Fillable Spell Card Template
I love spell cards for D&D. Perhaps it’s not love so much as complete dependence. Cards are a simple way to organize which spells my character knows, which of those are prepared and rifle through the entire deck every long rest for those divine casters. I have the official decks; multiple copies in some cases as I’m playing a few casters and I like to keep my decks set up.
But…
It can take a long time (or never!) for the official spell cards to become available for newly released spells, leaving big gaps in your deck. The blank cards that are included in the official decks have immunity to ink and graphite damage and while there are some great resources for printable spell-cards, they end up being more like spell-sheets and don’t jam with the official decks. Spell-card sites are also frequently culled to the SRD for copyright reasons.
What’s more, for spells with longer rules, sometimes the text on official spell cards is arbitrarily cut off, leaving a crucial part of the spell behind a page number. Animate Objects, I’m looking at you.
One session, while uncrinkling my wadded-up Wither and Bloom spell-note, I thought: I wish I could type spells out and print them on a card instead of paper. That way I wouldn’t be busting copyright, I could choose what text/shorthand goes on the spell, and it would shuffle in with the rest of my official cards. Wouldn’t it be extra cool if it was made out of cheap/free stuff anyone could get at any office supply store?
Meet the fillable PDF template designed for Avery Presta 94211 Rectangle Labels (2 1/3" x 3 3/8"). Just type in whatever spell info you want and print them off on any standard printer. Then grab a cheap deck of playing cards, or find an old battered one you don't use any more, and stick the labels on one side! Boom! Customized spell cards!
The template is free, Avery labels are pretty cheap and come in a ton of different finishes. I used high-gloss to match my other cards, but you may want to go matte finish if you want to draw on them? I don’t know! Go bananas!
Adobe Acrobat is the best program we've found for entering text. It automatically shrinks text to fit the fields so you can type in as much information as you want. Preview did okay, but you have to manually reduce the font size for the large rules text area (if it overflows). We tested this out on Safari, Chrome and Firefox as well and it looks like these browsers allow you to add text right in the browser window. However, it appears that Safari and Firefox don't reduce text size if too much text is entered into the main rules text area. Chrome did reduce the font size to allow more text.