d20 3.5 SRD Spell Lists: First Beta

So I’m in a D&D 3.5 campaign now. And I’m playing a Druid, which is kinda exciting–it’s the first time I’ve played a Druid at a high enough level that I can shapeshift, and I just tipped 5th level on Sunday. (Campaigns always fizzle out early…)

Anyway, the campaign is a hodgepodge of standard D&D and Sandstorm, and summoning restrictions by the GM mean that my spell list involves a fair bit of swapping out that’s a little annoying to manage. For instance, I’m using Sandstorm’s “Desiccate” instead of “Summon Nature’s Ally II”, since I can’t summon.

Since Druids are the type to prepare a few spells per day from a large list of available spells, I needed a quick way to see all of my available options without flipping through two sourcebooks and my swap list at the table. Then I wanted to avoid having the jotted down short-hand description of the spell that I refresh every “day” as I try out new spells.

Pain in the ass.

A bit of Googling lead me to conclude that with the advent of D&D 4e, many of the 3.5e resources… disappeared. And by disappeared, I mean:

All files withdrawn at the request of Wizards of the Coast.

That’s obnoxious, because I’m pretty sure I liked their spell lists during my previous campaigns.

SpellForge looks awesome, but requires Excel (no OpenOffice, for macro reasons), and I just couldn’t get spell selections to behave properly. Plus, I don’t like running Excel at home–I have Office XP (2001, y’all!), and I swear that if I so much as look at it wrong, it crashes.

Seriously. I can’t copy-paste. It crashes.

So I fired up Visual C# Express, grabbed an Open Game License SRD 3.5 database of spells, and proceeded to make a little tool.

…Then I figured I should release it. Cuz, you know. Handy for me, handy for others.

It’s a bit biased towards my current druidity in that it’s easier to add all spells relevant to your class then selectively remove/edit than it is to cherry-pick just several spells from the base book, as a sorcerer or wizard would.

You can add custom spells easily, though, and save everything to a character. It’ll calculate bonus spells for your character if you enter your Wisdom/Int/Charisma (whatever is appropriate for your class).

Characters are saved as basic XML files with all spell info included, so you can chew on the file directly if you want to and don’t have to worry about your edits to base spells being overwritten.

By virtue of my not firing up, say, Java, it’s Windows only. And it requires .NET 4.

That said, it doesn’t install anything. Download, unzip, and run.

There are a boatload of features I want to add: adding and removing various columns (range, school, etc.), making it easier to add several base spells at once, automatic updates, calculations of daily spells by class, etc.

Latest releases will remain on The Charon Sheet, but I’ll post updates here.