Fanatical dropped a new d20 System book bundle yesterday.
For $12, you can get up to 30 books from Mongoose Publishing for the d20 system.
The d20 Adventurer and Dungeon Master Book Bundle contains a variety pack of Mongoose Publishing‘s early 2000s books. In the bundle, you’ll find a couple of books from their Quintessential series and a few in their Encyclopaedia Arcane series, but only a small sampling of each.
I’m disappointed the entire Encyclopaedia Arcane series wasn’t included in this bundle, as I think it’s some of the strongest material that Mongoose Publishing put out in the early 2000s.
d20 system book bundle – not D&D 5e
If you primarily play Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, these books are probably not going to be super helpful to you from a core mechanical standpoint.
These books are designed for the d20 System that piggybacked off Dungeons and Dragons 3.0/3.5, so they’re suitable for use with those systems (and can probably be modified to work with Pathfinder 1e with a little work).
That said, the Book of Strongholds and Dynasties includes great content that may be useful to DMs and players looking to do more with the new Bastion rules and domain play in the 5e 2024 update.
Books like Ships of War and Seas of Blood have some great ship designs that can plug easily into any seafaring campaign.
Unfortunately, Stormhaven: City of a Thousand Seas isn’t included in this bundle. It would have paired well with these two titles.
Ultimate series — hit and miss
In my opinion, the weakest offerings in the bundle are a couple of pieces of Mongoose Publishing’s Ultimate series.
More Ultimate Equipment is a 47 page pdf supplement released as an enhancement to the Ultimate Equipment Guide (not included in this bundle).
Some of the equipment has balance issues. Many of the items are clearly better than their core counterparts in every way, but a savvy DM can use them as cool powerful treasures rather than allowing them to be purchased on the open market.
In my opinion, it’s the best of the Ultimate books included in this bundle, with a neat selection of magical and mundane items, but it’s very short and there’s not a whole lot to the book.
Ultimate Prestige Classes, Volume 2 is probably my least favorite book in the bundle. While packed with flavor, the prestige classes in the book suffer major balance issues that make it difficult to use them in play. Most of them are tragically underpowered compared to prestige classes offered in WotC’s core 3.5 books.
The spellcaster prestige classes particularly suffer this fate, with very few of them offering full casting progression.
Final verdict – should you get this d20 system book bundle?
Overall, this is a pretty decent bundle if you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons 3.0/3.5.
30 books for $12 is a nice price, even if you don’t end up using all of them.
If you aren’t playing D&D 3.5 though, I think there are probably better books on DMsGuild for 5e that cover all the topics in this bundle in ways more suited to that system.
At the time I’m writing this article, there are a TON of TTRPG book bundles offered right now. I made a whole thread of them over on my Bluesky the other day.
A bundle like the Humble Bundle Pathfinder 2E bundle probably offers better bang-for-your-buck for most gamers.
I already own most of the books in this d20 system book bundle, and since I’ve mostly moved on to playing D&D 5e these days, it’s probably not a bundle I’m going to pick up.
That said, if you’re wild about D&D 3.0/3.5 or just like collecting older TTRPG books, grab the bundle. It’s a great price for what the bundle offers.