Is it legal to buy filled out spellbooks?

[magicalmagicman]

The d20srd says filled out spellbooks cost 10,000gp and you sell it at half price. Does this mean you can custom order a spell book filled with the spells you want for a one time cost of 10,000gp? That's 11 level 9 spells for 10,000gp, while 3 level 9 scrolls will be more expensive than that. Granted, scrolls are useable and spellbooks are not.

[sideswipe]

well... thats the price of all the ink and a free book. assuming all the spells were "leveling up" spells. then yes it would be worth that.

in reality spellbooks usually cost a tonne more then that. i cant imagine a wizard selling his lifes work for 5k. when he could make that in 20 mins.

i would never allow that.

[Zanos]

That's their sell cost at the 50% reduction PCs have. To buy a full spellbook would presumably cost 10k, and also only counts the value of the ink within the book.

If there's any decent amount of prepared arcane casters in your world, you can pay other wizards or trade spells with them. According to the srd "In most cases, wizards charge a fee for the privilege of copying spells from their spellbooks. This fee is usually equal to the spell’s level × 50 gp."

Combined with a blessed book (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Blessed_Book), you can get 1000 spell levels for 62.5k total.

[Squark]

Sort of. That's the market price for selling an enemy spellcaster's full spell book after you're done with it. The price of commissioning a filled spellpook isn't given- It would probably be up to the GM.

[Troacctid]

If you could custom-order a spellbook, you would still have to copy the spells into your own book in order to prepare them, so you would still have to expend the normal costs for scribing new spells into your book. (While you can prepare spells from a borrowed spellbook, it only works on spells that you already know.)

[sleepyphoenixx]

You'd have to find someone selling a spellbook that has exactly the spells you want. Suffice to say, it probably won't happen unless your DM is very accomodating.

Also, the price is for a spellbook filled by a wizard who copies them from another book (100 pages at 50gp/page for copying an existing book). If he sells it at 5000gp he won't actually make any profit, and if he needs to buy some spells as scrolls or buy them from another wizard things get even more expensive. It would also take at least 1200 work hours to fill the book, and frankly wizards have better things to do with their time.

So it's very unlikely that you'll actually find someone writing spellbooks to order. What you may be able to get is used books sold as loot at the local magic store, if your DM feels like making up some filled spellbooks for sale. If you're lucky they'll have some spells you want and it's cheaper than scrolls, but the only advantage over paying another wizard to copy from his book is that you don't need to spend the time to scribe it yourself.

You would also have to master the book with a relatively high spellcraft check to prepare spells from it, and that process takes 1 week + 1day/spell in the book, so you're trading some savings in gold for a time investment.

[Zanos]

If you could custom-order a spellbook, you would still have to copy the spells into your own book in order to prepare them, so you would still have to expend the normal costs for scribing new spells into your book. (While you can prepare spells from a borrowed spellbook, it only works on spells that you already know.)
That's trivial if you have a bit of time.

Mastering a Foreign Spellbook: Instead of laboriously copying each spell of interest from a found spellbook into his own, a wizard might instead make a dedicated effort to master the spellbook’s particular ciphers and notations. This procedure is sometimes referred to as becoming attuned to the spellbook (although it’s a matter of time and study, not a mystical process). Mastering a spellbook requires a successful Spellcraft check (DC 25 + the level of the highest-level spell in the book) and takes one week plus one day per spell contained within. If the wizard succeeds, he can use the foreign spellbook as his own, requiring no further Spellcraft checks to prepare or copy spells from it. If he fails, he cannot attempt to master that spellbook again until he gains at least 1 more rank in Spellcraft.

[magicalmagicman]

Captured spellbooks can be sold for a gp amount equal to one-half the cost of purchasing and inscribing the spells within (that is, one-half of 100 gp per page of spells). A spellbook entirely filled with spells (that is, with one hundred pages of spells inscribed in it) is worth 5,000 gp.

Right, 10k for a filled out spell book.

edited first post to fix that.



in reality spellbooks usually cost a tonne more then that. i cant imagine a wizard selling his lifes work for 5k. when he could make that in 20 mins.

It's not his life's work. It's just a profession. You scribe a spell book while consulting your library of spell books. And it doesn't cost him XP.

[icefractal]

You could get a fully filled spellbook for that price, even at the 50% sell price if you have guild/college contacts rather than getting it through an intermediary. However, that's not the same as one being custom filled with exactly the spells you want. The price is for a book that may or may not have what the buyer wants, kind of a "random pack", like you were buying CCG cards.

Having one custom made would probably be somewhat more expensive, since they're compiling it specifically to order rather than just giving you whichever un-needed one they have lying around. I'd say that would always be at full price (10K), plus you'd need to pay for access to the spells you want (meaning either trading access to your own spells of equivalent level, or paying the standard fee).

I've been meaning to work up an actual system for trading spells, that takes into account different amounts of spell access. A large Wizard's college is likely to have whatever spells you're looking for, and might trade them at a generous rate, but it's also less likely that you have anything they don't already possess, for example.

[sleepyphoenixx]

It's not his life's work. It's just a profession. You scribe a spell book while consulting your library of spell books. And it doesn't cost him XP.

Creating custom spellbooks is a life's work. You spend months just filling a single one even if you do nothing else with your time, and the profit is practically nonexistent even if you copy from existing books. You pay 5000gp for scribing costs alone, add to that the cost of a spellbook and you actually lose money when you sell them without haggling.

If you actually want to earn money by selling spells you're much better off just copying your spellbooks once and then renting access to your copies so they can invest the time and money to scribe themselves.


If you're short on time but need new spells you can either take the Arcane Shorthand feat (Dr#358, half the time and cost), get a Necklace of the Phantom Library (Explorers Handbook, 8 hours and no cost to add new spells, but more than twice the cost of a Blessed Book/page) or buy a Quill of Rapid Scrivening (DMG2, 10 minutes, only copies spells from scrolls, wizard spells only).

If you're short on money nothing beats the Blessed Book (62,5gp/page if you copy from another wizard), except of course looting/stealing and mastering books off of other wizards. You can also get 2 levels of Geometer (CArc, only 1 page/spell regardless of level).

So the cheapest you can get is Geometer 2 copying from another wizard into a Blessed Book at 12,5gp + 50gp/spell level.
The fastest is 10 minutes/spell, but you'll have to copy from scrolls which is expensive (27000gp for the Quill + scroll costs).
The Necklace of the Phantom Library is a good middle ground at 8 hours/spell for 80gp/spell level.