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Hey all!

Recently, I started reading a book about anthrodermic biblioplegy—books wrapped in human skin. While the subject is creepy, it's pretty interesting, especially when you realize just how common this practice was, particularly in the 1800s.

This got me to thinking about how much I suck at describing random books found in dungeons. Books have a lot of value in a fantasy/medieval environment. In fact, a common book in D&D 5e is worth 25 gp and a spellbook without spells is worth 50 gp. That's some pretty significant cash!

Thus, I came up with this series of tables and historical notes on books. I'll probably expand this a bit, but for right now I figured that 22 pages on the subject was enough to get us going.

Enjoy!

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Get the black-and-white print-friendly PDF using the attachment link below.

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Comments

John Thomson

This is awesome! I actually needed this very resource right now. Excellent job!

Keith

This is fantastic! I especially appreciate the book price section at the end. I'm a fairly new DM, so I'm working to wrap my head around the relative valuation of both common and magical equipment, weapons, and items. In your post above, you mentioned a spellbook without spells is worth 50 gp, but I didn't see that detail in the pdf. You might want to list that as the base price in the Spellbook Prices table. Or did I miss something?

Aro

This is great! My party is in a place next session where this could be used and I might pull it out to see how it rolls.

Michael Dillson

Absolutely awesome. Been needing something like this for a long time!

Terry

Awesome resource, so many great tables! Will no longer dread characters finding books. 😎👏🏼 Thanks!

James Geluso

I am ALWAYS struggling with books, particularly with one wizard-playing player who inspects every bookcase for interesting (especially spell-containing) books. I am going to print this out and keep this in that game's binder. I should probably just pre-roll a few. Fantastic. Thank you.

David R. Howard

I love creating books, and this in particular is very helpful to do just that.