Pocketmod Spellbooks

Pre-generated spellbooks are a great way to speed up character creation time, particularly with new players who might baulk at the 30-odd spells available to a 1st-level wizard in the 5th edition of That Fantasy Tabletop RPG.

Now you can hand them a tiny book with the full text of each of their spells! If you're not familiar with how to make a pocketmod, simply print your preferred spellbooks one-sided on a sheet of A4 or Letter paper, then follow these instructions.

These spellbooks can easily exist within the game fiction. Maybe you see a novice mage in a backwater village, teaching herself simple dweomers with an outdated, fallen-apart edition of the very same textbook you received at your fancy Elven magical academy.

Perhaps spellbooks are mass-produced on the printing press. Only the well-to-do, or filthy rich adventurers who value a light load, have the inclination and resources to commission custom spellbooks anymore. The typical street-mage makes do with cheap paperback tomes, carrying several at once so they can cast all their favourite spells.

Maybe there's even an in-setting reason why a spellbook can contain no more than 6 spells (a limitation of the pocketmod format).

This is an ongoing project, which will soon have pocketmod spellbooks for multiple systems, not just 5th edition.

Future spellbooks might hold higher-level spells, new original spells, have illustrations, have special boons for the holder that cannot simply be transcribed to a new book. I'm open to further suggestions and collaborations.

Note this initial "proof of concept" batch does not contain any original spells, illustrations, or even original titles for each spellbook (they are all from this blog post by Gavin Norman).

edit: I've added a zip file containing each 5e spell available under the OGL, and the html file I use to generate these pocketmods. I've tried to make it so you don't need to know any html:

1. open the .txt files for the spells you want
2. open pocketmod_template.html in your preferred text editor (notepad will do)
3. copy all the text in your first spell's file
4. look for <div id="page_1" class="page"> in pocketmod_template.html
5. paste spell text between that tag and the closing </div> tag
6. repeat steps 3-5 for your other spells, and the other <div> containers
7. save the html file (preferably under a new name
8. open it in your browser of choice (I use Firefox), open the print dialog, look for an option to "print to PDF" or "save as PDF"

Good luck! I'll be working on a more in-depth guide for changing the CSS (e.g. to change font), inserting images, etc.