A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement The Spell Saying Guide

The Spell Saying Guide is a role playing game supplement written and published by The Gorilla Of Destiny for use with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. As such, it is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The supplement is available as a nine page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover, one the front matter and one the Bibliography.

The Introduction refers to The Theory of Magic and The Spell Writing Guide and that how to say spells is a natural question. The supplement is an exploration as to how to name spells.

The Theory of Magic: What Matters About Spells explains that in that supplement most spells could be described uniquely with just a few of their stats, and how this may affect the usage of this material.

Saying Spells: The Basic Idea explains that this has a simple framework and what went into it.

Following this is a table that uses the parts of a spell description mentioned earlier; Level, School, Damage Type (if applicable) Area Type and Range and Duration. Each of these has a sound depending on the value of it, so a level 0 spell has a different sound to a level 1, and so on, for each category.

After this is a list of spells from the SRD by name, with the sound that would be said using the previous table.

The Failures explains this wasn’t a total success and why, as well as listing a number of spells that have duplicate sounds.

The Spell Saying Guide in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and is short enough that these aren’t needed. Navigation is okay. The text is mostly a single column format, except the spell list and table, and appeared to be free of errors. There are no illustrations. Presentation is okay.

Though this is stated to be for D&D 5E, it will work for just about any game that uses D&D-based spell systems. Whether or not the idea is of use to individual groups will depend on whether or not said group fancies having different spoken sounds for spells; some will, some won’t. In a way, this is more of an academic work than anything else, though the author admits they aren’t a linguist. The Spell Saying Guide can be found by clicking here.