Sixth Edition
Compiled and edited by
Boudewijn Wayers

Prologue

As I promised over a year ago, I am now - finally! - posting the Great Net Prayerbook, currently at its sixth edition. This version has a lot of new prayers, compared to the fifth edition of the Prayerbook. Almost all prayers were edited by me to make them somewhat more legible (for example: SOME OF THEM WERE COMPLETELY CAPITALISED, some of the prayers contained lines that did not fit on one line, while others contianed much speeling missteaks). Please, read this prologue completely before continuing to read on. It contains an introduction to the Great Net Prayerbook.

Copyrights and Other Legal Stuff

Note that a lot of the prayers contained in the Great Net Prayerbook have been copyrighted by their respective authors. Starting this edition, these authors - when known - have been mentioned along with the prayers they contributed. Permission has been granted by these authors to copy the prayers for your personal use. Also, you may freely distribute copies of their work, so long as you do not prevent others from doing the same, and no commercial or barter considerations are obtained in exchange for such copies.

When you distribute these prayers, you must distribute them in whole, unchanged. Specifially, this file containing the copyright conditions, and the names of the editors must be included. Make sure that you distribute the entire package the way you have received it yourself. You may not claim these prayers as having originated from yourself.

Once in a while, the Great Net Prayerbook will be updated. Because of the large amount of work this involves, and the few spare time we all have, this will normally take quite a while. For example, it took me about two years to finish the sixth edition after I published the fifth edition. Note, however, that since the fifth edition, the entire layout has been changed, so these two years of work have not been in vain. I have never committed myself to a publishing date, and my successor (see the epilogue for more information) will not likely commit himself to a date either. Please, be gentle with him: don't rush him. Only the fact that he has taken much of the attention off ny back over the last half year or so has provided me with the time needed to finish this sixth edition. Whenever he thinks he has accumulated enough new prayers to warrant a next edition, there will be a subsequent one, and it will be posted, and most probably put on various ftp and www sites.

Another remark about copyrights: the prayerbook has been checked as thoroughly as possible not to contain any prayers that have been published in any official TSR publication before. The fifth edition of the Great Net Prayerbook appeared to contain no less than six of these copyrighted prayers, which have been duly removed. If we want to retain our own copyrights, we must respect those of others.

D&D, Dungeons & Dragons, AD&D, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, TSR, Dragonlance, Greyhawk and probably lots of other words used here are either registered or non-registered trademarks owned by TSR, Inc. They are used in this work without permission, but this should not be regarded as an attempt to challenge their rights.

Note that this work can and should not be used without TSR's excellent Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, which have inspired a whole generation of roleplayers. Let me quote a passage from the Player's Handbook, which says:

"The AD&D game is continually evolving - each player and each DM adds his own touch to the whole. No list of special thanks can be complete without recognizing the most important contributors of all - the millions of players who, over the years, have made the AD&D game what it is today."

Let's all cooperate to make the game even greater! See below, under contributors, for an attempt to thank at least a few of the millions mentioned above.

Other Net Resources

This edition of the Great Net Prayerbook now includes all prayers from the Net Carnal Knowledge Guide and the Net Guide to Alcohol, both edited by Reid Bluebaugh ( c2mxblue@fre.fsu.umd.edu), and all prayers from the first edition of the Net Dark Sun Resource Book, edited by John Martz (john_martz@unc.edu). Note that this means that you will sometimes have to refer to these sources to look up terms. Some prayers that were written for the Dark Sun world might have to be adjusted when used on another world. This is, of course, up to individual DMs.

Note further that prayers from the Tome of Mighty Magic (another Internet resource, not the TSR book) have not been included in this edition. One reason for this is that all these prayers were lacking most second-edition terms and were often too high or low level, the other reason was that its copyright status is uncertain. Anyway, the Tome of Mighty Magic can easily be used on its own, if necessary.

Contributors

Many thanks to Jim Lewallen (cscon113@uoft02.utoledo.edu) and Michael Lerner (cl115826@ulkuvx.bitnet ), who respectively accumulated and posted the starting lot of these prayers. When they started out, they were going to put each author's name next to each prayer. Then they started getting two or more copies of the same prayer, and decided to just put their names in one big list. Unfortunately, this meant that when I took over, I was unable to trace most of the prayers back to their original authors. The following people have contributed to the Great Net Prayerbook, but I have been unable to link them to any specific prayer. Still, I would like to thank them for posting or e-mailing their prayers (there must probably be some people whose names are missing even here: my apologies to them all):

Name Unknown	mrspock@hubcap.uucp
Gary Brewerton	g.p.brewerton@lut.ac.uk
Jon Broadfield	alh92@campus.swarthmore.edu
Julian Coleman	j.d.coleman@newcastle.ac.uk
Brain Dawson	Address unknown
Matthew D. Goldman	goldman@cray.com
David Krikorian	dkk@mit.edu
Phrixus	ars3_cif@uhura.cc.rochester.edu
Ronald P. Sater	sater@cis.ohio-state.edu
Ed Semeniuk	esemeniuk@dahlia.waterloo.edu

Special thanks should go to Glen Barnett (barnett@agsm.unsw.edu.au), who didn't contribute any prayers, but instead sent me some 60 kByte of constructive criticism, which has proven very helpful in my editing work.

On some ftp-sites, you might find some of these prayers as they have originally appeared, including the name of the one who posted them first. Lots of prayers have been e-mailed to me directly, and won't be found on the ftp-sites, except for in this or another edition of the Great Net Prayerbook. Note that where you found this collection of prayers, you should also find a file containing all prayers in their original form, if I could trace it back.

Editor's Notes

After receiving these prayers, I read them all, edited them to get a uniform format, and to make them more legible. Also, note that, starting the fifth edition, I did a lot of editing, and not only in a lot of obvious cases of spelling errors.

Especially, from the fifth edition on, I have tried to remove all traces that were left over from first edition AD&D, and to change everything to second edition terms and format. Should you find any remains of or references to the first edition, please send the editor e-mail saying so, so it can be corrected in a subsequent edition.

There are also some Quest spells, which have been introduced into second edition AD&D in the Tome of Magic.

Where no level was indicated, I just guessed what level the spell was to be in. Furthermore, in those many cases where either school, range, area of effect, or anything the like were missing, I just used my own brilliant mind and made them up.

My Editing

I have edited most prayers quite a lot. These changed include, but are not limited to the following:

All references to gender have been generalized, where the text allowed for this (I have removed all references to "her" and "she" for uniformity reasons, since "he" can, in English, refer to both men and women).
Hopefully, all first-edition notations, most notably the "segments" and the infamous "yards"-notation have been removed.
The use of capitals is as uniform as I could manage in the little time I have (if you notice, for example, any capitalized names of spells, or spells that have not been italicized, please drop me a line).
All spelling has been and will be changed to British English, not American English (at least, according to my speller).
Talking about spelling: everything should have been spell-checked. If you still notice any errors, again, please don't hesitate to write the editor.
The use of abbrevations has been made more uniform; have a look at the standards I try to keep to get an impression how exactly.
I've tried to uniformise the references to foot/feet etc.

For a comprehensive list of things that are checked before a new prayer is added, contact the editor.

Terminology Used, often Confused

Note that the Player's Handbook clearly mentions that if a prayer does not mention otherwise, its range is always limited to the priest's sight, next to any other restrictions. Furthermore, when there is a reference to a person, what is meant is any bipedal human, demihuman, or humanoid of man-size or smaller, such as dwarves, elves, gnolls, halflings, and kobolds. Only intelligent undead should be considered persons.

I have used the following two notations when naming prayers: II and [2]. Let me explain why I make this distinction. When a prayer is named, for example, magic bolt [2], the [2] indicates that this is a prayer of about the same strength of an already existing prayer of the same name. The corresponding [1] prayer can be found in either the Great Net Prayerbook or in an official TSR publication. In the latter case, the original prayer obviously has no [1] to its name. Prayers that were almost exact copies of existing prayers have not been included. When a prayer is labeled magic bolt II, the II indicates that this is greater-strength version of an alreadly existing prayer. Again, if the original prayer was from an official publication, the original won't have a I attached. Note that most of these prayers just increase the range, damage, or something like that, and thus aren't very interesting. Sometimes, however, one of these prayers is really original. Since I don't want to be a judge on which prayers to include and which to exclude, I have decided not to remove any prayers at all.

A Final Remark

Dungeon Masters, you should be sure to check these prayers before introducing them into your campaign (preferrably before even showing them to your players), and make sure they are right for the way you run your campaign. Some are awfully powerful (if not munchkin-like) but others could use a little more kick, that is for you to decide. If you find that some prayers seem far too powerful as given, but you don't have time to adjust the range, duration, area of effect, material components and the prayer effects as carefully as you would like, you might consider just increasing the level of the prayer, to be more in accord with prayers of similar power. Similarly, you may want to reduce the level of other prayers. Don't let your players talk you into introducing a prayer at too low a level.

Boudewijn Wayers, Keeper of the Great Net Spellbook and the Great Net Prayerbook.
March, 1995.

Sixth Edition Compiled and edited by Boudewijn Wayers