Dungeons and Dragons Lore: Spellbooks 

Please turn to page 3 for the table of contents, timestamps are included 0:08 Subscribe, Seriously. Costs you literally nothing. 0:49 Overview of Spellbooks in general. 1:40 The Travelling Spellbook and an Apprentice's Spellbook 3:56 General Costs 4:55 Sizes, Materials, Capacity of the Book, and a bit more on cost 8:03 Orizon Spellbook, and Arcanabulla (Illusionists) Spellbook 8:48 Suth trees of the Forgotten Realms 11:43 The Inks 13:01 Personal Sigils. Very interesting to see kind of the behind the scenes making of items like these, especially the Inks and the use of Suth wood. Speaking about Wizards, maybe you would like to see something on the people who use these in the game. And while you are at it, Subscribe and become a Member! The History of Netheril (Part 1): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-aPf6f6y3eCw.html Thay: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SWHjWGfBp8M.html Famous Wizards: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--_8ilJq4r4c.html

“Always keep extra copies of spellbooks well hidden in a safe place...especially if those spellbooks actually belong to other wizards!” ~ Morzed the Morally Gray

You just inspired me to create a mimic that has taken the form of a spell book that has changed the spells, so if you are trying to cast fireball you may cast a sleep spell instead.

Sometimes, a spell book is a large scroll tube with a lot of scrolls in it.

Sigils the original magic copyright that exploded whenever copied. Genius.

One of the many things I love about the Order of Scribes Wizard subclass is getting to rp your sentient spellbook as floating along above or through most hazards, perhaps even have it chuckle at its fleshy owner as his robes get covered in mud or have to slosh through a bog. And then of course having it act as a drone and remote spellcasting proxy or just belch out your spells like an automated turret. Ronan named his Jim.

The video has great lore, but the coolest part was the shout out at the end to all the other DnD Lore video creators.

I wanted my characters spellbook to be made of Glassteel, with the pages acting like an array of lenses that you had to align correctly to read and could be read in 3D. Shining bright light through it might cast the arcane formula like a projector. Or course you'd probably want to cast a levitation enchantment on it so it doesn't weigh you down.

i had a enchantment wizard/fiend warlock multi who kept her spellbook as a series of brass strips kept on a chain with the formulas etched into them. why? well when the flames of phlegethos wreath your very being with every casting of fireball you dont want any absent minded slip ups costing you thousands of gold

Wizards is the most powerful and interesting of classes. It is also BY FAR the most expensive.

Pretty neat stuff, and adds some depth to what's a pretty common item that get's almost forgotten by most groups. An interesting section of "Complete Arcane" for 3.5 was the section on alternative spellbooks (p186 for those curious), in which rules for things such as carving spells into skulls or stones, tattooing your spellbook onto your body, and creating a spellbook out of structures, like whole buildings, or the rooms within them, were covered. I found the concepts pretty interesting, and suggestive of a broader culture of Wizardry. Some use books, others carve their spells into the bones of their masters, and still others build entire schools, which both provide a place to study, and are the curricula.

I was thinking, if you were to take a ring of mind protection, and if you can have a blank soul with no memory or personality to inhabit it, then you could technically feed it your memory of the spells, and create a living spell book.

Never judge the caster, or the spells within a spellbook by it's bindings/cover. Obviously any book(magical or not) bound in the flesh of some humanoid need never be opened unless you've already dipped your toes in the pool of evil. However, not all spellbooks bound in gold and silver are carried by good aligned casters. The "Book of the Dead" from the Mummy comes to mind.

12:00 So THAT'S WHY coppying spells is SO EXPENCIVE! I thought it was because the ink had to had to have magical propertys, in order to be usable for memorizing spells in a way they would actually work.

There's a lot of cool potential homebrew inspiration material in the 3.0 Player's Guide to Wizards, Sorcerers, and Bards.... Also, dont forget about the Geometer prestige class! :)

The Evocation wizard artificter NPC that follows my brother, I describe him using spells, is either through his book or through a pistol that he crafted himself. For example, if he has to use strong spells, he pulls out his book. And if he wants to use weaker spells, like cantrips, or buffs like haste, he uses his pistol.

Vellum is basically thin and evenly smoothed rawhide (often from calves; the words veal and vellum are related), and is quite sturdy. As a reference, in the middle ages, before the printing press, a book would be worth about the same as a horse (sometimes a broken down nag, sometimes a champion racehorse). These days you can buy a horse for about the same as the cost of a car. Books also get quite expensive when written on parchment (lower in quality than vellum--not as even and sometimes animals have scars or spots) as for a large tome (research tome sized) every 2 pages is 1 sheep.

One time, our novice wizard was “given” a new spell book only to discover that it was cursed when he opened it. Long story short, eventually my paladin casts dispel magic on both the wizard and the tome, and when it was clear that that didn’t work, he threw the book into a fire. Our wizard, despite DYING from the cursed tome, was distraught that I burned it. I actually played the wizard class twice before, so I knew how bad that actually was for Wizards. I partially prepared a quote/did improv for if a situation like that ever happened Wizard: *”incoherent angry noises* Do you realize what you’ve done?!” Paladin:”I destroyed a tome that was worth hundreds of gold pieces just to save your life.”

13:44 I can just picture a wizard academy panicking if a young wizard *somehow* came in with a spellbook that has a lich’s sigil

Heres a subject i'm VERY interested in. A mages spellbook is extremly important,you cant just whip it together fast. Its imperative that you take your time with it as one tiny mistake on pg...."which ever" can ruin all the mages hard work! My drow/archmage uses ink in one of his sets that can only be read using infravision. He also uses creatures from the Elemental plane of Fire to hide inside it so as no one can use it! Spellbook design can be lots of fun and quite interesting! 😁😁😁 I also have a gnome illusionist/thief/gemcutter who uses expensive gems to store his spells in as well. Thanks AJ,another job well done!

I would have really loved if you had gone even more in depth, into objects such as Boccobs Blessed Book, Eidedic Memory (Dragon #357 89) removes the need for a spellbook altogether, but you potentially loose all your spells if your memory is somehow damaged... wizard's spellshard (Eberron Campaign Setting 121, 122), and a little more specifically Aureon's spellshard (ECS 265) when speaking of Spellshards, and telkiira (Lost Empires 155-6) and necklace of the phantom library (Explorer's Handbook 152-3) are a bit of special cases, but still applicable as 'alternative' spellbooks... There's also the Geometer prestige class that has a neat ability at 2nd level to reduce the space (and hence cost) of a spell when transcribing it to their spellbook lol Sadly, there's not that much attention given to Spellbooks as items, in general. Over the course of the entire 3.5 run, there were eventually some nice options put out to help protect spellbooks, and even options to make them from completely different materials, even completely out of Adamantium, with and Adamantium case... Some of the spells and alchemical items made the book immune to water damage, fire resistant or immune, made them look like other objects, there was a chain belt that you could connect to your spellbook to keep it at your side... it's really neat (to me) the finer details of what can be done with the items themselves, not just their general uses lol There should be a Feat, be it metamagic or otherwise, that allows you to reduce the cost of transcribing/learning spells and spellbooks... Good spellcasters know that they can loose their most valuable posessions... so it's a good idea to have copies of them in safe keeping... but it's _so_ ludicrously expensive to copy your spellbook! The only exception, of course, being Blessed Books... Which are in and of themselves, quite expensive... There's a Pathfinder class Archetype, Inquisitor (Living Grimoir), that turns the "holy book" / spellbook into a iron-clad weapon spiritually bound to the character... I love it thematically lol

I use a simple formula for spellbooks. Two gold pieces per page, fifteen gold pieces for a standard, non-exotic binding. Where it gets interesting is in things like the ranger’s weather-proof bookcase. It’s quite literally a chest, just big enough to fit a single book and protect it from the elements. Between the hinges, latches, weather-proof sealing and the book made specifically for it, it can set you back a pretty penny. Most of those are made for collections of maps, so they aren’t something you can just swap out for any book. That’ll set you back 10-20 gold after buying and binding the book. I always thought the prices were too extreme for spellbooks, so I stole my buddy Jim’s rules for spellbooks. Even a poor wizard with just a handful of loose pages can call it a spellbook, but having it neatly bound will make him more welcome in academic circles.

Really appreciate your channel and your content. Definitely one of the best DnD channels on YT

Would love to someday see a follow-up on Spell components. Pretty pretty please

Between this and spell components, spellcasters really are quite an economic boon for any community. Of course you have to take the bad with the good, which may just be a new breed of ooze that slowly engulfs the town... 🙃

I came up with a concept of a species of moth that is drawn to magic, and tends to consume things like spellbooks and scrolls. When the caterpillars consume the paper, they can store whatever spell is on it, which, after they pupate and then emerge from the cocoon, is displayed in the patterns of its wings in the form it was written. It can then cast the spell once a day, with a sort of animal cunning and understanding of the spell’s effects baked into their tiny brains as they reform during pupation (so they don’t immediately, say, kill themselves with fireballs). Around (5/spell level)% of its offspring will inherit this spell pattern, regardless of what spell they consume. At scale, this can actually be a viable way to manufacture “spell scrolls” for sale. Allegedly, some spells were discovered not from research, but from the rare situation of a moth inheriting a pattern from not just one parent, but both, resulting in a unique magical effect.

A new DM idea for spellbooks, scrolls & ciphers. The spell book is actually the origami animal on the desk - each origami object showing a different spell. This makes it more portable (one page), hides it from thieves (they keep stealing your diary instead), and makes sure novices can't access spells they aren't ready for (well, unless they do origami as a hobby). Having a mage school that runs like a Taoist tea shop (complete with an "Iroh") with calligraphy and origami everywhere adds a nice flavor of "wonder" to a campaign. (Animated origami animals would be a hit with the kids, too)

God I wish stuff like the Sigils were in the player's handbook its such a small thing and it may not work in every world, but man does it add a lot of flavors

The ideas of sigils is really cool, and I'm surprised it isn't made more of in adventures or the the PHB or DMHB.

Each tome of magic, not just spellbooks, is customized by the user, it serves both as a journal and works in that specific domain of magic, to give a better understanding, look at the Celestial Wizards & Golden Order from WarHammer Fantasy, they keep many records of their research and studies in there respective fields of magic, while in the case of Celestial Wizards, they also keep wast maps of the stars, alteration changes and new spells, techniques etc. that are tested and verified are kept, by them to use by new Wizards and improve on them, etc. Very few Master Wizards, Arch Mages, High Sorcerers, in DnD, ever attempt a memory tome, this is basically an imprint of a soul like the holocrons from Star Wars, that is because while an apprentice will have a spellbook to learn said spell and journal to keep tracks of his work, even after reaching a senior and master rank, even after learning all his spells, the process is not easy as the tome must be made from specific types of components, those who show sturdiness, like basilisk hide, that is waterproof, the pages must be made from either lamb, sheep or cattle hide, that has been alchemically treated and enchanted to prevent damages same as its covers, ink is another thing, usually, it volcanic iron mixed with the mages blood, some silver or other things and yes it also enchanted, finally there security measures, like wards placed on it, after all you cannot allow just any one to access it,

Folding Spell books are great as well. They can be folded up to 3 inches across. I got the idea from the wizards handbook! 😁

3rd edition's "Magic of Faerun" has additional capabilities for spellbooks to protect them. See pages 172-174 for materials and permanent enchantment costs.

I’ve heard that there are problems with having a Spellbook, but the “Order of Scribes” subclass is able to fix them. I once built a Scribes Wizard with the “Rune Carver” background to make it easier to work with.

Great video AJ. Where were these kinds of details when I made my 2nd Ed AD&D world from scratch? Oh, right, I'm a dinosaur. ;) The first spellbook all player character wizards had was a 50-page traveler's spellbook with all their initial spells in it. For "Mages", the rules for typical spellbooks applied as they are to them... and were quite standard all over each world. "Read Magic" was needed to read any magical reading that is not by the hand of the writer save for the one-use scrolls that can be used by any class. So, I ran with it. I had a dark necromancer's school make them from various skins with most of the book creators as necromancers really skilled in taxidermy and leatherwork (sentient being bodies being the best). Also, tears of sorry are used in the ink for hydrating the crystal dust base... children's tears were the best. Interacting with that school's (guild's) NPCs on this is fun for me, really creepy for my players. They push the grizzly human-resourced ones without directly mentioning humans (especially children and other innocents) are the best harvests for it... hinting at it. Some prefer other demi-humans. With abjurers, the most difficult to work with wood and bamboo was used. Clay must be beaten into the pages in a way that they don't tear and still be paper-thin. The voice of 3 types of shell-wearing animals/monsters must be harvested to harden the binder, hardback book cover, and to activate the ink... a different harvest for the ink. I had a clay tablet version too but I can't remember much of the details right now. With diviners, it's a special case that's really expensive to produce. Their blank pages are a specially prepared petrified set of wood chips a square inch in surface area (thin otherwise). When transcribing a new spell, they use their burning wand (heat it to engrave) to put the spell on a bunch of chips. Diviners study spells by opening up the case, thinking of the spell, grabbing chips, and throwing them on a surface. The right chips and their positions are always granted because of the nature of the "book" and its "pages". With conjurers, they were absurdly expensive. Only one player wanted that path because it was the only specialist wizard that had "Wish" in its magical school... long-term thinking. Powdered gemstones were a part of every aspect and gold (or higher GPV metal) was integrated into its everything that's not pages. It's also the only spellbook that can get a save vs. Fireball (or Dragon Breath, magical fire/acid, etc) with failure damaging it while otherwise ignoring the spell. Oh, never tell anyone you are a conjurer. Your spellbook is worth a fortune as mere material loot. "The Ancients" were Crystonians, they had crystal technology, their super-high-magic existence was their technology and based upon crystals. Finding a Crystoninan magical item is pretty much finding an artifact with a generic era history... it has problems that come with its gifts. Conjurers crushed up gemstones to leech upon their legacy to do the more reality-altering powers their spells give. They dabbled in demonology among other things as well. With Transmuters, most have only their first travelers' spellbook for forever while carrying cheap transcribable scrolls in the meantime. Every component needs a quest. There's a 10% chance you can buy a component for the book and 1% to get the whole book at a very high cost. Most of the time, you will be given a side quest. Component quests: A doppelganger's honesty, the voice of a fish, the eye of a basilisk, the tear of the unfeeling, gold that was once lead, the blood of the polymorphed (from the polymorphed form), a pound of lycanthrope fur, the horn of a gorgon, etc. If you succeed in the quest, you get not only that component for the book but you get GPV in gems for what they can use in their school (guild). For white (and grey) necromancers, their spellbook is an especially protected set of scroll tubes with super-thin super-durable "parchment" with the best renaissance era quill, ink, and magnifying glass. Each component is virtually a component for a magic item. The magnifying glass is a special form of hardened crystal, not really glass. The quill is a special form of fountain pen. Writings are done extremely small. The school (guild) is always founded upon morally questionable methods (like our world's obsession with not messing with the dead all the way to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein) to give such wizards a bad name. Also, these are the guys who created the first Flesh Golems... golems, not undeads. They dabbled in demonology among other things as well. Meh... 1000s of hours wasted. I should have just focused on a world. I love the Forgotten Realms. I always had. I was just too obsessed with my homebrew because I disagreed with some aspects.

Lots easier to make this info relevant in old school dnd than modern ones for sure

Thank you I just gave out a spellbook (was loot) in the campaign I'm running but did not fully know how to implement it.

What seperates a spellbook from a regular book that hapens to have stuff about magic written in it? ... Also, what seperates a regular stick from an archane wand or druid staff?

Helluva anti-piracy measure there. Divine wrath plus shaming.

That’s one of the things the game doesn’t capture from the books. The great mages in the chapter books were sorcerers who picked up a spellbook and went to wizarding school.

Back in the day (honestly can't remember if it was 100 or 2000 years ago) someone wanted to make an asbestos book that would last forever. A book made of salamander fur sounds like a good idea for a fantasy setting... Just don't rip it up and snort it without a cleric present.

Brilliant video AJ, also once again well timed for my current campaign thanks.

Now I have to wonder what the difference would be between a normal mage's spellbook and a Book of Shadows gifted to a warlock by their patron. Hmm....

Heck, githzerai have puzzledisc spellbooks, just remembered that

So, since the sigil is theirs until death, what happens with resurrection magic if someone "chose" their sigil between death and being brought back?

Strange. Hard to believe you're not at least at 100k subs. If ya like the vids, subscribe peeps.

I'll bet the lady wizard on the thumbnail used an enlarge spell! 😉

Makes me want to start a character that's the son of a prominent Giant Cobra farmer.

Thank you

Gnomes have tiny hands

I would not make Spellbooks so expensive. Too much of a penalty. However I would make scrolls tough to make given how much they can wildly expand a mage’s repertoire.

sees thumbnail, "Spell Boobs?" oh! Books! Spell Books!

My Necromancer Drow Tath’myr now own’s one of Halaster’s spell books in his Estate in Phlan in from his time in Undermountian in AL🕷🕸💯

Wizards today would have spell flash drives :)

maybe lore on spells. such as why the spell fireball is made and such, I have been always curious on spell creation

I adore these videos. Any chance you'll do the Nagpa?

*Relevant and Supportive Comment*

I wonder what would happen if someone drew a silly little doodle in the margin of a wizard's spellbook. (I'm assuming the "artist" and the wizard would be in the same adventuring party.)

thank you very much, very interesting and well presented

I learned new things today lol great video

Are you going to expand on sigils of mages? Great video though.

The best spellbook pages are made of wood soaked in wood...

What materials might aquatic creatures use for spellbooks?

When you said "book binding," did you mean "book binding" as in crafting the book, or "binding," as in atunment, like to a magic-item?

Very interesting video Thanks for the information

Anyone know if you can cast spells from a spellbook like they were scrolls and lose the spell from the book in that way? Like use the spell as written in the book like it was a spell scroll that then is destroyed from the book. You know, in a desperate circumstance a wizard out of spell slots could still literally burn their spellbook if necessary.

“The ecology of the spellbook” About 97% sure you’re not using the word “ecology” correctly in that statement.

This reminds me of a question i had with regards to more intelligent familiars. Aj do you think it would be possible to use more intelligent familiars as a backup spell focus? I was thinking just give them a few levels as a spell caster and give them one spell slot per level but the more i think on it the more concerned i become for balance. Would a tressym able to cast counterspell be too much? I dunno just food for thought. Keep up the great work 😄

I'm not entirely sure how some of thus would work in 5e; it's my understanding that a wizard needs to have written the spell themselves, using their own nomenclature, to be able to cast it, which leads me to wonder how a Master might fabricate a copy of an apprentices book as a gift? I know scrolls are special, but if you defeat an enemy caster, and steal his book, or nab your master's and flee into the night, you can't prepare those spells to cast, unless you first jot them down in your own hand, into your spellbook. Personally, I like coming up with strange alternatives to books, lice etched crystals, and I think I remember Dark Sun even using complicated arrangements of braided knots, since books are unheard of on paper-poor Athas.

Would not each school of the art have its own take on the grimoire? Also why would each of the eight schools of the art not have their own take on the other schools such as necromantic conjuration or enchantment or an evocative form of transmutation?

When I looked at the thumbnail I first read it "spellb00bs"... Not sure why... :D

*sees thumbnail* Wow she has some Big, Amazing, Delectable, Spell books.

Are cantrips written in spellbooks, I thought they were just memorized by rote?

rewatched

DAMN that lady has some THICC spellbooks to her shes definitely a ten! Lvl 10 wizard!

Who is the artist who made the painting you used as this video's thunbnail.

Wizard idea: A youth craving adventure finds his great-great-great-granduncles traveling spellbook one day in his basement. He spends all his free time studying it until he eventually becomes a level 1 wizard, then sets out into the world to find the location of his great-great-great-granduncle's original research notes. The kicker, you have to randomly roll for every spell you have access to, because those are the spells that your great-great-great-granduncle had written in his traveling spellbook at the time.

Didn't you do 1 on tattooed spellbook reference 3.5?

2:52

If a Sorcerer acquires a spell book, can they use the spells from the new spellbook?

Well first of all no one in any D&D world ever ever ever ever ever would refer to it as a spell book in character in World in Universe just like in the real world they're called a Grimoire Speaking from personal experience your first through 6th level spells will be upfront they will be as presented on the paper in your Grimoire However everything above that is probably hidden behind one if not several layers of encryption and symbolism and specific ways of folding pages together to create new pages this makes it a little bit harder for your average idiot casting 9th level spell and this is probably for the best because there are people out there that have an Supernatural Affinity with magic and as such even unskilled and uneducated could accidentally start casting an 8th or 9th level spell mess it up severely hurt themselves a lot of people around them also duplicate your Spellbook make multiple backups and Scrolls if you don't have scribe scroll and you're a wizard or a sorcerer you're doing it wrong

Question: Where did you find info about personal sigils?

I have a question in the question is this, how can you use electrum and your games and what's the point of it?

I like to disguise my spellbook as a piece of furniture. 😉

Now I want to play a wizard...

I had an idea I thought you would enjoy, a troglodyte wizard who's spell book is a smell book, and the Spells recorded there in are done so through smears,smudges and smatterings of partially digested material components, along with various other troglodyte effluence. Imagine a group of adventurers taking down the troglodyte Wizard and trying to translate the Spells.... we're talkin nauseating people.

👍

A wizard should always make his own spellbook....never buy one as you can never be sure of the quality of the product you purchase...."buyer beware! Lol

Also what were the election be the equivalent in real world?

We r all deeply offended

😴

im not sure when the video starts . there is not stop after the selfadvertisement...

I got an idea. It's a "spell book" But it's actually filled with curse words that automatically translate into any language of your choosing. The words are so offensive The target suffers from one of several effects depending on how successful their saves are or how badly they fail. Cursing like a sailor type stuff.