d20 Books For Your TTRPG Game

Running a Dungeons & Dragons game this week? Make sure to throw 1d6 books into the next treasure pile!

Books cost 25 gp (minimum!) in 5e D&D, making them valuable treasures. They are far more interesting than sacks of coins or gemstones. Rarer books could cost orders of magnitude more, assuming the party is willing to track down interested buyers.

And, of course, the best part is loredumping your campaign notes if any player shows interest and reads it.

I’ve broken things into 4 categories to match the 5e Intelligence-based lore skills. As a fun exercise you could make a d100 table tailored to your TTRPG campaign setting by inventing 5 books for each topic. (Don’t forget to include scrawled journals owned by former bounty hunters or treasure seekers.)

d20 Book Topics:

  1. Arcana: Biographies of famous magic-users
  2. Arcana: Fanciful stories about magical items
  3. Arcana: Cosmology and the planes (1-astrology, 2-Inner Planes, 3-Outer Planes, 4-border planes, 5-other Primes, 6-Far Realms)
  4. Arcana: Practical magical theories, mathematics
  5. Arcana: Tales of magical creatures (1-aberrations, 2-constructs, 3-dragons, 4-elementals, 5-fey, 6-monstrosities, 7-oozes, 8-undead)
  6. History: Popular fiction (1-adventure, 2-romance, 3-mystery, 4-horror)
  7. History: History of lost civilizations (1-elves, 2-dwarves, 3-giants, 4-other humanoids)
  8. History: Law, civics, economics, architecture, language
  9. History: Geography, politics, nobility
  10. History: Tactics, warfare, historical battles
  11. Nature: Climate, natural philosophy
  12. Nature: Metallurgy, alchemy
  13. Nature: Wilderness survival, cooking, crafting
  14. Nature: Plant creatures, botany, herbology, farming almanacs
  15. Nature: Beast creatures, biology, anatomy, surgery
  16. Religion: A tract or religious text (1-lawful, 2-neutral, 3-chaotic)
  17. Religion: Songbook, poetry, music
  18. Religion: Stories of crusaders, saints, and their relics
  19. Religion: Academic treatise on religion or philosophy
  20. Religion: Lists of Outer Planar creatures (1-good, 2-evil, 3-law, 4-chaos)

I should also mention that I’ve put together a more comprehensive list of my TTRPG publications on Itch: https://koboldsquest.itch.io/