Spell book pricing

Lord Foul · Oct 21, 2005

My characters have found a spell book and after taking the spells they want, they want to sell it. How would I go about figuring a price for it?

Prism · Oct 21, 2005

The PHB sets the price of a complete spell book at 5000gp (P179)

Lord Foul · Oct 21, 2005

Prism said:
The PHB sets the price of a complete spell book at 5000gp (P179)

Thanks. I must have looked at that page 10 times in the last half hour and missed it.

ElectricDragon · Oct 21, 2005

Space in the Spellbook: A spell takes up one page of the spellbook per spell level. Even a 0-level spell (cantrip) takes one page. A spellbook has one hundred pages.
Materials and Costs: Materials for writing the spell cost 100 gp per page.

Selling a Spellbook
Captured spellbooks can be sold for a gp amount equal to one-half the cost of purchasing and inscribing the spells within (that is, one-half of 100 gp per page of spells). A spellbook entirely filled with spells (that is, with one hundred pages of spells inscribed in it) is worth 5,000 gp.

Worth 5,000 gp if completely full (100 pages of spells) but sells for 2,500 gp.

Ciao
Dave

Patryn of Elvenshae · Oct 21, 2005

Spellbooks have, generally speaking, 100 pages. It costs 100gp per page to scribe a spell.

It therefore costs, at a minimum, 10,000gp to scribe a full spellbook. By using the standard D&D half-price rules, this translates into 5,000gp.

This does not include the cost of procuring the spells that went into a spellbook, however, which can increase the cost to make it by a lot. The problem is that this is highly variable: a wizard's initial spell loadout doesn't cost him anything, scrolls found on adventure and spells copied from a friend cost only the scribing charge, spells copied from an other wizard's spellbook generally cost 25gp-50gp per level, etc.