D&D 5E (2024) 2024 and 2014 spellbook builder

[xyrad]

Hey all, I hope this is okay to share here — I built a web app for building spellbooks and helping me use those spells right at the table, and I'd love your feedback: https://5e-spellbook.app

A little about me, I've been a web developer my whole life but find myself not enjoying a lot of the web today — tons of ads, email sign ups for no reason, data collection, bad interfaces, enshittified experiences. I also started playing the 2024 edition and wanted spell cards but there aren't any. So I thought I'd use my skills to build a solution I'd actually want to use at the table. It's designed to be fast and really low friction. Start building your spellbooks immediately — no registering an account, no logging in, just get right to making spellbooks and playing with your cards. The web can be fun and that's what I wanted to do here.

Some of the features:

• Sharing spellbooks with a URL. You can make any number of spellbooks, that persist on your device but can be shared with a URL to others, and it generates the cards you can filter and flip through at the table to plan your next move. This makes it a useful tool for DMs to share Spellbooks with players who pick them up. Try importing The Incantations of Iriolarthas from Rime of the Frostmaiden right into your browser right now. Some more details here.
• 2024 and 2014 rules. For every 2024 spell that has a 2014 version, you can immediately flip between those rules as written to compare the differences. You can also set your default ruleset to 2014 if your table is still using that edition since I know many tables are. I've added summaries of the spell differences for each spell too. Full transparency — AI helped generate the summaries, most of them are good, some of them are funnily over descriptive about little to no mechanical differences, but I'll be manually updating the less helpful summaries over time. Some more details here.
• Print. For any spellbook you create you can generate a PDF and print out the spell cards. Which means you can now use the spellbook builder to keep your game using pen and paper. PDF generation is always tricky but this has been working on every device I've tried so far, including printing straight from the phone. Some more details here.
• Custom spell creation. You can add your own spells so that you can bring in any home brew content or add in missing 2014 spells from other books that aren't in 2024 yet. It will all mix in harmoniously with the official spells but you can filter the custom ones you've made. You can export to a file any custom cards you make to share them with your group so that you only need to make these spells once. Some more details here.
• Random spellbook creation. Sometimes as a DM you just need to load up an NPC with some spells, or quickly create a spellbook as treasure to be found. You can create a random spellbook with different parameters, and save it, share it and export it like any other spellbook you make.

Let me know what you think and if you like using it. I'd appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

 

[Yaarel]

@xyrad, it looks good.

I see it is possible to create new spells. For my needs, I wonder if it is possible to let it modify the official spells, especially to add a tag for divine "domain" or psionic "discipline".

The resulting lists would help players choose spells thematically for the character concept that they are going for.

 

[xyrad]

I was considering a feature to add notes to any spell. Tags that allow for sorting is a really good idea too.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Incredibly kind @xyrad. Thank you. How long did this project take you to complete?

 

[xyrad]

Thanks! I got the bones of it going in a very productive week or so — formatting a list of the 2024 spells and then building the interface around building spellbooks and flipping through the cards. From there I've spent much more time adding all the additional features: sharing spellbooks, adding in 2014 rules and toggling between them, creating custom spells, importing and exporting files, generating PDFs for print (that one took a week or so on its own) and adding a blog.

I'm looking to make more interface refinements: Some people don't like the cards and just want their list — so I'll add a toggle for how you view your spellbook. I like the tagging and notes feature suggested above. I'll improve the filtering UI. Down the road I'd love to add art, and other ways to represent your spellbook.

But I feel pretty happy with where it's at now. I like using it and it's really fast to use.

 

[Yaarel]

@xyrad

Maybe the customize a new spell, can have an option to import the data from an official spell, and then modify it from there. So there would be an official and a custom version of the same spell to choose from.