I have written a lot on this blog about my favorite character, Griswald, from my brother Robert’s campaign. Griswald is a half elf Fighter/Cleric/Magic-User.

As a character with two spell classes, it grew harder to track spells, levels, and details of each spell, so I came up with this simple, old school solution.

Lots of erasing of pencil on paper, or writing in ink and having to re-write makes for a mess. I settled on a neatly handwritten form made with a ruler on typing paper, later I printed it out on a dot matrix printer. I put it in a sheet protector. I can write on the sheet protector with a dry erase marker or grease pencil and wipe it off for continued use.

Griswald has three magic user henchmen, so I have one sheet to track all three of them.

Next is the dot-matrix version.

Here is a link to a PDF of the unfilled printable version in a current word processor, Libre Office writer. It could just as easily be done in a spreadsheet, like Libre Office Calc. I did not take the time to get the row height adjusted to only have as many rows as needed. This gives a bit more room to write.. In my brother’s game, he does not enforce level limits, so my half-elf F/C/M is level 10/10/11. It took a LONG time to get there dividing XP by 3.

Here is a link to a PDF of the blank printable version

This has proved to be a handy tool for at the table. I will make something like this available to the spell casters in my game, or at least a suggestion that they use something like this to speed up play.

What I did was indicate one side for cleric spells and the other for magic-user spells. I then indicated how many rows for each level of spell. There is a spot for spell name, range, area of effect, casting time, and duration. This covered most of the crunchy bits of using spells. I also had a copy of the spells from the player’s handbook, also in sheet protectors, so that I did not have to take long to find them.

I got this idea from playing Star Fleet Battles and having the ship sheets in sheet protectors.

I came up with a few other uses, one that I find can apply to my current campaigns, that I will share tomorrow.

[EDIT: A common sense trick I heard a year or two after I first posted this advises to always note the page number of the spell and what book it is in. That holds for any version of D&D or other RPG with defined spells. Specialized equipment and abilties can also be handled with a page notation. Especially if you are gaming and don’t have your own PHB with all your notes and bookmarks. I should really add a spot for page number to the linked PDF….]