What are sources for Magic Items that are not adventure-specific?

Question

As a DM, I like to award items to my players. These may not be in the module I'm currently running, so I often draw from the DMG. I recently found that XGtE also has a list of magical items (this shows both lists).

I can use D&D Beyond to filter magical items by sourcebook, but there are a million books there now, and I believe most of them are adventure books. I don't want to include these in my aggregated list of magical items, as items are probably adventure dependent. Ideally, I'd like a list of adventure-agnostic magic items for D&D 5e (unlike this question, which wants all items sorted by rarity).

What books should I buy to have all the magical items that are not adventure-specific? So far, DMG and XGtE seem obvious, but I'm not sure what others to include or not (for example, I know SCAG has new spells, but does it have new items?).

Answer 1

You can use the query browser on DnD Beyond to filter these out.

Open up the browser and select "Advanced Filters", and in the box labeled "Source", select which source(s) you want items to appear from.

For example, limiting the source category to Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes gives two results:

• Greater Silver Sword
• Infernal tack

So just use that to select any/all books and ignore the adventures, and that should give you all book, non adventure magic items. This does presume that you know which are books and which are adventures, however. To get that information, also on DnD Beyond, you can select "sources-> Sourcebooks (View All), and that will give you the list. Once you have the list, you can click on the + sign on the right of the results and it will show you what sourcebook it is contained within.

Current sourcebook list (9.17.2019):

• Player's Handbook
• Dungeon Master's Guide
• Monster Manual
• Basic Rules
• Acquisitions Incorporated **
• Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica **
• Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes **
• Xanathar's Guide to Everything **
• Volo's Guide to Monsters **
• Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide
• Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron **
• The Tortle Package

** - Has new magic items (I excluded DMG, PHB, Basic Rules and MM. How I got it was essentially searching all, and as I identified a book as having any magical item, I removed it from the list and requested a new filtered search. You can use this technique for spells, as well.)

This link will show the current list of magical items contained within all those books. You can unselect the ones you know of (Such as PHB, DMG, etc) to get whichever books you don't already have/know about.

Also note: The method will remain the same, but each new sourcebook added will need to be searched when it comes out for new magic items/spells/whatever.