Splatbook

Splatbooks are sourcebooks devoted to a particular facet, character class, or fictional faction in a role-playing game, providing additional background details and rules options. For example, a "swords and sorcery" fantasy game might offer splatbooks for each of the races in the setting: humans, dwarves, elves, and others. The first game to use such books was Dungeons & Dragons.

The term "Splatbook" originally rose to describe the sourcebooks published by White Wolf Game Studio for its World of Darkness games. Many of these books were titled using similar patterns: "clan"books in , "tribe"books for , "tradition" books for , 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". [ [http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/edit11nov04.html] Winn, Ross. 'The Vorpal Sword Went "Snicker-Splat"', RPG.net, Nov 11,2004]

This term is also used for e.g. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books such as "The Complete Book of Dwarves" and "Complete Arcane", or the numerous Codices for "Warhammer Fantasy Battle" and "Warhammer 40,000". By extension, the term "splat" is used for the character class described in a splatbook.

Splatbooks are alternately desired and reviled by gamers, who see them alternately as valuable resources for creating their characters and a craven attempt to milk players for extra money for things that either should have been included in the main system resource books or devalue the things that were.Fact|date=May 2008 Some complain that some splatbooks are unbalancing to the game as additional powers are given to the group focused on in the book to provide players with incentive to purchase the book.Fact|date=May 2008

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