D&D Spelldeck

While Dungeons and Dragons is great fun, it can be a chore to wade through the Player's Handbook to find out what one of your spells does. This tool attempts to make this easier by allowing you to create a deck of spells; a pile of cards with all your spells and the most important information about them so you can speed up the game.

Preview

A card looks something like this. As you can see, some (many) cards need to have their text truncated because there is simply too much to put on a small card.

Usage

The first step is to create the appropriate LaTeX spell list. To do so, use the generate.py program. The output of this program should be stored in a file called spells.tex. By default, this selects all spells in the game so if you want to be economical you can filter them by class, level or school. Some examples of this:

# This simply outputs all possible spells.
$ ./generate.py > tex/spells.tex

# This outputs all spells for bards and fighters
$ ./generate.py -c bard -c fighter > tex/spells.tex

# This outputs all spells of levels 0, 2, 5, 6 and 7
$ ./generate.py -l 0 -l 2 -l 5-7 > tex/spells.tex

# This outputs all warlock spells of levels 0 through 3
$ ./generate.py -c warlock -l 0-3 > tex/spells.tex

After this is finished, use your favourite LaTeX compiler to first compile cards.tex which will produce a 8.89x6.35cm page for every spell (same size as a Magic: The Gathering card so your sleeves will work!). Then, compile printable.tex which will arrange them neatly on a sheet of paper so you can print them and then cut them to size. I like to use the following command:

$ latexmk -xelatex -cd tex/cards.tex tex/printable.tex

Paper sizes

If you are so uncivilised that you don't use the A4 paper format, you should change this in the printable.tex file. You may also need to change the number of cards on each page.

Fonts

These cards look best, in my opinion, if printed in the font Wizards of the Coast uses for the Player's Handbook, which is Mrs Eaves. If you compile with the XeLaTeX compiler, it will attempt to use this font. It is a proprietary font, however, and if you do not own it, use a non-XeLaTeX compiler instead which will compile with the default LaTeX font. Feel free to play around with this!

Copyright and credit

The spells included in this repository as well as the background for the cards are property of Wizards of the Coast. This stuff should be licensed under the Open Gaming License and the LICENSE file included does not cover them, only the Python and LaTeX code.

Instrumental in creating this product were reddit user Afluffygrue in this thread for providing the spell data and the people at UnearthedArcana for making all sorts of graphical resources available.

If I fucked up here (I don't speak legalese) please contact me before sending a team of angry lawyers and/or highly trained assassin-monkeys.