Hi All,
When creating a wizard of higher than 1st level, are there any guidelines concerning the number of spells they have in their spellbook? The PRG tells us they can add an extra two spells per level, but in reality wizards (especially adventuring PCs or potential villain) would have many opportunities to discover and copy more spells in their career before entering play.
Is it something factored into wealth-by-level?
Personally I'm interesting in any different approaches, be they RAW, from older or third party editions or homebrew approaches different GMs take.
I want to establish an approach with some element of random rolling for more own campaigns. I enjoy personalizing spellbooks and spell rosters in my game, and avoid 'he's a 15th level wizard so he knows all the 1st level spells' generalizations. I also find it's more fun for my players - if there's a spell they want to know they have to track it down. Even slaying relatively minor wizardly opponents brings a certain 'what's he got in his spellbook excitement'.
I simply allow new casters in my campaign to pay the cost for a scroll and scribing costs into a book, as part of their starting wealth. To counteract the fact that they may have found it cheaper if they were a normal character made at first, level, they never fail this check and waste materials either :)
Ita factored into wbl as wizards that level organically buy spells or find them in treasure.
Save yourself some trouble. Buy a few Blessed books and roll with it.
As a GM, I've had to do this a fair amount. The d20psfrd has a few spell books already made up. Admittedly, I don't go to this level of detail with the books. After reading about those ready-made spell books though, I'm starting to wonder if I should.
My party has been gathering a ton of books (probably several tons, actually) over the course of the campaign--lately, there've been a lot of spell books. I've been listing the spellbook with just the number of spells the wizard can cast /level + 1d4, instead of their actual spell list.
Book 5 has some suggestions -- namely some powerful wizards have all the spells from a given level (less a couple of schools), but doesn't provide much more detail than that.
For the curious, here's the list of mundane books they've collected (as gathered by a player in my game who is also a member on these boards). I once entertained the idea of detailing *all* the books picked up by the party in the game. After about the third room with "walls full of books" that kinda went by the wayside.
Wow! Love the library. The preconstructed spellbook link is also useful benchmark to work from.