Top 10 3e/3.5 Official Products

I watched a video recently that listed the vloggers top 10 3rd edition products. Given that 3rd Edition (both original 3e and the 3.5 revision) was the edition that I spent by far the most money on and have almost the entire run of official products, I thought I could do this, and maybe should just for the heckuvit.

I should point out, however, that I do not much like 3e anymore. It's a very rules-heavy, proscriptive system. Although it has a lot of flexibility relative to some earlier versions of D&D, that flexibility comes at the cost of giving you new rules for almost everything rather than simply not requiring unique rules for most things. I also feel (although I don't think this is unique to 3e, but I only experienced it first hand with 3e) that the game doesn't work very well after the first tier and a half or so of play. Middle high and higher levels—to say nothing of epic levels—don't even feel like the same game or setting anymore, and it becomes extremely tedious to both run and play.

I'm also not at all a fan of the combat system, which is kind of a tactical grid-based miniatures game inside the game of D&D; you literally stop playing D&D to play a combat minigame within the game. So, by the time we got to the later entries in the editions life-cycle, I was pretty over the game, to be honest. However, by that point, more of the products were less about new rules and mechanics and more about new ways to play the game, and cool "fluffy" products.

Because of this, I will pick very few of the books that focus on mechanics, unless they do something so unusual that they really kind of changed the way that I played the game. I will also not pick any of the core/basic rules, or any of the monster manual type books. To be honest, although those often got better as we got up to Monster Manual V and the Fiend Folio, I was less interested in them. Monster books were often books that third party d20 publishers could do better than Wizards themselves did, and as good as Monster Manual IV or V was compared to earlier entries, they still paled compared to, say, the Monsternomicon books by Privateer Press.

It should also be noted, of course, that this list is very subjective. This is just the books that either meant the most to me, or which I liked the most. I also will point out that my taste relative to D&D "norm" are probably kind of esoteric and unusual. I almost have as favorites stuff that other people do not, and I often dislike stuff that is otherwise very popular.

The other big chunk of 3e products that I'm not really analyzing or considering for inclusion here is the large number of Forgotten Realms products. I don't have a lot of those books, and I'm just really not into the FR very much. Not only would it not be fair to the products to consider them alongside others, but I also just don't know many of these products all that well.

And finally, don't overthink the specific ranking. I don't really like forced rankings all that much, because in general a more nebulous approach is better for me, where the actual rankings may shuffle over time, and are going to be fairly arbitrary anyway.

Two Runners Up

I actually made a list of potential books to include, and I came up with 12. I had already decided to to this as a top 10 list, so two of them have to be bumped down to runners up; below the top 10, but better than anything else in the oeuvre. 

• Oriental Adventures. While I'm not actually a huge fan of Orientalism, chinoiserie, or any of the other exotica fads which we've been guilt-tripped into thinking that we're racist if we admire other cultures, I still find this one has a lot of value. I also think that if you're like me, you just don't want a pseudo-Japanese setting, and if you're really woke, you find the whole concept offensive that it even exists. But, there's a fair number of pretty cool things in this book that I enjoyed reading about and considering how I might be interested in adapting to a different setting. If nothing else, some of the alternative classes, like the wu jen or shugenja are kind of interesting, and although I don't remember for sure, I think this is the game that first introduced us to the corruption mechanic which made the rounds throughout the rest of the edition.
• Unearthed Arcana. Because I've ditched the 3e system, this just doesn't have the same punch that it did when I first picked it up, but there are tons and tons of ideas on how to houserule your game to get different results contained in this book. Some of the ideas are better than others, but the whole concept was great. If you were willing to play 3e again, then this would be my first go-to to look for ways to tailor the game. Before adapting even more radical changes, this was a real game-changer for me.

Not quite D&D, but should have been

Here's a couple of official WotC products that are not actually part of the d20 line, but which I really liked and frequently borrowed elements from in my D&D games.

• Call of Cthulhu. Lots of people had a hard time getting their arms around the idea of a d20 alternative of this game, but I really loved it. It's a beautiful book, it's fun to read (well, I kind of skim a lot of the mechanics anymore), has great GM advice, and is just a great book. Most people don't really seem to be able to wrap their heads around how to run it as CoC, which is unfortunate, but I'll be honest; I almost like the game as a supplement for D&D than as a game in its own right. Although I would have liked to see it cleaned up and improved in a revision late in the d20 product cycle, I can understand why it wasn't done. And at the time, I may not have bought it anyway.
• d20 Modern. I actually went through quite a long phase where Dark•Heritage, the setting that preceded Dark Fantasy X, was meant to be played using d20 Modern + d20 Past rather than any type of D&D, because I could do it with significantly fewer houserules. I also really quite liked the organizations section of Urban Arcana. All in all, I think d20 Modern was an under-rated attempt to take the D&D rules and do something different with them. And because I wasn't a huge fan of the D&Disms in D&D, I thought it worked quite well for fantasy too.

TOP TEN

10. The Book of Vile Darkness. This book had a number of problems, but I always liked it because it added thematic stuff that was important to me in my darker fantasy games. It also was the first time the iconic demon lords and archdevils were described in d20. They were later superseded; in fact, everything in this book just about was eventually replaced by a better revised version. Sadly, the book suffered sometimes by assuming that really banal, cartoony villainy was the same thing as "vile darkness" while it ironically also suffered from dipping its toes in gratuitous stuff that was really little more than snuff film material. There were a few other sloppy mistakes, such as Demogorgon being hyena rather than mandrill headed in the art and text. But still, this was one of the early books that actually had some interesting and not completely generic flavor to it. I tend to be glass half full with it nowadays and see more the things that it did well rather than the things that it attempted but fell flat on.

9. Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. My favorite of the Expedition series, and the only one that isn't really a dungeon crawl. Granted, this is a remake of an older 1e module, and it was probably done ever better (by all accounts; I haven't read it yet) when it was remade into 5e's Curse of Strahd. However, this is the one where I really deep-dived the Ravenloft concept, and I thought that as a big mega-adventure or small campaign, it was one of the ones that I'd be the most inclined to actually try and run. As above, what makes it stand out is the less generic feel; it's got a strong tone, theme and plenty of detail. I prefer products with a tone, theme and detail that's useful rather than much of the stuff that's pretty generic, or which offer weak offerings on a theme (like the 3e environmental books mostly do, for instance.) Go bold, or go home.

8. Drow of the Underdark. I'm not a drow fan-boy, and when 3e launched, it seemed like drow fanboyism was kind of like disco fanboyism in 1979 before "Disco Demolition Night." It had fans, they were loud, but there was a growing backlash, or tiredness with the genre too. I'm sure drow are still kicking around in D&D. D&D nowadays seems to be full of all kinds of bizarre furry races and who knows what else. But, that said, a good drow product will remind you why they were such iconic and popular villains for so many years in D&D in the first place, and this is a pretty good drow product. It did have to compete with a third party Green Ronin, which is also a good product, but that said, it certainly still holds its own against it. In fact, these deep dives into a monster or villain type are among my favorite of the books from the 3e run; you'll notice that this is the first of three (or five, depending on how you're counting) that fit that bill.

7. Exemplars of Evil. This very late stage product is more about giving the players some specific NPC villains and their plots, motivations, goals, and organizations to be used as opponents in your game. There are several at various levels, and you could use them all and probably get a decent 1-20 level campaign going. They'll be pretty shallow if you do that, but it can be done. What you should do to get the best use of this product, is to pick a couple of your favorites, and use the material here as seed corn; you'll have to do some more work fleshing it out more fully to make it really work in your campaign. And to be fair, it says that in the book; it clearly intends for you to use this ideas in your own campaign by figuring out exactly how to integrate the material that it has. And, as per all too many D&D products, it spends much more time than is prudent detailing each villains "base" as a kind of smallish dungeon. It still has better ideas and more practical, useable material than most products of its type.

6. Lords of Madness. This monster book is a deep dive on about half a dozen or so different types of aberrations; beholders, neogi, mindflayers, aboleths, etc. While this is neither my favorite type of D&D monster, nor do I care as much as most about including iconic D&D-ish elements that are unique to D&D, nor do I really love cosmic horror as much as the next guy—especially if it's not really going to be too horrible, because you're meant to just fight the cosmic horrors and shout huzzah—this is still a really good book. In many ways, its format is very similar to that of Exemplars of Evil, along with an "ecology of" kind of dealio. This book actually made me want to use aberrations a little bit more than I otherwise would have been inclined to do, which is exactly what it should have done. Sadly; I really love undead, but the undead book in this series was underwhelming and didn't make the cut. 

5. Heroes of Horror. A book specifically designed to allow you to play D&D with a stronger dark fantasy theme, this book should have been right up my alley. And... well, it is right up my alley. The only concern I have about it is that by the time I got it, I already had better products that did the same thing from third parties. It feels a bit like baby steps away from the standard D&D paradigm rather than a real embrace of a horror or grimdark theme. I had the exact same problem with Cityscape, a product I really wanted to like but only kind of did, but I feel like Heroes of Horror did a better job and actually offered stuff that I like, hadn't already thought of in some cases, and is really useable. Even in my situation where I no longer use any 3e stuff at all (to be fair, one of the main conceits of m20, which even with the changes I've made, my game is based on) is that you can use any 3e stuff you want with minimal or even no real conversion needed, so maybe that's why it helps.

4. Elder Evils. Set up very much like Exemplars of Evil (and written by the same author) but focused more on epic, world-threatening threats. There's no "captain of the orcs" villains here for low level characters; these seeds are meant to go through a campaign (that probably does other things on the side) and end with something that would literally destroy the world showing up and being fought off a la the Avengers movies. I know this kind of high fantasy save the world characters as literal superheroes stuff is pretty popular (most of the adventure paths work that way too). It's not really quite my jam, but I get it, and I really like the villains (most of them) and feel like they have either iconic mythic resonance, or some other kind of really interesting hook to them. I like this book quite a bit.

3. Manual of the Planes. When I first got this, I wasn't really super familiar with Planescape yet, but I really liked this. I actually read this from time to time just to get excited about all of the exotic ideas that it has in it. To be fair; some of the ideas aren't as exotic as others. I don't really love the Great Wheel cosmology, which this book specifically details. But there are some great ideas and some great locations here. Even Dark Fantasy X borrows more than a little from stuff that I originally read in this book (well; I may well have originally read it in some 1e book, but it was this book that really made it gel for me.)

2. Eberron Campaign Setting. Eberron is the setting that was developed specifically for this edition of D&D, and is one of my favorite of the original settings. (It remains the only one that I've remixed to be useable with the Dark Fantasy X game to date, and probably the only one that I'll actually get around to doing.) While there are plenty of mechanics in this book, unfortunately, that's not really the focus of it; the focus is exploring and describing a campaign setting that has more of a theme than many other D&D campaigns, but not one that's so weird that only people who are really into the weirdness of it really get it (like Dark Sun, for instance.) I really like the setting, and I know that not everyone does. A lot of people very oddly (and incorrectly) characterize it as steampunk or something like that, which is frankly ridiculous. It does have an old-fashioned pulp kind of vibe, translated through the medium of D&D, and honestly, that's a good look on D&D. And who really needs yet another pseudo-Medieval D&D setting at this point? If you're not going to use Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms or one of the many others already in print, you're probably just making your own. 

1. Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss. This is it. My favorite 3e book. As noted, it's a monster book, but not just a catalog of monsters, but rather a deep dive into demons specifically. It has all of the demon lords that you expect, it has all kinds of cool stuff about the Abyss, about a few new demons, about how demons operate and what you can do with them, and it even has some of the best Lovecraftian stuff in it that any D&D book ever had in the form of the Black Scrolls of Ahm and its author. There are few books of any type in the TTRPG realm that has inspired me to find some way to use its contents than this one. I said before that I really like good villainous monsters, and demons and undead certainly fit the bill better than most. I was predisposed to like this book, but what really makes it sing isn't the subject matter but rather the adroitness with which it treats it.