Hello and welcome to DnD Arts&Crafts. I am Michael and this is how to create Spell Cards to use in your DnD or other RPG Game.
I know that with our current technology using Smart Phones, Tablets and Laptops seems to be the prefered method of keeping track of characters sheets and spells. I guess I’m just old fashioned. I prefer physical/tangible objects.
During a recent game I had a player that was struggling to keep up with which spells he had available and how many slots for each level he had. I came up with a multi-pronged approach to fix this and here is the first step.
Creating business cards with the spells on them.
For my Spell Cards I used Avery Printable Business cards #5871.
These are for Laser Printers. If you have an Ink-Jet printer I’m sure there is a comparable product.
Once you have the Labels the next step is to design the spell cards. I’m going to attach several of the ones I made at the end of this post. Feel free to use them, but you may want to make yours slightly different or may not be using DnD Next and would want to use 3.5 spells or another system.
To design them go to : http://www.avery.com/avery/en_us/Templates-%26-Software/Software/Avery-Design–Print-Online.htm#
Enter your Product # in the box (5871) and hit the green GO Button.
Now, select the format you want to use. Top one on the right.
Business Cards, Wide, Print both sides.
Next, select what should be the second option from the left, the blank card.
and now you should be here, the design center
This is where you can design the front and back of the cards. For my cards I choose to print the Name of the spell in bold large letters near the center and include the level of the spell and type. I also included the class that spell is for. When there is overlap I printed multiple copies of that card. You’ll see why in a minute.
I had to play around with these settings for a while before I got exactly what I wanted. Here you can see the boxes I ended up with. These may not work for you, but they are what I settled on.
At the top left area of the design center this is a Quick Edit button. Click on this to be taken to a page that makes adding text much easier.
For 99% of all the cards I made (I didn’t make them for every spell, only for all the spells that my players currently needed) I was able to fit all of the text of the spell on the back though in some cases the font size had to be lowered to 6 (the lowest option available). I also had to sometimes change the wording to make it fit. Most notably if a spell could be cast as a Higher Level spell for greater effect I would just write “+1dX per higher slot level” which is much shorter than the verbiage they used.
Once you have the first page set up you can save it to your computer as an .AVERY file and then you can open and edit it as needed. The files i’m attaching below are .PDF and cannot be opened by AVERY. I was unable to attach any of my .AVERY saves (for some security reason) or I would have.
At this point it is just a matter of entering the text and printing the labels. Once Next is released I will do this for every spell but for now I would suggest only doing these for the spells you need.
Once I had them printed out I divided them into class and then by level in alphabetical order. To keep them in this order I’m using these 3×5 inch poly bags.
As you can see, that are just the right size and have an opaque area to write a description on. If I had printed every spell one bag may not have been big enough for all the spells for a class, but for the moment I was able to get all the spells needed for each of my three spell-casting players into one bag.
My next article Arts&Crafts article will show a couple different ways of using these cards along with dice to keep track of your daily resources.
Here are 9 pages of spells for you to print and use with the Avery Business card #5871, or to use as examples of how to make your own.
Spells page 1 note: I didn’t start out using the class/level designation. This file only has level
Hope you found this article useful.
Thanks!!
~Michael
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