Your favourite third-party material?

[Fizban]

The magic book for Scarred Lands, one Relics and Rituals, is packed with plenty of flavor. Unfortunately it is not packed with particularly good mechanics, and indeed is specifically and intentionally devoid of prices for its magic items. I remember going back over it and finding like, exactly one spell worth filing the serial numbers off. Great fluff, made me interested in the rest of the setting (which is apparently spread over some number of books including more than one monster book, but no actual central setting book), but it is what it is.

By stipulating 3rd party, it's hardly a surprise the responses so far: most 3rd party stuff for 3.x is from very early in the edition, so their power levels are often lower than even the first set of Completes, and that's on top of their being so much further from the public eye, and usually rather small. If you want power and you're willing to consider Pathfinder, suddenly you have "3rd party" rehashes of like half a dozen 1st party systems from 3.x, and also Spheres of Power- practically an entire new game system itself. And thus, it's spheres every other post or more.


As for myself, for all that I've cribbed a bit here and there from several 3rd party books, I can't say any of them are really favorites. Favorite implies celebration, or at least recommendation, of a significant portion, and most of them just tend to have far too few things that are actually usable even when the vibes are great.

• Fantasy Flight's Sorcery and Steam is the only book that has done guns close to right (yes, they do not ignore armor, because early guns do not ignore armor, and the game gets all sorts of messed up if you just start ignoring armor). I suppose their Elemental Lore and Twisted Lore (aberrations, oozes, and shapeshifters) have some nifty monsters, and their Path of Faith had some small god rules where you could beseech them for boons directly.
• Malhavoc Press's Books of Eldritch Might 1-3 had good vibes, even if most of the mechanics end up overwrought and undercooked.
• Mongoose's Encyclopaedia Arcane series: Crossbreeding is a whole chimera making system (abusable as anything else), if you want rules to excuse those sorts of things existing. They have one about golems which was nice as a system, though being less esoteric than Crossbreeding it's more obvious you probably don't want to use it.
• The Warcraft Setting books had some cool stuff and good vibes, back before WoW went and WoW'd everything up- except ironically, the WoW'd books have some of the better mechanics 'cause second try. The best steam armor I've seen. Hard to argue with titles like Magic and Mayhem and More Magic and Mayhem.
• Dragonmech is cool, but their central tech class is deeply nonfunctional. Similarly, Iron Kingdoms sounds good on paper with its magitech, but falls apart upon inspection.
• If we're including adventures, The War of the Burning Sky is pretty good for most of the run, and The World's Largest Dungeon is pretty terrible but oh so interesting in its terribleness.

But generally, when I've gone digging through 3rd party stuff to see what sort of things I just can't leave out (to port into or at least mention in my tweaks and brew), there's really never large enough chunks of books to mention. Specific spells, feats, items, etc here and there.


Now if you want to hear about favorite non-1st-party content, I've read all sorts of amazing quality homebrew that puts most 3rd party and often 1st party material to shame.