Monster Manual

Wizards Releases 3.5 PHB and Monster Manual PDF

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Published: May 10, 2015 8:12 PM

Its taken years to happen, but Wizards of the Coast has finally come to help bring Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition to the PC in a more meaningful fashion. While Wizards was quick to support 4th edition with the computer - 4e had some of the best computer tools for any system out there - 3.5 never had that support. Additionally, its pdf support was basically non-existent meaning that basically all the PDFs for those books in existence were what people uploaded.

That was less of an issue than it may seem in some cases because of the Open Gaming License (OGL) for D&D 3.5, but the OGL did lack some key details within it. Many monsters were cut out, and key parts like the experience table were not part of the OGL, meaning that online System Reference Documents (SRD) were lacking key elements to use in game. Pairing that up with the lack of legal PDFs meant the inevitable happened, there was a lot of uploaded and shared 3.5 books.

However, recently Wizards has teamed up with DriveThruRPG to unleash them back into the public, this time taking the 2012 editions of the books and putting them as fully searchable onto the service to sell to people. Not only that, they've priced them at a far more competitive rate - 9.99 each presently.

The Player's Handbook is the key for being a player in 3.5 and has all the base core classes and details like the experience table in it. Also by having bookmarks and OCR searching it is more usable than ever before and if you were looking for another copy it may make sense.

The Monster Manual is for monsters, and a lot of Wizards' proprietary monsters such as the Beholder didn't get into OGL. Additionally there's some excellent art and the latest printing had put in more rules for monsters as players and how to integrate D&D Minis. It came out just last week on May 5th!

These are far from all that Wizards is offering at cheap prices though as the D&D Classics area there is full of old time goodness. It really doesn't matter what edition you favor as there's something for everyone from red book era basic D&D to 4e Dragon magazines, to 2e Ravenloft setting and adventures. Many of them, especially the classics, are on sale for under $5 making it worth your while to check out if you are at all interested in Dungeons & Dragons.

Are there any books you hope to find in D&D Classics? Are there any you'd like to hear stories of the TechRaptor staff daring to play? Share your thoughts on it all below!

Don Parsons
| Senior Writer

A longtime lover of speculative fiction, in almost all its forms, Don joined TechRaptor in 2014 on a whim sending in an application as he was looking for… More about Don