The first thing I did was begin writing on one of the back pages. That was a mistakes as I soon found out that it's much harder to clean up graphite lines on the lokta plant pages. The upper layer of fibers are scrapped away by the act of erasing, meaning clean ink lines aren't possible. With a 2H pencil it does not require much erasing, yet the lines will look poor anyway.
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| First drawing attempt in the book. |
I rifled through the trash and found a piece of lokta paper that came with the journal. I took out several of my writing utensils and began scribbling marks on it. I found that a basic sharpie bled through too much. A sharpie pen however did not. My graphite pencils wrote, but shading looked blotchy from the paper's fibers. The same effect was caused by charcoal. Water bled through the paper easily, so water based painting would not work well. My V5 ink pen seemed to mark the best.
A break from art was needed, so I began to free write ideas for the page content. If erasing was so difficult, I would be using pens to turn the journal into a spellbook. Some sense of forethought and planning was needed. First I asked a Facebook D&D 5E community if they had any experiences or suggestions on making spellbooks. While waiting on response, I used Microsoft Word to write down a general outline and slowly filled in some basic content.
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| Testing calligraphy. |
The person is just getting into D&D, so a book to narrow down early level spells could also have a practical use for them. The journal had about 92 pages but D&D had almost 79 (much larger) pages of spells. I decided it would be a beginner's spell book, and burrow cantrips and first level spells from the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Player's Hand Book. To help narrow the information down, I found a website called
D&D-Spells.
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| Left: Concept Sketches Right: Practice page. |
I used their best friend (they've had since middle school) as my insider to figure out what the recipient would like. My friend likes to make jokes, so they will most likely comment on the "wiki-how" type diagrams in the spells first. I still took the time to give a healthy amount of lore to tie in to both D&D and our real world, to keep the book versatile.
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| A magic language I invented. |
Part of the work came with creating a magic language to give a unique feel. I asked questions on a Facebook D&D community and go good answers. I had already made for a forum game a unique phonetic group, and decided to use that as the base. The phonetics were made with a mixture of Pictish, Ogham, Asomtavruli, and Attican Greek symbols as references. The alphabet was based off Welsh, yet random sounds like
rh and
ar were left out to keep it unique.
The numbers were made up specifically for this spellbook gift. I played with a few ideas, but settled on each number up to 5, having an equal number of lines in their symbol. Once I reached 5, the symbols were too cluttered, so I flipped 2 to make it 6 and continued the process from there. I used a dot for zero because unlike the whole numbers in the sequence, it has no line. One cannot draw zero lines. The grammatical structure was initially meant to be like Basque, for it is the most unique make ups of the European languages. I only kept the articles being suffixes for the sentence subject; I made up rules for everything else.
I slowly pieced together information after the fact, not the most efficient manner to be honest, on what lore could support this magical language existing. I got lucky, when I saw that many the language mixed came into contact on Anatolia. The Celtic (pictich/ ogham) borrowings could have come from Galatia, the Asomtavruli possibly from Armenia or Georgia, and the Greek style from anywhere. They weren't perfect copies, so it could simply have been mixed before or over time. For the weird grammar, I found that one of the groups that could have used this fictitious language [the Lukka] were part of the mysterious Sea People.
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| A spell page for Fire Mote. |
To finalize the language for later spell names, I put what I want their name in English was into two translators:
Google Translate's Finnish, and
FreeLang's Nahuatl translator. I would get as close to a translate as possible, then mix the words, and match the phonetics with the alphabet I created. For spells I would then type into my search engine various words for their International Phonetic Alphabet, so my friend would know how to pronounce the crazy word I made up.
I only used the cantrips, due to a lack of pages, but each of the 27 level 0 spells in the
Dungeons and Dragons Player's Hand Book, averaged at two pages within the journal. The reason is because they had a definition, some flavor text, and elaborated with diagrams on the spell components: verbal, somatic, material.
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| Lore pages on the power of magic words. |
21/71 of the pages were my made up lore. The majority of it expanded on the
Player's Hand Book about where magic comes from and how it is manipulated. I kept the idea of the Weave of magic, and even measuring spell durations in terms of rounds to help give synergy between spell flavor text and game mechanics. Each spell has considerable thought put in. As an example, somatic components for Conjuration spells require hand gestures, Evocation more powerful full body movements, and Abjuration simple sigil tracing in the air.
It has been a worthwhile project for me to undertake. The book has a unique feel in terms of content and material. I also spent a large amount of time creating it and am anxious to see their reaction. Remember, this whole ordeal started when they joked I should get them a spell book for their birthday.
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| They'll appreciate this. |
