Dungeons & Dragons Goes PDF: Every Edition Available Again!

I almost entitled this entry How Nostalgia Broke My Credit Card.  The reason is simple, Wizards of the Coast, in association with DriveThruRPG, has made available for download in PDF format over 80 classic adventures and rulebooks.  I think I want to buy more than my credit card limit allows.

I still remember the first time I played Dungeons & Dragons.  It was 1980 and I was in 7^th grade.  I rolled a rogue and we played the adventure included at the end of the blue rulesbook edited by Holmes.  It had to do with a wizard’s tower and the sprawling dungeon he created under the tower, and ended with access to a seaside cave where pirate ships were docked.

While Holmes rulesbook is not available right now, Tom Moldvay’s 1981 Basic Set rulesbook is.  So are a lot of old time/original Dungeons & Dragons modules.  I quickly found some of my favorites: X1 - Isle of Dread, Q-1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, D-3 Vault of the Drow.  The list goes on…

With this renewed web offering, Wizards of the Coast is attempting to please players of all editions, all six of them.  You can search for your favorite rulesbook, supplement, module or adventure, by name, edition, setting (Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Greyhwak, Planescape and Ravenloft), as well as by product type (sourcebooks, core rulebooks, RPG media).

Many of these products are at very reasonable prices.  You can buy 1^st Edition’s D-3 Vault of the Drow or 3^rd Edition’s Bastion of Broken Souls for $4.99.  Compilations and sourcebooks, like 1^st Edition’s T1-T4 Temple of Elemental Evil or 2^nd Edition’s Greyhawk: The Adventure Begins, are going for $9.99.  Rulebooks are a little more expensive.  For example, be prepared to pay a hefty $19.99 for 3.5 Edition’s Dungeon Master’s Guide II.

Yes, you can find all of the products offered in DnDClassic.com as pirated torrents on the internet.  However, not only is that illegal, many of the pirated reproductions are of bad quality.  Buying them from Wizards of the Coast/DriveThruRPG gives you a high quality scan that has the added bonus of being searchable.  Good luck searching a pirated PDF for a particular NPC or item, particularly if it is several hundred pages long like the aforementioned T1-T4 Temple of Elemental Evil.  More importantly, buying legitimate copies rewards the authors for their work and encourages Wizards of the Coast to make more of their offerings available for download.

Finally, I wish you good luck accessing DnDClassic.com.  Apparently, this untapped market for PDF versions of classic and not so classic products from TSR Hobbies, Inc. and Wizards of the Coast is so large that the servers are frequently overloaded.