D&D: Five back-edition books to collect for your 5E campaign

Want to spice up your game? Here’s how D&D’s past can make your future games even better. Browse through these back issues.

One of the best things about switching editions is the opportunity to perform the homebrewer’s initiation ritual all over again: taking something from an older edition of the game and tinkering with it until you can get it into the current version. And while the new 5.5E (or 5.24, as I’ve heard some people say) promises to be backwards compatible with itself, that only applies to the core main book content.

There will be plenty of subclasses, feats, weird spells, and more to play around with. But even if everything gets ported over, there’s still plenty of older material to mine. It’s a story as old as the editions. And one that continues today. Here are some books from older editions worth browsing.

Player’s Handbook, 4th Edition

At the top of the list is one of the most influential books on D&D. Not necessarily because it was universally well-received. But it set the tone for 5E D&D as we know it. Was it more of a game than the current edition? Yes.

Does that mean there’s nothing out there ripe for the picking? Absolutely not – there’s plenty of stuff people have tried to port over, and you can do that too. Popular candidates include the Warlord, a combat-focused healing/support character, as well as the idea of ​​Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies (sort of additional subclasses layered on top of your class once you hit 11th and 21st levels).

Encyclopedia Magicka

The Second Edition was strange. It was also wonderful. But above all, it was strange. And much of that strangeness was condensed into a set of four books: the Encyclopedia Magicka.

These books contain magic items from all sorts of sources. Official magazine entries. Fan contributions. Older books of the game that have been converted to 2nd edition. And magic items are universal enough that it’s pretty easy to take an item and adapt it to the ruleset you’re playing with.

So grab an armored bathtub or a magic changing station and give it a try.

Wild species

You know the natural urge to flip through the Monster Manual and think, “I could play one of those”? Well, that’s what everyone thought in 3rd Edition. And this book was the blueprint for living out those dreams and giving them meaning.

Unlike the current direction WotC seems to be taking: you can choose anything as long as it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things; Wild species had complicated rules for converting a monster into a playable class, including leveling up to the maximum of its Hit Dice.

Psionics Handbook

Integrate psionics directly into the game using the manual. Psionics and D&D have always been this kind of weird add-on system that sits on top of the game as a standalone system.

That said, it’s ripe for the current edition’s harvest. And while 5th edition turned psionics into a cube that lets you play with powers, it also brings back things like Ego Whip and Id Fortress and all the systems associated with them to play around with.

Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords

And of course, Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords. This book was one of the last books of 3.5th edition. And what a book it was. It was a book that gave weapon-wielding characters access to spell-like powers. It was the culmination of the 3rd edition design philosophy and resulted in martial characters with a huge range of options.

You could hurl enemies and perform superheroic blows like you were straight out of a wuxia novel. It was very firmly entrenched in the 3.5 ecosystem, but there’s no reason you can’t just look at those powers, 5E-ize them, and let loose. Bring back Warblade and Swordsage

Happy homebrewing, and remember: If you break your own game, you can always just say, “I screwed up, it’s broken, I’ll try again.”

Bell of Lost Souls editor and DM, JR covers RPGs of all kinds and occasionally eats sandwiches. You can ask him about both topics at (email protected).

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