable material, there's potentially over four billion items to be had in the work. Not bad, I'd say.

 

[JEB]

The Encyclopedia Magica was one of the earlier non-monster books I got for D&D as well - starting with Volume 2, to be precise (so I guess I dodged the dodgy find-and-replace by the time I snagged Volume 1).

We used the Encyclopedia Magica in our most recent 5E campaign to make random magic item collections in-setting. The traditional, official assortment in the DMG is nice but sometimes you want quirkier options.

 

[Orius]

You can certainly get quirkier with the Encyclopedia Magica.

 

[delericho]

One of my great D&D-related regrets is that I skipped the Encyclopedia Magica. I do have both the Spell Compendia.

One of the things I would very much have liked to see for 3e was an "encyclopedia version" of the game - once the line was 'complete', repackage the material by topic for easy reference. However, the reason this couldn't be done is obvious, in that by the time the material is all available to be collated, the line is already done (as @Alzrius mentions, of course).

That said, if they do eventually settle on an evergreen version of the rules, there's a decent argument for starting to pull together the various items into a digital encyclopedia - indeed, 4e pretty much had exactly that as it went along.

 

[Alzrius]

Based on the time-frame for which it was released, I feel comfortable in assuming that the Wizard's Spell Compendium was born from the success of the Encyclopedia Magica series. If so, it's one of the rare examples of someone saying "hey, let's take this one good idea we had and milk it like crazy" turning out to not be a bad idea, as it gave us not only four incredible volumes of arcane spells, but another three of divine spells, and even the excellent Van Richten's Monster Hunter's Compendium series, complete with an entirely new guide!

But it's the Wizard's Spell Compendium that I'm talking about today, and for those who want the TL;DR, I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this, except for the usual complaint that it's technically incomplete insofar as AD&D 2nd Edition spells goes (for reasons mentioned in my last overview), and that the DriveThruRPG offerings have neither a POD option nor even a bundle for the PDFs. Seriously, what's up with that?

In terms of what's inside the pages of these books, though...I knew before I ever even cracked the covers of these that I would love them, and they still managed to exceed my expectations! It's not even that my nerdy heart practically exploded at the sheer utility of this, but rather how far the people behind this project went in making it as useful as possible.

For instance, a significant number of the spells here have received editing since their original release. I remember seeing the temporal freedom spell when it was first released in Dragon #219 and thinking that it was incredibly powerful (since it protected you from the aging that spells like haste inflicted on you when casting them). Here it's been properly downgraded so as to be less open to abuse. That the staff behind this project went through and actually tweaked things like this justifies the entire series unto itself, in my opinion.

And really, that's me burying the lede. How about each and every spell having a rarity rating, one which outlines in practical terms what that means for your characters AND giving guidelines on what sources' spells are what rarity? That is, it tells you that spells in the PHB are "common," which means that virtually every wizard knows about them, whereas spells in the Tome of Magic are "uncommon," and can't be taken automatically when you level up but can be created via spell research, while spells from DMGR7 The Complete Book of Necromancers are "rare" and impose a penalty to research roles (but not for specialists), etc. It's so freaking useful!

You know what else is useful? Campaign-specific icons next to spells that warrant them! Now you can also adjust the rating (or other appropriateness) of a spell by where it's from! So yeah, if you don't think that spells from Al-Qadim are appropriate for your Dark Sun game, despite them both being desert-based, it's easy to filter them out. There's even an icon for "savage" settings, denoting a tone rather than a particular campaign, showing that they really went the extra mile.

And there's just so many other helpful tidbits, particularly in the final volume's appendices. Starting spell tables for literally every single magic school you could specialize in, including those from the Player's Option books! Overviews on how to become a lich! World- and race-specific spell lists! There were even notes on "path"-based spell lists, which I hadn't heard of for AD&D 2nd Edition (but had seen for 3.5 in the Distant Horizons Games products Paths of Power and Paths of Power II).

Now, the series did overlook a few spells, some of which were on purpose and some of which were simple errors (for more on the latter, see this thread over at Dragonsfoot). In the case of the former, it was because the book's focus on spells that any PC could potentially learn meant that some styles of magic (such as the realm spells of the Birthright campaign) were deliberately excluded while others were simply not included as a judgment call (such as the timereaver spell from the Dragonlance campaign setting). Even then, things like 1st Edition cantrips and the psionic enchantments from the Dragon Kings supplement were moved over to the appendix, in what seems like another (much-appreciated) nod toward completeness as well as usability.

Though I suppose I will have to walk back my statement as to not having any more complaints, since this series doesn't do one thing which Encyclopedia Magica did: list the source product of each spell. I know the editor openly questions the usefulness of such a thing in the foreword to the first volume, saying that only the "most ardent of bibliophiles" would find it useful, but guess what, Mr. Editor? I'm an ardent bibliophile, so I would have found it useful! Grr!

Ah, who am I kidding? I can't bring myself to be mad at this series over that. It's just so good. It even reins in (albeit as an optional rule) the total number of spells that wizards can know per level if they raise their Intelligence above 18. In the PHB, that used to let them transcend that cap entirely; here, it simply pushes it back, but doesn't allow it to be overcome. I know people tend to chafe at lowering the power-level for spellcasting classes (everyone still talks about that section on reining in the cleric from PHBR3 The Complete Priest's Handbook), but I appreciated that.

So yeah, while it might not be absolutely perfect, this is still a treasure-trove of goodness. Who needs new classes or kits when you can make your wizards unique by giving them a couple of spells from this series which your players have never heard of before? Or maybe let your party's wizard hear rumors of a fantastic new spell from this book, and dangle that as your next adventure's plot hook? There's just so much potential in these tomes.

D&D magic may be entirely fictitious, but I'd wager that everyone who knows about them was enchanted by these literal "spell books."

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