What's the best and worst D&D book you own from any edition?

[Deset Gled]

Best: A toss up between the Red Box set, which was my first D&D book ever, and the 3.5E Player Guide, which is my "home" edition. Both were great reads for very different reasons. Both were definitive books for my RPG life.

Worst: I'm going to go with Races of Destiny from 3.5e.

There are lots of D&D books that I dislike with a passion. I hated the lack or organization in 2e material. I hated how the Magic Item Compendium and Book of 9 Swords completely changed 3.5E. I hated stealth errata in Complete Psionic, and terrible spells like Melf's Unicorn Arrow in the PHBII. But all of those books had some actual ideas and some actual value, even if I personally dislike them.

Races of Destiny, OTOH, is without a doubt the least remarkable book in my RPG library. It came in a box set with the other Races Of series. I read it, I put in on a shelf, and it was done. It's not terrible; it doesn't break the game, it isn't annoying, it isn't offensive. But there's nothing useful in it. There are no new ideas, and none of it's concepts are flushed out. It is by far the most boring and worthless RPG book I own. I don't think WotC ever referenced any of the material in it ever again. The only thing remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is.

 

[Ibrandul]

So, when I glanced at the thread title, I mistook "any" for "every," and that still seems like a more fun list, so I'm making it.

You'll notice a theme.

pre-2e
Best: Waterdeep and the North — Incredibly imaginative, it feels like this book plus the grey box constitute the real start of the 2e era
Worst: N/A — This is the only category I can't fill, because I only have a few pre-2e books and they all rock

2e
Best: Faiths and Avatars — Nearly overwhelming in its rich detail, but still very usable
Worst: Realmspace — Reads like it was written by a nine-year-old high on fumes

3e
Best: Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting — A stunning achievement that should remain the model for any such book
Worst: Faiths and Pantheons — Cut-and-paste reprint of the previous edition's winner that adds too little new material

4e
Best: Neverwinter Campaign Setting — The only excellent 4e Forgotten Realms book
Worst: Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide — Cover to cover just about as bad as it could possibly be

5e
Best: Out of the Abyss — Still the only really original 5e hardcover adventure
Worst: Explorer's Guide to Wildemount — The only 5e book I wish I hadn't bought

 

[Dire Bare]

Best: A toss up between the Red Box set, which was my first D&D book ever, and the 3.5E Player Guide, which is my "home" edition. Both were great reads for very different reasons. Both were definitive books for my RPG life.

Worst: I'm going to go with Races of Destiny from 3.5e.

There are lots of D&D books that I dislike with a passion. I hated the lack or organization in 2e material. I hated how the Magic Item Compendium and Book of 9 Swords completely changed 3.5E. I hated stealth errata in Complete Psionic, and terrible spells like Melf's Unicorn Arrow in the PHBII. But all of those books had some actual ideas and some actual value, even if I personally dislike them.

Races of Destiny, OTOH, is without a doubt the least remarkable book in my RPG library. It came in a box set with the other Races Of series. I read it, I put in on a shelf, and it was done. It's not terrible; it doesn't break the game, it isn't annoying, it isn't offensive. But there's nothing useful in it. There are no new ideas, and none of it's concepts are flushed out. It is by far the most boring and worthless RPG book I own. I don't think WotC ever referenced any of the material in it ever again. The only thing remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is.

Didn't Races of Destiny have the killoren and the illumien? I loved those races . . . although never did play one of them . . .

 

[Jack Daniel]

I don't actually own a huge number of official D&D books at the moment. (I pruned the collection a while ago, and I'm not sure if or when I'll ever build it back up again.) The best that I have is definitely the Rules Cyclopedia, that's a no-brainer… but the worst?

…Actually, I've just remembered that I have a copy of the adventure In the Phantom's Wake. Which, to be fair, has a cool full-size poster-map of a ship's deck and interior for it's "dungeon"—but it's also a God-awful railroad of an adventure, with an unkillable ghost-pirate "boss monster" and a stupid puzzle-mystery that has to be figured out by the PCs within a time-limit on pain of unfair character death. The only way to win is not to play, making it a negadungeon published decades before the likes of Death Frost Doom, Tower of the Stargazer, and Maze of the Blue Medusa.

 

[Deset Gled]

Didn't Races of Destiny have the killoren and the illumien? I loved those races . . . although never did play one of them . . .

Googling shows that the Illumian was in this one, but Killored was from Races of the Wild. I remember RotW being a step up from RoD. Races of Stone was the best of the series IMNSHO.

I think the fact that you never actually got around to playing an Illumian, and the fact that the race and mechanics they used never show up anywhere else, illustrates my point fairly well.

 

[Dire Bare]

Googling shows that the Illumian was in this one, but Killored was from Races of the Wild. I remember RotW being a step up from RoD. Races of Stone was the best of the series IMNSHO.

I think the fact that you never actually got around to playing an Illumian, and the fact that the race and mechanics they used never show up anywhere else, illustrates my point fairly well.

The illumian certainly didn't have traction, pretty sure they never appeared again in D&D! But I still love the race, or at least, the idea of the race.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Best: 4e's Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead. Not quite a setting book, not quite a monster manual, but an overall excellent trove of ways to them your campaigns around the undead. I used this quite a bit when I ran an Eberron campaign centered in Karrnath.

Worst: 4e's Monster Manual. Ugh. What a piece of crap.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I never had the Shackled City hardback, and I never managed to run the campaign, but I have vivid memories of reading about the adventures in Dungeon Magazine at the time. I found the city inside the caldera of a volcano a fascinating setting!

And you just know the “dormant” volcano is definitely not going to erupt at some point in the campaign.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Currently there are exactly 2 WotC branded books and 1 Paizo book on my shelf. I purged all of my actual D&D / PF hardcovers maybe 5 years ago, other than:

-- The 3.x Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting,
-- The 3.x Eberron Campaign Setting
-- The 3.5 Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting

All of them are excellent, but if I had to rank them top to bottom, Golarion/PF would be #1, and Eberron #3. So the "worst" D&D book I own is the Eberron Campaign Setting.

What system are you running currently?

 

[Blue Orange]

I've always wondered how much of the charm of the 1e DMG, particularly in retrospect through the rose-colored glasses of early adolescence, was precisely due to its bizarre disorganization. Reading it and trying to make sense of the contradictory rules felt like being a wizard puzzling through an occult tome of eldritch secrets, what with the tables for minutiae (there was a random condiments table!), and of course Gygax's grandiloquent, archaic, and sesquipedalian prose. The whole thing was full of complicated digressions, rarely-used tables, and long disquisitions on every possible permutation of something simple (has the magic item list ever been so long?).

There was also the vaguely disreputable feel of a lot of it--in addition to the now-famous random harlot table, there were rules for summoning and random generation of demons (and this was back in the 70s and 80s when Satanism was something people had real moral panics about), tables for torture chamber items and sexual perversions, and the notorious cheesecake pictures, including one near the back of a succubus. Every major magic item type had a booby-trapped version. It was like reading a book written by that dangerous (?) guy in high school who wore a black leather jacket and listened to heavy metal music (this was what rebellious older kids did in Gen X, for the younguns), if he had had the vocabulary of a professor of medieval studies. It was a nerd's idea of rebellion, if rebellion involved reading about stuff you weren't supposed to instead of taking drugs and committing petty crime.

What, you think I'm picking on the book? I used to take it with me when getting dragged to try out clothes by my parents and pore over it trying to figure out why some monster had a 3% chance of appearing in a swamp while another had a 4%. I generated 12 monsters from Appendix D (yes, I can still list half of them besides Appendix N) in grade school and turned them into a personal set of demons with a hierarchy and everything. I stuck bits from the dungeon dressing tables into school essays as metaphors (don't ask). I thought the gal in Darlene Pekul's Aubrey Beardsley homage was cute.

But if the golden age of science fiction is thirteen, well, maybe that's the golden age of RPG books as well.