Splatbooks are supplements devoted to a particular character type, providing additional background details and rules options. For example, a swords-and-sorcery fantasy role-playing game might offer splatbooks for each of the races in the setting, such as humans, dwarves, or elves.
Because they offer new options for player characters, splatbooks are largely marketed towards players rather than GMs, which has contributed to their popularity.[1]
Etymology[]
The first game to use splatbooks was Dungeons & Dragons, but the term splatbook was coined in the 1990s to refer to supplements published by White Wolf Game Studio for its World of Darkness games. Many of these books were titled using similar patterns: clanbooks for Vampire: The Masquerade, tribebooks for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, tradition books for Mage: The Ascension, and so forth. In newsgroups, these were called *books (the asterisk on a computer keyboard being used as a wildcard character). Since the asterisk is also known as a "splat", this gave rise to the term "splatbook".[1]
The term splatbook is not used officially by publishers, but has been used extensively in RPG circles. After being coined, it was used retrospectively for similar books, such as The Complete Book of Dwarves from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition. It has also been applied to more recent products, including several product lines for Dungeons & Dragons, such as the "X & Y" series (e.g. Sword & Fist and Tome & Blood) for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition and the "Complete X" series (e.g. Complete Warrior and Complete Divine) and the "Races of X" series (e.g. Races of Stone and Races of the Wild) for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Ross Winn (2004-11-11). "The Vorpal Sword Went "Snicker-Splat"". RPG.net. Retrieved 2020-01-19.
External links[]
- Splatbook at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.