Whether it’s the Necromancy of Thay, the Book of Vile Darkness, or simply the Dungeon Master’s Guide, where would Dungeons and Dragons be without a good tome of arcane wisdom? In thematically appropriate news, DnD fan and redditor u/Yawgmothlives has gathered scores of free supplements for DnD 3.5 that have long since disappeared from the internet, and compiled them all into a massive tome of lost lore, ‘The Web Compendium’.
The Web Compendium is composed of “every web article” with any kind of rules content published by Wizards of the Coast on the official Dungeons and Dragons website during the lifespan of DnD 3.5 edition.
You can download the whole Web Compendium from Dropbox.
The scope of these articles show just how much free support DnD 3.5 received. They include extra abilities for the DnD classes; dozens of new DnD monsters; scores of new DnD spells; adventure locations; extra content for specific DnD books; and loads more.
These articles have are long gone from the DnD website. Posts in the Min/Max forums indicate that the articles were either intentionally removed, or just no longer supported on the official site, by the end of July 2014 .
While it’s easy to assume that nothing will ever be lost on the internet, archivists of modern culture have found that to be far from true. Over time, and with successive server migrations, most websites shed old articles, and unless a page happens to be snapshotted on the not-for-profit Internet Archive, or duplicated on a mirror server somewhere, it’s gone for good. Yawgmothlives’ ad hoc archiving effort has preserved part of nerd history.
DnD 3.5 feels a world apart from the latest edition, which we’re tentatively calling DnD 2024. It was a time of high crunch, when literally any DnD race could become a player character, provided you took a big enough level penalty, and players could create legendarily silly characters by combining powers from multiple sourcebooks. We’re very fond of the “jumplomancer”, a character that could make a crowd of enemies become fanatically devoted to them by making an enormous long jump.
The spirit of open-ended, crunch-powered character building lives on in Pathfinder: see what we thought of the recent Tian Xia Character Guide for an example of what it gets so right.
Source: Wargamer
