Dungeons & Dragons homebrew spells!

Hey everyone! Yes, this blog is still alive and kicking! I must admit, it's been quite a while, I'm more active on Instagram and Facebook these days (it's so much easier and quicker than writing complete blog posts), but I finally decided to write a complete post once more.

For I think two years now I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons with some friends. Unfortunately, it's been more than a year since we've seen each other in real life, with Covid-19 and all, and we've been playing online ever since. I have some experience with D&D because of the Baldur's Gate videogames, and when I was in college I also played Cyberpunk 2020 with friends, but this is my first experience with actual real life Dungeons & Dragons.

If you follow me on Instagram (wich you really should!) you probably noticed I made a few homebrew spells recently. That's the beauty of role playing games, they perfect for creating your own content. So, let's take a look at how I make these spells!

Step by step

I've got plenty of ideas; at the moment I have only two completed spells, but I've got ideas for plenty more. The only limit here is your imagination! I try to add a little bit of humor to my creations, and some pop culture references. For example, the reference on my "Rogue Anvil" spell is pretty clear (and if you don't get it, shame on you!).

For spells that deal damage, a good approach in my opinion is to make it a low level spell, and make it scale at higher levels. Many D&D spells do this, it's a good way of creating spells that always remain useful. A good example is the Magic Missile spell. You can start using it straight away at level one, and at higher levels, it fires more missiles, dealing more damage. The next spell, "Poquito Cabeza", doesn't deal any damage, it's more of a utility spell, so it doesn't scale at higher levels.

Many spells also require some sort of material component. If you're not familiar with D&D, spell components are often summarized as "VSM", meaning "verbal, somatic, material". "Verbal" means a spoken component, "somatic" means gestures and "material" is pretty self explanatory. Why are these things important? A spell with a verbal component (pretty much all spells) can't be used when you are silenced, for example! Materials aren't that important, because most spellcasters use some sort of arcane focus wich replaces the material component most of the time.

Drawing

When I've decided the effects and description of the spell, I first start on the artwork. I don't want my spells to be just a sheet of text, I want a nice drawing to go with it. I must admit, I'm not that good at drawing, but I'm working on it. I try to draw at least a few times every week, even if it's just some random doodles, and I'm progressing slowly but steadily. The anvil for my "Rogue Anvil" spell was quite easy, the head for "Poquito Cabeza" was a bit more challenging, but I'm quite satisfied with the result.

I use 200 gram/sqm mixed media paper and 3H and HB pencils for sketching, and then I ink everything with burnt umber acrylic ink. I prefer this color over black because of the resemblance to walnut ink. I use two different pen nibs, one for the thick outlines, and a thinner one for small details.

When the ink has properly dried, I erase all my pencil lines and use the same ink for filling and shading. The acrylic ink I use is insanely intense, and can be thinned a lot and still produce vibrant colors! Although it works well, I might try watercolor paint in the future, because there's one huge disadvantage to this acrylic ink: it dries almost instantly! Even when the paper is still wet, the ink has already dried and is impossible to blend or feather with a wet brush. It works if I wet the paper a bit first, and keep a separate wet brush on hand, but once the ink has set, it has set!

One more thing I should add is this. I always scan every step of the drawing process. The pencil drawing, ink drawing (several times) and sometimes even different stages of the shading step. If I mess up, at least I still have my scans!

Writing

Next comes the most important part: writing! I've been dabbling in calligraphy for quite a long time, and now it finally comes in handy. For the spell text itself, I use the Carolingian alphabet, and for the title the Rotunda Gothic alphabet. Even though I like the look of Gothic-style alphabets, they are hard to read in large blocks of text.

I use a 3mm wide nib for the main text, and a 4mm wide one for the title, and the same ink I use for drawing. With the 3mm nib, my line height is 27mm! Of course, this is waaay to big to fit all of my text on a single sheet of paper. For my "Rogue Anvil" spell, I used about four sheets of paper (front and back!) to write all of my text. I scan my text and scale everything down quite a lot (about 12% of the original size).

What I found takes the most time is not the writing. It's drawing all the lines! For each line of text, I have to draw three lines, for the correct height of the letters and all ascenders and descenders. In addition, I also draw some line to keep my letters at a consistent angle. Really, once you've gotten the hang of a certain alphabet and can write it at a reasonable speed, drawing all the lines takes more time than the actual writing!

For future projects, I'm going to try different other fonts as well. For example, the Uncial and Half-Uncial scripts are very beautiful, and still very readable. For the title, I'm gonna try different types of Gothic fonts. A really nice one is Batarde, but it's a difficult one, because it requires you to rotate the nib as you write, so I'll need to practice that one quite a bit!

Scanning and arranging

With everything written and drawn, I scan everything, scale it down and arrange it to fit an A4-sized sheet of paper. I scan it at 600 dpi and save all my original scans as-is, without any editing. Any editing is done on copies.

For the main text, I scale everything to about 12 percent of the original size. It's a comfortable size to read, and it still looks like hand-written text. The header text of the spell is a bit bigger, just like the title. For the header and the title, I add some shadow. I use Gimp for all my image editing, and the trick to make the white background of the scans disappear is setting the layer mode to "Darken only". I copy my original text, offset it a bit, and then blur it and adjust the transparency.

Arranging the text takes quite a bit of time. Lots and lots of cutting and pasting! Besides the drawing I made a decorative page border (took me a long time to get it right!) and some horizontal borders. When everything was finished, I printed it on thick parchment paper, and I really like the way it turned out! 

I also added a wax seal in the bottom right corner; this gives it a nice touch of authenticity, and of course my personal logo! I had a stamp custom engraved, and it turned out quite nice. I used a bar of sealing wax with a wick, like a candle, that I had lying around, but I found it messy to use. It takes long to melt, and you have to be careful you don't set the paper on fire! Perhaps I should get some of those sealing wax sticks you can use with a hot glue gun.

If you're interested in my spells, you can find them in my Etsy Shop, along with all my other stuff!