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Cover of the 1985 Unearthed Arcana

Unearthed Arcana is the title shared by two hardback books published for different versions of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Neither version of Unearthed Arcana should be confused with Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed.

The original Unearthed Arcana (ISBN 0-88038-084-5) was written by Gary Gygax and published by TSR, Inc. in 1985. Announced by its author as "an interim volume to expand the Dungeon Masters Guide and Players Handbook",^[1] it was written for use with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (a.k.a "1st Edition") rules. Divided into two sections (one for players and one for Dungeon Masters), the 128-page book provided new races, character classes, and other expansion material.

Although much of the material in Unearthed Arcana had previously appeared in Dragon magazine,^[2] and was therefore familiar to many D&D players, TSR (and the RPGA) considered publication in a rulebook format necessary before the material could be used in tournament standard play.^[3] Unearthed Arcana, therefore, is the publication that made this material an official part of the AD&D game system.

The original Unearthed Arcana is noteworthy for the numbers of errors contained in its text. Even some positive reviews of the book pointed out the considerable number of mistakes.^[4] An errata article was published in Dragon magazine,^[5] but the errata was not incorporated into later printings of the manual.^[6]

Gary Gygax intended to incorporate the material from Unearthed Arcana into revised versions of the Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide,^[7] but left TSR shortly after announcing the project.^[8] The new classes and character races were, in fact, left out of the next version of the Players Handbook, as they were considered unbalanced by the AD&D 2nd Edition's designers.^[9]

The second book called Unearthed Arcana (ISBN 0-7869-3131-0) was written by Andy Collins, Jesse Decker, David Noonan, and Rich Redman, and published in 2004 by Wizards of the Coast, for use with the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragon rules. Where the original Unearthed Arcana had simply expanded the rules and options of the core game, this 224-page supplement was aimed at providing an extensive list of variant rules and options to change the standard game's baseline. In fact, the volume of options added were intentionally excessive. A DM who reads the book must be prepared to, quoting the book itself "Drink from the fire hose", or only use a few of the numerous variants.^[10]

• The Acaeum: Later AD&D Manuals, retrieved June 1, 2006