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I have always prided myself for knowing (at least vaguely enough to be able to google it when needed) every piece of D&D 3.5 official content - but today by a random chance I found something called the Mind's Eye Archive, which seems to be official content but never printed or released as part of any book.

I have no idea how I missed that but now I wonder whether I'm missing more.

Was there any other official content (official as in released by WotC) that only exists in some article, webpage, or whatnot?

Also if there indeed is more, why wasn't it simply released as another book? (Not that I'm complaining - free content is good - I'm just surprised.)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Those only say how to access archival articles on WotC site. And I'm asking which articles or article series contain additional official content for the game. And that's IF AND ONLY IF archival articles on WotC site are the only source of official content outside the books which might as well not be the case. In which case I want to know about those other sources too. \$\endgroup\$
    – Nec Xelos
    Oct 27, 2019 at 17:06
  • \$\begingroup\$ Sorry! The new copy link button has screwed up my routine: You may be interested in this question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Hey I Can Chan
    Oct 27, 2019 at 17:11

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The Guide to Free D&D should cover all of them, since Wizards didn’t charge for the non-book options. Note that the list makes no attempt to separate things that are also available in some book from the things that are exclusively found online. Still, since it covers everything (probably, though extremely obscure offerings like the subject of this question may well be missed), with enough effort you can comb through it to find the ones you were unaware of.

Dragon and Dungeon magazines are the other major possible examples, though I’m sure you’re aware of them and they were published under license by Paizo, not by Wizards of the Coast.

The only other thing to be aware of is the various campaign settings that Wizards licensed off to other companies, which have a kind of nebulous “official-dom.” Most of those were published in books—though not by Wizards of the Coast—but athas.org, which is the “official” 3.5e version of the Dark Sun setting, never offered its PDFs in print to the best of my knowledge. From what I understand, one of the contributors to athas.org was a Wizards of the Coast employee—that’s partially how they got the “official” status—but the PDFs there aren’t Wizards of the Coast products, and aside from that one employee, have not been written, edited, or endorsed by the Wizards of the Coast staff. (To editorialize a little, their quality is also not nearly up to the standards of most Wizards products, though of course stand-out examples of terrible quality can also be found in Wizards’ catalog.)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ So free D&D content guide contains every "article" from WotC and Athas contains everything Dark Sun setting related. So far so good! Is there anything else out there that can claim it's official status? You said "various campaign settings" but mentioned only Dark Sun directly. Quoting the Queen: I WANT IT ALL! \$\endgroup\$
    – Nec Xelos
    Oct 27, 2019 at 21:22
  • \$\begingroup\$ @NecXelos Oriental Adventures, Ghostwalk, Kalamar maybe, etc. have various maybe-claims to something approaching official status. Those all were published as books, though. I think there was a athas.org-like Ravenloft PDF floating around though. \$\endgroup\$
    – KRyan
    Oct 27, 2019 at 21:48
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks for that. I'm digging through all that right now. Still don't understand why things like Epic Insights series or Mind's Eye series were not released as books (free or not, but more organized). \$\endgroup\$
    – Nec Xelos
    Oct 27, 2019 at 22:46
  • \$\begingroup\$ @NecXelos Because organization costs, actually costs quite a lot. Typesetting is an art, there isn’t exactly a glut of typesetters out there, and it’s an arduous, exacting process. For that matter, it was generally expected that books would be held to higher quality, and while most of the Mind’s Eye stuff is pretty good in my experience, to make sure that it’s up to snuff also costs quite a bit of money. And there just wasn’t demand for a lot of this stuff; psionics has always been kind of niche and epic play was almost never used by anybody (probably because it never worked). \$\endgroup\$
    – KRyan
    Oct 27, 2019 at 23:29
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    \$\begingroup\$ @NecXelos Everything printed for 3.5 by Wizards of the Coast should be in this list. Although it lacks the Wizards of the Coast and Mirrorstone Web site stuff, that list does contain the names of licensed product lines (but not actual titles) and has links to the fan-created sites like Athas.org that received permission from Wizards of the Coast to produce official-ish material. (Dude who made that list is pretty thorough. :-)) \$\endgroup\$
    – Hey I Can Chan
    Oct 27, 2019 at 23:43

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