The Joys of Spellbook Ownership

So, I have this thing where I don't usually play D&D (or Pathfinder, which is D&D). It's not my thing, but whenever I do play D&D I often like to do it as a wizard. A specific wizard. The best wizard. Lucio Pavlec.

Now, Lucio is my go-to wizard because I kind of grok him better than most of my other characters. If this seems familiar, there's an older blog where I go on about him at length. I never know which particular version and level of D&D I'll be using Lucio in, so I've prepared an exhaustive, if not comprehensive, collection of them.

If you've played D&D before, you know that spells are kind of a big deal for wizards. Now, I like the plethora of D&D spells as much as any other reasonable human being but it's a constant struggle to keep up with what spells I have and what they do exactly.

Conventionally, a player would just copy-paste the spells from an online source and make a reference document. I did that, but then I realized I could take it a step further and found a parchment image from the internet. An hour's worth of working with Microsoft Office and a lifetime's worth of cursing later, I opted to just give my reference document a quadruple pass through the printer to make:

A spellbook. 

Luckily, I rarely ever use my color ink, so printing in color wasn't that big of a deal for me. There's a medieval font I used for most of it (except for papyrus for the front), though I had to use times for the symbols and operators since the world of fonts didn't invent those until the 1800's.

It's a great little thing though. I left two center pages blank so I could use tiny post-its to keep track of my prepared spells:

The spells are organized by level and I'd like to keep them that way so that Lucio can expand his spells evenly as he levels. Level 0 spells are on the far left, then level 1, 2, and 3 spells. I'm honestly not 100% on what happens if I play a game where Lucio has access to level 4 spells.

Perhaps best of all, a real spellbook means real wear and tear,

fun opportunities to use exotic fonts and spells,

Those are explosive runes and I am happy to see you.
But seriously, start rolling.

and occasional reminders of the spell books that got it right (sorta. not really..).

Presented upside down on purpose to preserve easter-egginess.

Sadly the expansion between levels and campaigns hasn't gone as smoothly as I'd hoped. Because level 0 spells are printed on a page with level 3 spells, adding a single level 2 spell in between them had the potential to wreck the entire format.

I eventually broke down and got a mini notebook and sheet protectors to keep things organized and appropriately modular. But that also reminds me of the best part of having a spellbook: a lot of space available for handwritten feat reminders, story notes, verbal components, and other cool stuff.

Are all my verbal components bad jokes and puns? The only way to know is to join the game.
But yes. The answer is yes.

I still need to resize and reprint the pages to fit the notebook better, which is going to be a pain, but It's the best thing I can manage until I can budget for bindings in human flesh and printing in human blood, which Staples charges an arm and a leg for.