Random Spellbooks For Swords & Wizardry

One of the benefits to a game like Swords & Wizardry is the ability to quickly generate a character. Roll the dice, pick the class, fill out hit points and you are pretty much ready to go. The only thing that can slow down the process is figuring out what spells the Magic-User can have access to when starting out. The assumption is that a fledgling magic-user is given a (mostly blank) spellbook when completing their studies that has a handful of spells scribed into it by their teacher. The question is, what spells are in their spellbook?

This post helps you to quickly, and randomly, generate a starting spellbook for your first level magic-user. (It can also be handy for spellbooks found in the loot while dungeon-crawling.) We assume that your character's teacher is not going to be too helpful and provide them with too much magic...just because powerful magic-users tend to be covetous of the knowledge that they have gathered, and paranoid about how others might use that power against them. One house rule that I have for my Swords & Wizardry games is that Read Magic is a class ability for magic-users, rather than a spell. It seems silly that a magic-user would undergo that much sorcerous training and not understand magical languages.

Spellbooks are a repository of the accumulated magical knowledge of the magic-user, part documentation for their spells and part magical diary of their journey of discovery. A spellbook is very important to a magic-user because it contains the formulas and memory devices for each spell that they use. Losing a spellbook means that a magic-user is unable to rememorize spells as casting causes the spells to vanish from their minds. This makes a spellbook more valuable than gold to a magic-user.


A spellbook given to a starting magic-user will rarely have spells above fourth level in them, and never above fifth level except for a particularly generous teacher. The following tables are simple enough. First roll to determine the number of spells at that particular level, and then roll on the table to determine which spells (re-rolling duplicates).

1d6 roll	Highest Spell Level in Book
1-4	Third Level
5	Fourth Level
6	Fifth Level

Roll 1d4+2 to determine the number of first level spells. And then roll 1d20 on the following table to determine what those spells are.

1d20 roll	Spell
1-2	Charm Person
3-5	Detect Magic
6-9	Hold Portal
10-12	Light
13	Magic Missile
14	Protection From Evil
15-17	Read Languages
18-19	Shield
20	Sleep

Roll 1d4 to determine the number of second level spells. And then roll 1d20 on the following table to determine what those spells are.

1d20 roll	Spell
1-2	Detect Evil
3-4	Detect Invisibility
5	ESP
6	Invisibility
7-8	Knock
9-10	Levitate
11-12	Locate Object
13-14	Magic Mouth
15-16	Pyrotechnics
17	Strength
18-19	Web
20	Wizard Lock

Roll 1d4 for the number of third level spells. And then roll 1d20 on the following table to determine what those spells are.
 

1d20 roll	Spell
1	Clairaudience
2	Clairvoyance
3-5	Darkvision
6	Dispel Magic
7	Fireball
8-9	Fly
10	Hold Person
11	Lightning Bolt
12-13	Protection From Evil, 10-foot radius
14-15	Protection From Normal Missiles
16-18	Rope Trick
19	Slow
20	Water Breathing

Roll twice for the number of fourth level spells. And then roll 1d20 on the following table to determine what those spells are.

1d20 roll	Spell
1-2	Charm Monster
3-5	Confusion
6-9	Extension I
10-13	Hallucinatory Terrain
14-16	Ice Storm
17	Massmorph
18	Polymorph Other
19	Polymorph Self
20	Remove Curse

Roll once for the number of fifth level spells. And then roll 1d6 on the following table to determine the spell.

1d6 roll	Spell
1	Animal Growth
2	Cloudkill
3	Extension II
4	Hold Monster
5	Magic Jar
6	Passwall

You will notice, proabably quickly, that the tables do not contain all of the spells that are available for a level, particularly for the fourth and fifth level spells. That is intentional. Not only are many magic-users not big on sharing but the gift of the spellbook imparts one final lesson to the neophyte magic-user: magic is about always learning. If all of the spells were just given to the novice, they would not have the drive to discover and learn further. That and magic-users tend towards the paranoid.