Sometimes you may wish to modify an existing spell that you own on D&D Beyond. Whether you want to change your Fireball into an Iceball, or make Cure Wounds available for Wizards in your campaign, here is one method that I have found pretty effective that I use for my own campaigns. I hope you'll find it helpful as well!
Step One: Create a Spell
If you haven't made any homebrew before, you might not know where to start, and that's alright!
If you're on a desktop you can go to "Creations" in the top menu, and select "Create a Spell".
If you're using a smaller screen device, like your phone, you'll select "Creations" from the side menu, and then "Browse and Create Homebrew". From there you can find an option in the list to create a spell. **IMPORTANT:If using a small screen, change your view to "Landscape" mode! You'll be missing some options when viewing in Portrait mode.
Step Two: Making a Copy
Now that you're in the page for making spells, you can choose a spell to make a copy of! What's very important here is that you need to own the spell on D&D Beyond in order to make a copy. This doesn't include content being shared with you. If you don't own the spell, you can purchase either the book it is from, or the spell itself from the D&D Beyond Marketplace.
If you do own the spell, you can now begin to search for it in the drop-down list. Once you find the spell you want, go ahead and click "Create"!
Step Three, Part One: Changing a Spell's Effects
So, let's jump back to the idea of making a spell have a different effect. In this case, I'm changing Fireball to an Iceball! First thing is that I'm going to change the description itself to read "cold" instead of "fire" damage, and of course change the name to "Iceball". You can also play around with other flavour text or material components at this point. Once I'm satisfied, I'll press the SAVE CHANGES button before doing anything else.
Now that I've changed the damage type and SAVED my changes, I can also change some of the modifiers-- These are the things that make the content function on the character sheet. Fireball here has a "damage" modifier that deals fire. I'm going to change that to cold. So I'll edit the modifier, and in there I'll choose "cold".
Once I'm satisfied, I can go ahead and check my work, and then "Save" again, and now I can move on to Step Four! But wait... What if I want this Iceball spell to be available to different classes? In that case, we'll go to part two of step three!
Step Three, Part Two: Adding a Spell to a Spell List
So along with Iceball, I also want to add Cure Wounds to the Wizard spell list. In that same spell editing field, I can see a small box in the corner that has those classes listed in it-- And that's what I'm going to change!
First off: You'll want to remove any classes that ALREADY have access to the spell, if you haven't changed the spell itself. So Cure Wounds is available to a lot of things here... I'm going to get rid of all of them so that my homebrew version doesn't doubleup on these lists!
Then, I'll add the Wizard class, which is what I want to add Cure Wounds to.
-> ->
Once I've done that, I'll SAVE CHANGES! That will now make the spell available to the classes I've listed there. Now let's go on to Step 4!
Step Four: Check Your Work!
Time to make sure that everything is working as intended. Hop into one of your characters, and ensure that "Homebrew Content" is turned "On".
Now we can set up the character to check these spells! Iceball and my new Cure Wounds are both available to Wizards, so let's make a Wizard to test it out. Once I make my Wizard at the right level (Level 5 for a 3rd level spell like Iceball!) I'm going to manage spells and see if I can find these available on the list. Here's what I find:
Success! If you're not able to find your new spells, double-check your work in the previous steps, and feel free to reach out here on our forums, or in our Discord community for some extra help!
And just like that, we're all set! But there's one more thing to remember, the most important step...
Step Five: Don't Publish!
Do NOT publish your homebrew copies of spells!
Your private homebrew will be shared automatically in campaigns you're a part of, and publishing is only for your original work.
And that's it! I hope that was helpful in learning how to modify existing spells to best fit your own campaign's special rules and exceptions!
If you're like me, you might be a part of a LOT of campaigns, which have different homebrew options in each. Because of this, you may want to add a couple extra steps which will help you ensure that the homebrew spells you make in this way are clearly for just the campaign you want it to be for. Here are the methods I personally use:
Method One: Label Your Homebrew!
I make tons of homebrew for my DMs and my own games. To help groups know at a glance what is a valid choice, and what isn't, I add labels to the names of my homebrew! So let's jump back to Iceball, which is a spell I might make available in my campaigns, but that my DMs might not. I'm going to edit the name, and change it to something like this...
Now when I hop into my Wizard, I can see this really clearly labelled! And if I don't want that label to persist on my character sheet all the time I can use the on-sheet "Customize" option and change the name, so it shows really simply on the sheet itself:
There you go! With just a little name change, and communicating to your groups what to look out for, you can easily create lots of homebrew and ensure that none of your fellow players or DMs get confused.
Method Two: Remove From Collection
This is a great method for those homebrew spells you're making to serve just one character. Let's go back to the Cure Wounds example. Maybe I, as a DM, gave my Wizard Cure Wounds as a quest reward, so I want them to be able to add the spell into their spellbook. However, I don't want this to be available for every Wizard I ever DM for-- So labelling isn't going to be my favourite option. Instead, I'm going to do this!
Once the content is created (and double-checked to make sure it's working!) you'll want to have the player add the new content to their sheet. Once you've made sure it's been added, you can then go to your Homebrew Collection. In there, look for the spell in question-- For me, I'll be using my homebrew Cure Wounds.
Now that I've found it, I'm going to expand it by either clicking in it's row, or using that '+' symbol at the end, which will show me my spell in full. At the very bottom of the description you'll see two options: View Details Page, and Remove From Collection. The option you'll want to click is Remove From Collection!
Once you do that, the character (or characters) that already have the spell added will keep the spell from the source they added it from, whether that's from their class spellcasting feature, or from some other feat or feature that granted them access.
Important: If the spellcaster is a "prepared" caster that knows all their spells like a Druid, Cleric, Artificer, or Paladin and they unprepare the spell, you will need to add it back to your collection for them to prepare it again.
That's All, Folks!
I hope that my methods of modifying spells and organizing them has helped you and your campaign out somewhat. The D&D Beyond homebrew tools offer a lot of options to DMs and players to customize their campaigns, so go ahead and explore them and see what cool things you can do!
If you ever run into problems with homebrew, or can't figure out how to do something, the community is here for you! We have a Homebrew section of our forums where you can look for help, as well as a Homebrew Discussion channel on our community Discord!
Thanks for this walkthrough. Do you think there will ever be expanded options to sort/view the "My Homebrew Collection" screen? I am ending up with a lot of items, and I would love it if I could browse through some nested collapsed groups to narrow down to what I am looking for that moment.
Thanks for this walkthrough. Do you think there will ever be expanded options to sort/view the "My Homebrew Collection" screen? I am ending up with a lot of items, and I would love it if I could browse through some nested collapsed groups to narrow down to what I am looking for that moment.
Is there a simple way of changing JUST the spell name and not the effects of the spell itself?
There is! While on your character sheet you can click on the spell to open a sidebar. In that sidebar you have the option to customize the spell, which allows you to change the name. I do this for my Wizard and Artificer to flavour their spells.
Mellie is there anyway to edit the description under the spell name? I only ask because as a warlock when I use Beyond20 to cast my eldritch invocations in my VTT it describes what and why i have eldritch invocations and not the act of the invocation itself (like instead of describing produce flame it just lists the eldritch invocations description).
I want to run a celestial warlock, and I think "hellish rebuke" would be remade into a heavenly rebuke that does radiant instead of fire damage.
Okay, so to do that you go to the homebrewer, and select to make a homebrew spell and pick Hellish Rebuke as the template. Then do things in this order:
First. Scroll down to the “Modifiers” and hit the big blue plus sign. You should see a modifier that says “Fire Damage” and next to it “2d10” scroll all the way to the right where it says “Edit/Delete” and tap/click “Edit.” Change the “Modifier Subtype” to “Radiant” and SAVE CHANGES!
Second. Change the description from fire to radiant, change the name to “Radiant Rebuke” or “Heavenly Rebuke” or whatever you prefer. Then SAVE CHANGES!
Congratulations, you just made your first homebrewed variant spell.
Mellie is there anyway to edit the description under the spell name? I only ask because as a warlock when I use Beyond20 to cast my eldritch invocations in my VTT it describes what and why i have eldritch invocations and not the act of the invocation itself (like instead of describing produce flame it just lists the eldritch invocations description).
The description is usually the spell's effect itself. It sounds like you may be wanting the spell's description to go through Beyond20 as opposed to the class feature— For that I would recommend reaching out to the extension's developer! I know they have a Discord where you can report issues or make requests.
Thank you again for your responses! It looks like maybe I encountered a glitch because now when I go to the spells in my list it lists the spells description and is working the way I'd like. SO I'm all good. But thank you again! You rock.
Thank you again for your responses! It looks like maybe I encountered a glitch because now when I go to the spells in my list it lists the spells description and is working the way I'd like. SO I'm all good. But thank you again! You rock.
Never mind.... all about patience. Just got to wait and let the behind-the-scenes magic work.
Tried a bunch of times, but no luck.
I'm trying to add Revivify to the Druid spell list. I created a spell, used Revivify as a template, changed name to 'Revivify' from 'Copy_of_Revivify', removed all classes/subclasses, and added Druid. Then I saved. Still not there.
I have a couple questions regarding publishing and licensing.
The SRD lists the products that can be used in publishing under free license.
My question is why these cannot be used to publish homebrew on D&D Beyond?
For example, if I wanted to publish Instant Fabricate on D&D Beyond, as a modified Fabricate, it is flagged as being too similar to Fabricate and therefore barred from publishing.
I just find this a bit odd, as Fabricate comes under the SRD, so I wondered if you could clarify that for me?
As a second question, I wondered how different a product has to be from its appearance in the SRD before it is considered a 'new' product. Do I have to change 10%? 50% 99%? Fabricate with a casting time of 1 action is obviously very close, but at what point is it no longer considered 'too similar'?
I really love using the character sheets! Is there a way to change a spell to hit value? Specifically, Guiding Bolt. I tried to add it to a weapon as a bonus action after a successful hit with the sword. I can edit everything except the +4 to hit. I would like it to be +8. Is this possible?
I really love using the character sheets! Is there a way to change a spell to hit value? Specifically, Guiding Bolt. I tried to add it to a weapon as a bonus action after a successful hit with the sword. I can edit everything except the +4 to hit. I would like it to be +8. Is this possible?
You can adjust that directly on the character sheet by “customizing” the spell.
I really love using the character sheets! Is there a way to change a spell to hit value? Specifically, Guiding Bolt. I tried to add it to a weapon as a bonus action after a successful hit with the sword. I can edit everything except the +4 to hit. I would like it to be +8. Is this possible?
You can adjust that directly on the character sheet by “customizing” the spell.
The sword is used by a Samurai Fighter. He only gained the spells because he wields this weapon, and when I open the spell on the character sheet there isn't an option to customize it at all.
Can this same concept be applied to magical items instead? I want to make a modified version of the Rod of the Pact Keeper, but I can't seem to select it from the list even tho I own the DMG thru the site
I've been encountering this weird glitch where if I try to use a spell as a template, the drop down contains no Warlock spells. Like no armor of agathys, no arms of Hadar.
Anyone else experience this?
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Customizing Official Spells
Sometimes you may wish to modify an existing spell that you own on D&D Beyond. Whether you want to change your Fireball into an Iceball, or make Cure Wounds available for Wizards in your campaign, here is one method that I have found pretty effective that I use for my own campaigns. I hope you'll find it helpful as well!
Step One: Create a Spell
If you haven't made any homebrew before, you might not know where to start, and that's alright!
Step Two: Making a Copy
Now that you're in the page for making spells, you can choose a spell to make a copy of! What's very important here is that you need to own the spell on D&D Beyond in order to make a copy. This doesn't include content being shared with you. If you don't own the spell, you can purchase either the book it is from, or the spell itself from the D&D Beyond Marketplace.
If you do own the spell, you can now begin to search for it in the drop-down list. Once you find the spell you want, go ahead and click "Create"!
Step Three, Part One: Changing a Spell's Effects
So, let's jump back to the idea of making a spell have a different effect. In this case, I'm changing Fireball to an Iceball! First thing is that I'm going to change the description itself to read "cold" instead of "fire" damage, and of course change the name to "Iceball". You can also play around with other flavour text or material components at this point. Once I'm satisfied, I'll press the SAVE CHANGES button before doing anything else.
Now that I've changed the damage type and SAVED my changes, I can also change some of the modifiers-- These are the things that make the content function on the character sheet. Fireball here has a "damage" modifier that deals fire. I'm going to change that to cold. So I'll edit the modifier, and in there I'll choose "cold".
Once I'm satisfied, I can go ahead and check my work, and then "Save" again, and now I can move on to Step Four! But wait... What if I want this Iceball spell to be available to different classes? In that case, we'll go to part two of step three!
Step Three, Part Two: Adding a Spell to a Spell List
So along with Iceball, I also want to add Cure Wounds to the Wizard spell list. In that same spell editing field, I can see a small box in the corner that has those classes listed in it-- And that's what I'm going to change!
First off: You'll want to remove any classes that ALREADY have access to the spell, if you haven't changed the spell itself. So Cure Wounds is available to a lot of things here... I'm going to get rid of all of them so that my homebrew version doesn't double up on these lists!
Then, I'll add the Wizard class, which is what I want to add Cure Wounds to.
Once I've done that, I'll SAVE CHANGES! That will now make the spell available to the classes I've listed there. Now let's go on to Step 4!
Step Four: Check Your Work!
Time to make sure that everything is working as intended. Hop into one of your characters, and ensure that "Homebrew Content" is turned "On".
Now we can set up the character to check these spells! Iceball and my new Cure Wounds are both available to Wizards, so let's make a Wizard to test it out. Once I make my Wizard at the right level (Level 5 for a 3rd level spell like Iceball!) I'm going to manage spells and see if I can find these available on the list. Here's what I find:
Success! If you're not able to find your new spells, double-check your work in the previous steps, and feel free to reach out here on our forums, or in our Discord community for some extra help!
And just like that, we're all set! But there's one more thing to remember, the most important step...
Step Five: Don't Publish!
Do NOT publish your homebrew copies of spells!
Your private homebrew will be shared automatically in campaigns you're a part of, and publishing is only for your original work.
And that's it! I hope that was helpful in learning how to modify existing spells to best fit your own campaign's special rules and exceptions!
Bonus Tips
If you're like me, you might be a part of a LOT of campaigns, which have different homebrew options in each. Because of this, you may want to add a couple extra steps which will help you ensure that the homebrew spells you make in this way are clearly for just the campaign you want it to be for. Here are the methods I personally use:
Method One: Label Your Homebrew!
I make tons of homebrew for my DMs and my own games. To help groups know at a glance what is a valid choice, and what isn't, I add labels to the names of my homebrew! So let's jump back to Iceball, which is a spell I might make available in my campaigns, but that my DMs might not. I'm going to edit the name, and change it to something like this...
Now when I hop into my Wizard, I can see this really clearly labelled! And if I don't want that label to persist on my character sheet all the time I can use the on-sheet "Customize" option and change the name, so it shows really simply on the sheet itself:
There you go! With just a little name change, and communicating to your groups what to look out for, you can easily create lots of homebrew and ensure that none of your fellow players or DMs get confused.
Method Two: Remove From Collection
This is a great method for those homebrew spells you're making to serve just one character. Let's go back to the Cure Wounds example. Maybe I, as a DM, gave my Wizard Cure Wounds as a quest reward, so I want them to be able to add the spell into their spellbook. However, I don't want this to be available for every Wizard I ever DM for-- So labelling isn't going to be my favourite option. Instead, I'm going to do this!
Once the content is created (and double-checked to make sure it's working!) you'll want to have the player add the new content to their sheet. Once you've made sure it's been added, you can then go to your Homebrew Collection. In there, look for the spell in question-- For me, I'll be using my homebrew Cure Wounds.
Now that I've found it, I'm going to expand it by either clicking in it's row, or using that '+' symbol at the end, which will show me my spell in full. At the very bottom of the description you'll see two options: View Details Page, and Remove From Collection. The option you'll want to click is Remove From Collection!
Once you do that, the character (or characters) that already have the spell added will keep the spell from the source they added it from, whether that's from their class spellcasting feature, or from some other feat or feature that granted them access.
Important: If the spellcaster is a "prepared" caster that knows all their spells like a Druid, Cleric, Artificer, or Paladin and they unprepare the spell, you will need to add it back to your collection for them to prepare it again.
That's All, Folks!
I hope that my methods of modifying spells and organizing them has helped you and your campaign out somewhat. The D&D Beyond homebrew tools offer a lot of options to DMs and players to customize their campaigns, so go ahead and explore them and see what cool things you can do!
If you ever run into problems with homebrew, or can't figure out how to do something, the community is here for you! We have a Homebrew section of our forums where you can look for help, as well as a Homebrew Discussion channel on our community Discord!
Thanks for this walkthrough. Do you think there will ever be expanded options to sort/view the "My Homebrew Collection" screen? I am ending up with a lot of items, and I would love it if I could browse through some nested collapsed groups to narrow down to what I am looking for that moment.
Homebrewed by PhantomTim: Weapons | Items
Is there a simple way of changing JUST the spell name and not the effects of the spell itself?
That's a great request!
There is! While on your character sheet you can click on the spell to open a sidebar. In that sidebar you have the option to customize the spell, which allows you to change the name. I do this for my Wizard and Artificer to flavour their spells.
Thank you SO MUCH!
Mellie is there anyway to edit the description under the spell name? I only ask because as a warlock when I use Beyond20 to cast my eldritch invocations in my VTT it describes what and why i have eldritch invocations and not the act of the invocation itself (like instead of describing produce flame it just lists the eldritch invocations description).
I want to run a celestial warlock, and I think "hellish rebuke" would be remade into a heavenly rebuke that does radiant instead of fire damage.
Okay, so to do that you go to the homebrewer, and select to make a homebrew spell and pick Hellish Rebuke as the template. Then do things in this order:
First. Scroll down to the “Modifiers” and hit the big blue plus sign. You should see a modifier that says “Fire Damage” and next to it “2d10” scroll all the way to the right where it says “Edit/Delete” and tap/click “Edit.” Change the “Modifier Subtype” to “Radiant” and SAVE CHANGES!
Second. Change the description from fire to radiant, change the name to “Radiant Rebuke” or “Heavenly Rebuke” or whatever you prefer. Then SAVE CHANGES!
Congratulations, you just made your first homebrewed variant spell.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
The description is usually the spell's effect itself. It sounds like you may be wanting the spell's description to go through Beyond20 as opposed to the class feature— For that I would recommend reaching out to the extension's developer! I know they have a Discord where you can report issues or make requests.
Thank you again for your responses! It looks like maybe I encountered a glitch because now when I go to the spells in my list it lists the spells description and is working the way I'd like. SO I'm all good. But thank you again! You rock.
Yay! Glad to hear it's working for you. :)
Thanks for putting this together! Great info.
**Edit**
Never mind.... all about patience. Just got to wait and let the behind-the-scenes magic work.
Tried a bunch of times, but no luck.
I'm trying to add Revivify to the Druid spell list. I created a spell, used Revivify as a template, changed name to 'Revivify' from 'Copy_of_Revivify', removed all classes/subclasses, and added Druid. Then I saved. Still not there.
Where'd I go wrong?
I have a couple questions regarding publishing and licensing.
The SRD lists the products that can be used in publishing under free license.
My question is why these cannot be used to publish homebrew on D&D Beyond?
For example, if I wanted to publish Instant Fabricate on D&D Beyond, as a modified Fabricate, it is flagged as being too similar to Fabricate and therefore barred from publishing.
I just find this a bit odd, as Fabricate comes under the SRD, so I wondered if you could clarify that for me?
As a second question, I wondered how different a product has to be from its appearance in the SRD before it is considered a 'new' product. Do I have to change 10%? 50% 99%? Fabricate with a casting time of 1 action is obviously very close, but at what point is it no longer considered 'too similar'?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! =)
I really love using the character sheets! Is there a way to change a spell to hit value? Specifically, Guiding Bolt. I tried to add it to a weapon as a bonus action after a successful hit with the sword. I can edit everything except the +4 to hit. I would like it to be +8. Is this possible?
You can adjust that directly on the character sheet by “customizing” the spell.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
The sword is used by a Samurai Fighter. He only gained the spells because he wields this weapon, and when I open the spell on the character sheet there isn't an option to customize it at all.
Can this same concept be applied to magical items instead? I want to make a modified version of the Rod of the Pact Keeper, but I can't seem to select it from the list even tho I own the DMG thru the site
I've been encountering this weird glitch where if I try to use a spell as a template, the drop down contains no Warlock spells. Like no armor of agathys, no arms of Hadar.
Anyone else experience this?