The Collected Works (Canon as Spellbooks)

 Writing on the theme of a lost spellbook, suggested by Semiurge for Glaugust 2026.

Inspired by this post over on Oversights and Oubliettes, as well as the same book that inspired it, I present six manuscripts attributed to the same author. Unlike Regalia’s work, these are not based on the works of real history, which risks a diminished sense of grandeur— few settings have a Caesar that excites us as much as the historical Caesar. But I hope the relationship between the fictional history and the ongoing in-game conflict can maintain interest.

Charops, Father of Cartographers
Every scholar basically agrees that Charops was born in Cessily, moved to Fantasy Rome as a young man, and rose to prominence as a wise man, administrator, and scholar. Charops’s books on distant lands, gathered from both firsthand and secondhand research, are legendary. His signature method of discerning whether men who brought him tales of strange sights had actually been far abroad, checking their memory of the route they took against his own later voyage, provides us with accurate reports of shipping lanes and geography of use to this day. In later years, Charops was accused by his enemies of embezzlement and exiled to the countryside. Many of his writings were burned. The resulting lacuna spurs on fanciful rumors that the scholar was perfecting a book of spells to utterly perfect human virtue, granting someone a truly optimal character. Common folk remember him as a cautionary tale against politicians getting too airy-fairy and ungrounded. Scribes remember him as a cautionary tale against bright minds getting involved in politics.

Travels: 

• Exemplary: Bubble Trick (creates an orb of breath that cannot be breached, save by very careful sawing, for up to six hours. At your discretion, it can be buoyant or static.)
• Decent: Weigh Anchor (discern the relative quality of ships and their crew. Among other things, detect the result of any Reaction Roll made with them.)
• Poor: explains the forms of address and request for hospitality of the gnolls of Thrinos, famously mercurial and irascible people with the heads of beasts, but whose high priest is thought to be the most beautiful yet living, and bless'd with clear vision of the days to come.
• Mouldering: warns of the location of the Thassopinon, a whirlpool that wanders through a given territory throughout the year, created by a giant fish from the underworld.

Lesser Travels:

• Great: shows an infallible index for predicting the weather, with just a banner and a simple sextant.
• Decent: details the ruins of the town of Bourda, outside Vasilaea, and means of accessing the hidden stairs to a foyer of the underworld, where prisoners were exchanged with the long-dead, and gold was brought from below. Infested with shades, shelled monsters, and chthonic doubloons.
• Mouldering: Klarion (fires a magical burst straight in the air, leaving a floating, glowing, colorful sigil for four hours. If it strikes someone, deals 1d6 damage.)

On Moral Character: 

• Exemplary: sets out a general method for maintaining the proper relationship between patron and client. While practicing it, retainers and hirelings have +1 loyalty, and they never abandon or betray you without notice.
• Great: Expounding Principles (speak at length on the moral and historical considerations before a crowd, and they will listen. No one can ignore you. By the end, at least one important listener will become your hater, but another important listener will become your advocate.)
• Decent: Empathy (consider three questions about someone you've just met, and the DM will provide three truthful, perhaps incomplete, answers)
• Mouldering: provides meditations for diligence, allowing you to go a night without sleep, at no penalty.

On Perfection: pseudepigraphic. A trap for true seekers, but a good source of income for copyists.

• Decent: sets out the proper Fantasy Roman method for a proper patron-client relationship. While practicing it, retainers and hirelings have -1 loyalty, and will take the opportunity to screw over their overbearing and pompous boss on the way out if they abandon them.
• Poor: sets out a description of Charops's estate outside of Fantasy Rome, including its location and the valuable treasures, rare books, and magical experiments he accumulated to perfect his magnum opus. The entire description is fake, a combination of pecuniary motive and wishful thinking. Those who follow the directions to the estate will instead find a thorny woods in the middle of troll country, and get their asses hunted by a pair of panther-yechas.
• Mouldering: Interrogate the Soul (deals 1d3 permanent wisdom damage to the caster, but initially tell the player the book describes it as a spell to “glimpse the self, unvarnished by pride or cowardice, to grant the bravery understand oneself truly and know what faults must be excised.”)

Monstrous Manual: also called the Hand of Omens

• Exemplary: catalogues many types of creatures, with an index to aid study. 2-in-6 chance of identifying creatures upon seeing their true form, learning their name and their D&D 5e statblock (if not playing 5e) or their 1e MM statblock (if playing 5e). If the monster can't be found in the right source, it isn't described in the Hand of Omens beyond its name.
• Great: describes the differences between various dragons and semi-draconics and ranks them according to "Zariazois", a difficult-to-translate word that means something between hardiness and durability. Sets out their different abilities.
• Decent: Tireless Tracker (Shows the tread of the most recent creature to go through an area as silvery footsteps. Lasts until you stop following them for more than ten minutes)
• Poor: describes the differences between various goblinoids, including their Hardiness-Durability. Postulates what differences arise due to natural cultural development and what from different deific impacts on them.

My Life: 

• Exemplary: rare account of Charops's shameful exile, and a true account of his estate not near Fantasy Rome but in Cessily, the land of his birth. Describes how he used his modest means to prepare and fortify labs in his basement, and how he was saved from penury from the contributions of his friends and admirers who wanted him to continue his study. Sets out description of a lapidary vault with a combination-lock whose cypher changed with clues hidden throughout the house, an "angelic engine" which animated the lower workings, and an alchemical project to isolate and extract character traits. Careful study of context clues can reveal its precise location.
• Great: Tally-Line (conjures an intangible line segment that allows for accurate measurement of distances and lengths. Gives +2 to ranged attacks using it as a guide. Lasts ten minutes.)
• Decent: description of Charops's youth and exploits after coming to Fantasy Rome to seek his fortune. Partial map of the sewers under Fantasy Rome, as well as an indication of a hideout which has been home to a variety of denizens over time, always driving previous residents out. In his time, it was primarily home to a union of thieves who worshipped a patrician mummy. +3-in-6 chance of detecting secret doors in Romedeis's Shit-Hole.

Some Spells, Mostly Summons

 Mostly summons, as a discussion in the glog discord server reminded me that I think summoning spells are cool and easy to write, but they so seldom appear in the blogosphere.

These spells are written in a hybrid form. Parenthetical details are for old-school leveled spell systems and bracketed details are for glog-style MD spell systems.

• Johannes's Promise (3rd) summons (2d4)/[sum] goblins, who arrive in 1d10 minutes. They will assume you are the wizard Johannes, a goblin-friend who devised this spell and died centuries ago.They will assist you as befits a great friend until midnight, when they must march home to the moon, until you violate their friendship, or until they learn that you are not Johannes. New goblins arrive each time you cast the spell, so messing up won't ruin the spell in later castings.
• Inner Fire (1st) Burns both ends of your life's wick, causing you to explode in a 20' radius blast of flames dealing (6+1d6 per caster level)/[sum+6] damage to every other creature, save for half. Flammable items are ignited, but some might get a save. This expenditure of energy reduces you to 1 hit point, permanently costs 1 point of a random attribute, and incurs a -3 penalty to all d20 rolls until you rest in the warmth and eat a double ration.
• Giant Beetle (2nd) summons a 6' long giant beetle, shell a deep gossamer blue and with evil-looking eyes. Horns like a forklift. (4 HD)/[sum HP], chitin as chain, fluttering wings. Cannot safely carry rider or cargo, but you can be creative about it. Serves until it feels it has fulfilled its debt to you, then flies off.
• Crab Battle (2nd) Point at a foe who truly wants to kill you, then utter an invocation to the muse of deep-sea gladiators and Atlantean bloodsport. Both of you rise from the ground, lifted up by giant crabs that carry you forward and fight on your behalf. Each of you can easily keep your footing atop your crab mounts. Lasts until the end of the combat [or after sum rounds].
• Manifest Tree Spirit (3rd) Sing to a tree to charm out its dryad. She will be positively disposed to you until you do something to annoy her[, and will do you sum favors].
• Create Graveyard (6th) Breaking through walls from out of nowhere come (1d20)/[1dsum] furiously angry elephants. They'll try to avoid hurting you, but no promises.
• Grave Curse (6th) Target deserving, unwilling victim must save or turn into a medusa, dracula, thatcher, or other pathetic creature of the night.
• Termagants (5th) Summons (2d4)/[sum/2] harpies to torment and degrade a person you name. They won't intentionally kill this person, and will mostly just heckle them if they get into a deadly fight. Caster beware! If they encounter servants of Kanil, the god and mockery, born from ill-informed morality plays, praised in poorly-remembered rumors, and worshiped in the hearts of every zealot, the harpies will betray the caster to them.
• Cry Havoc (5th) Go to a graveyard or a crossroads when it's too dark to see. Wave an article of clothing or similar item belonging to your enemy in the air in front of you. After the massive hound has gotten their scent, it will open its coal-red eyes and unerringly hunt them. Has (4 HD)/[Sum HP]. If the hound is slain, another will take its place the next midnight until (2d4)/[highest] have hunted. Hides and waits on Sundays, and cannot enter hallowed ground.
• Locate Treasure (4th) While underground, lay a fire on a fresh corpse. Charging through a nearby corridor will come a massive monster with the front half of a bull, the back half of a man, hands, and a massive labras. He is lonely, bright, and flesh-mad. After messily devouring the corpse (taking 1 Turn), he will lead you through the underground area, wandering until some kind of treasure is discovered, all avenues of exploration are exhausted, [sum Turns have elapsed] or he is slain. In any of those cases, he leans against a wall and melts into shadow. If led out of a dungeon into the warm light of day he will immediately renege on the terms of the spell and run for the hills to smell flowers, draw shapes in the dirt, and gore shepherds. Has a flawless sense of direction.
• Commission Guard (2nd) Wave around a sack full of coins and call out for an ogre, who you must give an ignominious name like Grim Bug, Shitlips, or Cheese Rind, and utter a riddle. They pop out of nowhere and answer the riddle with your intended answer. If the riddle is good enough, they will guard a bridge, door, or other spot for you, using it as a password. For this privilege they demand (1d6x100 gp)/[lowestx100 gp]
• Ouza's Proper Delegation (6th) Flick your shadow off your body. It will ripple out to undertake a mission of your choosing. Stats as a shadow, but with your HP maximum and any other relevant changes. [You must cast this with all of your normal MD.] After its mission is complete, you must sew your shadow back on or it will shrivel up and get weak, and will complain like a peckish housecat. Any shadows created by yours will serve you if you can sew them to some other person or object, but any third-generation shadows serve them. If your shadow is slain in this form, you can't cast the spell again until you get a new one.
• Summon the First King (5th) Find an ancient bone, so old it is hard like stone. Kill 20 HD of humanoids with the bone. With terror and slaughter, a T. Rex roars forth from your shrieking mouth. It is 20 blood-soaked HD of scale and muscle, and it is in a mood to reward you, its first servant in many millenia. [You have a sum hour grace period.]
• Flesh-Ripping Beam (5th) Fires a blast of furry fluid at a target, resolving into an 8 foot long [sum hp] giant weasel. It makes an immediate attack roll, and on a hit begins sucking blood. It can only be removed if it or its victim is slain. On a miss, the weasel ricochets and skips its next turn. [The weasel gets +dice to hit and drains 1d4 HP each round for every 2 MD invested.] After all potential victims have fled, it disintegrates into old paper pulp.

The Written Word Remains: Spellbook Generator

 I like spellbooks. I like to imagine all the notes, marginalia, and non-spell contents in them. To spur that kind of detailed artifact on the fly in a game, I've made a generator for random spellbooks and their miscellaneous contents. Each generated spellbook will have 20 items listed. If you have an idea for how many spells you want the book to contain, simply stop after it lists that many. 

This is a brainstorming aid; it will give you prompts for spells, usually pretty actionable ones, but it will be up to you to designate the particulars.

This generator builds on my glog wizard generator and my wild west wizard generator. See also ktrey's Magical Marginalia and 100 Grimoires.

Wild West Wizard Generator

 Generates a moniker, some signature items, and a spell list for a wizard that draws from B/X's base magic-user spells, a few from other sources, and a collection of original spells. I prefer for campaigns to take the spell list in the book as a jumping-off point, from which we can dive into variation and invention.

I use this generator for cowboy names, so I imagine the "moniker" of each wizard is something they take on when they enter magician society.

The generator shows the spellbook of a 14th-level magic user. To get the spellbook for a lower-level magician, you can just ignore spells of a higher level than they could cast.

Nine Horse Wizard Spells

Horse wizards often work as leatherers, hoping to perfect the art for the crafting of saddles enchanted to protect their mounts.

art by Dragon_Wizard

Double Jump- (1st) lets a touched creature jump while in midair, doubling your jump distance or height and possibly changing direction. Lasts 3 Turns.

Flaming Hooves- (1st) One designated creature leaves trail of flames behind it whenever it moves for the next 6 rounds. These flames are nonmagical and disappear from nonflammable surfaces after at most a minute.

Graceful Charge- (1st) A touched creature ignores difficult terrain and impediments, including set polearms and caltrops for 1 Turn.

Tunnel Vision- (1st) One creature in sight loses their peripheral vision. They get +2 morale and have an easier time pathfinding, but otherwise have difficulty noticing things, and -4 AC against all but one creature they focus on. An unwilling creature is entitled to a save vs spells to negate the spell.

Horste- (2nd) as haste, but lasts 2 hours and only works on horses.

Calm Emotions- (2nd) instantaneously halts failed morale roll, rage, etc. May instead let you reroll a reaction roll and take the more moderate result. Targets up to 4d4 HD of creatures.

Borrow Vision- (2nd) See through a touched creature's eyes instead of your own. Lasts as long as you maintain concentration. An unwilling creature is entitled to a save vs paralysis to negate the spell.

Shoulder Burdens- (2nd) You and a willing creature combine your carrying capacity for 1 hour. You aren't encumbered until your combined load exceeds your combined capacity.

Spider Ride- (3rd) like spider climb but with mounts, safely carrying their riders unless overencumbered. Lasts 1 minute per level.

Quick Procedure For Spell Components

 When a magician lingers in their tower, studying spells, they are essentially studying magic tricks. Figuring out how to turn sticks into snakes is like a life hack. It's like getting really good at throwing a water bottle so it does a backflip and land standing up. The defining feature of the magician is that they know how to twist their brains in ways that make them good at holding these weird skills in their minds.

In the past, I've been a bit loosey-goosey with the exact in-the-moment requirements of spells. I was keen to ask players "what does it look like when you cast your magic missile? What do you do to cast it?" People were often confused, or at least imagined different spell-casting tropes than I did. To eliminate future confusion in my games, I've tried to write out my feelings on spell component requirements.

In order for these guidelines to be useful, they need to be intuitive. I should be able to retroactively apply them when the PCs find a scroll of some spell in a module I wrote years ago, and they should apply to spells that PCs create themselves, which is really an under-explored process in the games I run. I like the idea of there being largely redundant versions of similar spells, which pose all the more reason to include a spell creator's name in the spell itself. A pair of wizard's apprentices may argue the merits of Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound and Lian Yimu's Silent Hound spells. All the better when Mordenkainen is a PC of a previous campaign and Lian Yimu is an important NPC

What does it look like to cast a spell? Does it require a free hand? An invocation? I like to let the intended effect guide me. What mundane action can I imagine is getting extended into something magical? Is someone throwing a fireball at me? Are they staring at me with so much hateful concentration that a fireball is coming out of them? If they're casting a summoning spell they've got to be verbally calling, just like mom used to call me to dinner, right? 

Spell Component Procedure

Generally, a spell will require at least one of these conditions:

• Somatic: some specified physical action. Your wind-walking spell should fail if you can't walk-walk.
• Verbal: using specific words to get some entity's attention, or influencing a target with language. Might fail if they don't understand you.
• Concentration: some purely mental action. Probably requires you to utterly halt anything else you're doing when you cast it, or at least concentrate on it for the spell duration.
• Material: some specific object or material. These spells should get a bit of leniency I feel, since you require the object as a focus. Why else would you prefer to learn staff to snake instead of summon snake?

For each condition beyond the first that the spell's creator wishes to employ, it should have a +10% chance of getting successfully researched, or go 10% faster or be 10% cheaper, depending on how that procedure works. The DM should reject proposals that feel too contrived.

When your GLOG Wizard Doesn't Have a Spell List

In the wake of the proliferation of microclasses, people may find themselves playing some kind of magic-using class that claims to use traditional GLOG magic dice, despite lacking a spell list. To offer guidelines for use when a random wizard needs appropriate spells, I share my thoughts here.

You only really need, like, three of these for a level 1 character; any more is just to distinguish two wizards of the same school. Further spells should be found and created in play.

1. Speak to X (such as a kind of substance, creature, or item)
2. X to Y (transmute one kind of substance into another)
3. Offensive-but-roundabout spell (harmful to foes, but not just directly dealing vanilla damage to them)
4. Grant a boon
5. Inflict a curse
6. Movement spell (such as speed, new vectors, through or along certain substances, etc.)
7. Alteration of form 
8. Tackle domain-relevant hazard 
9. Offensive-but-specific spell (serious harm in specific conditions)
10. Information Gathering (divination or perception-enhancing)
11. Social Lubricant
12. Forced Move (directly causing a target to act in a certain way)

General Guidelines (See also Skerples on Wizards)

• Always tie something back to the [dice] used or the [sum] of them
• Direct and automatic damage to one target is typically [sum], with a little bonus effect
• “Save negates" is for cowards, but— 
• Class abilities (including spells) should create new options and potential problems, They should not negate the game.
• Open-ended spells are best.

Mesomergos Dungeon Prompts

Inspired by several different resources, this is my current generator for inspiring medium-sized dungeons. It owes the most thanks to Spwack's generators, Arnold K.'s Dungeon Checklist, the community-curated list of GLOG spells, and others.
See also: GoblinPunch's Dungeon Checklist and 1d124 OSR-Style Challenges
Papers and Pencils's 20 Architectural Features for Memorable Dungeons
My Testing Equipment
Courtney Campbell's Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design
ALL GLOG SPELLS
Throne of Salt's Road-Weary Wanderers
MeanderingBanter's Haunted Crypt Generator and Scrambled Race Table
The Diceblade's Total Improv: Dungeon