Unlock the Lore of a Thousand Spellcasters

The essential spellcaster's companion, Spell Compendium gather over 1,000 of the best spell from previously published Dungeons&Dragons game supplements and campaign settings, Dragon magazine articles, and articles posted on the Wizards of the Coast website.

The spells contained herein complement those presented in the Player's Handbook and have been updated to include official errata. In addition, this book contains descriptive read-aloud text telling you what a spell looks like, sounds like, or feels like.

Product History

Spell Compendium (2005) by Matthew Sernett, Jeff Grubb, and Mike McArtor, is the first of three capstone Compendiums for D&D 3.5e. It was published in December 2005.

The First Sign of 3e's End? The march toward D&D 4e (2008) began in early 2005, when Bill Slavicsek and his design and development managers chose the core team for the new edition. They conducted a first workshop in May and had designed a set of eight core classes by September. So, was Spell Compendium a purposeful capstone for D&D 3.5e, intended to provide GMs with a definitive spell sourcebook?

Probably not.

This would more obviously be the case when Wizards returned to the Compendium series over a year later, with Magic Item Compendium (2007) and Rules Compendium (2007), but this first release in the series was too early in 4e's development. It probably just reflected the fact that D&D 3e had already produced a lot of spells. The Spell Compendium gave the design staff the opportunity to not just compile those spells, but also to regularize them and (in some cases) to update them for 3.5e.

About the Book. The design team for Spell Compendium didn't try to include all of the spells for D&D 3e and 3.5e, but Andy Collins estimates that they collected 90% of the official spells not in the Player's Handbook (2000, 2003).The major sources for the Spell Compendium are: Complete Adventurer (2005), Complete Arcane (2004), Complete Divine (2004), Complete Warrior (2003), Draconomicon: The Book of Dragons (2003), Libris Mortis: The Book of Undead (2004), Magic of Faerûn (2001), Manual of the Planes (2001), Miniatures Handbook (2003), Planar Handbook (2004), Player’s Guide to Faerûn (2004), Savage Species (2003), and Underdark (2003). Dragon magazine in its various 3e incarnations also contributed much of the Spell Compendium's content.

The Premium Reprints Continue. Following the success of the 2012 premium reprints for AD&D and for D&D 3.5e, Wizards decided to extend those series with some of the more critical supplements for the lines. For 3.5e, Spell Compendium was an obvious choice, so it appeared in April 2013 as the fourth premium reprint for D&D 3.5e.

Expanding D&D. Spell Compendium helped to incorporate swift and immediate actions in the D&D 3.5e core. Swift actions had originated in the Miniatures Handbook (2003) and immediate actions in the Expanded Psionics Handbook (2004). They'd both been referenced in numerous rulebooks since, but their appearance in the various Compendiums (2005-2007) was the closest they'd come to the core D&D 3.5e rules.

Future History. Spell Compendium filled in most of the basic spell design space for the D&D 3.5e game, so when Wizards designed Complete Mage (2006) the following year, they had to "push the familiar boundaries of what spells do".

About the Creators. Spell Compendium is a book that shows how much effort Wizards of the Coast could put into a product in the mid '00s. It had three designers (Matthew Sernett, Jeff Grubb, and Mike McArtor), five developers (Andy Collins, Jesse Decker, Mike Donais, Stephen Schubert, and Rob Watkins) and two editors (Michele Carter and Kim Mohan). Whew!

About the Product Historian

The history of this product was researched and written by Shannon Appelcline, the editor-in-chief of RPGnet and the author of Designers & Dragons - a history of the roleplaying industry told one company at a time. Please feel free to mail corrections, comments, and additions to shannon.appelcline@gmail.com.