Top 10 5E D&D Homebrew Magic Items by a Factor of Three — Wands

There’s so much homebrew content for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons found at D&D Beyond! Tens of thousands of entries include spells, races, subclasses, monsters, magic items and pretty much everything you’d expect. We’ve even got a presence over there in what I believe is the only third party creator to achieve. (I do totally mean to toot our own horn 100%) In videos and posts we’ve looked at all the schools of magic, subclasses for each class individually, feats, monsters, races and a variety of other categorizations of 5E D&D content. Now I’m onto magic items and already explored the homebrew armor, potions, rings, rods, scrolls and staffs so now it’s time to take up a trusty staff. There’s enough of the over 3,649 homebrew magic wands at DDB to include something for any character so let’s get into it.

Magic items (wands) at D&D Beyond

Before getting started it’s important to note you can create homebrew content for private use and share your homebrew content publicly at DDB at no cost — there’s no subscription required to access these services. However if you want to add any of the homebrew magic items like the rings mentioned below or any other homebrew content you come across to your 5E D&D collection you must subscribe at the Hero Tier or above. There’s a lot you can do at DDB for free. Check out what you can do here.

The DDB homebrew collection uses several statistics to track entries. Views shows how many eyeballs any particular homebrew creation received, Adds shows the number of times a creation was added to someone’s collection and Rating is an upvote/downvote system. Since there are over 3,649 wands in the collection I’m going to share the top 10 highest rated, most viewed and most added selections and to see what’s out there along with any crossover between these three lists.

Top 10 highest rating wands

1. Swiss Army Wand. The No. 1 wand for rangers shows up again! “You’re not sure who the Swiss are or why an army would need such a non-aggressive wand, but it seems useful enough.”
2. Fork of Bees. I’m not sure why the form of this wand is a fork but the function is fun and fulfills what I look for in a wand — you thrust it forward and unusual magic issues forth.
3. Adventurer’s Wand. I like this a lot but there is a caveat. Too many charges on this wand means it becomes somewhat of an easy button for a variety of scenarios. Consider this before including as a reward.
4. Beholder’s Gaze. This is excellent. I appreciate how the designer incorporates all the beholder’s Eye Rays into this variable magic wand.
5. Bone Wand of Healing. This wand makes for a terrific party item. A character can throw around a healthy amount of healing but it’s not too much. This feels well balanced to me and I’m not someone particularly interested in the amorphous and subjective notion of balance to begin with.
6. Wand of Counterspell. There’s not a single 5E D&D magic item with counterspell attached and I’ve got to believe this is by explicit design. Whether this is in the possession of an NPC or a player character it’s going to seriously affect encounters. Proceed with caution.
7. Invisible Wand. Designed for a campaign with comedic tones I presume?
8. Wand of Wondrous Sounds. I love this wand. It totally fits right in with other common magic items and provides a fun effect. I can very much imagine myself using this often during adventures in all sorts of scenarios.
9. Abjurationist Wand. This feels like a bit of a long way to go to to save a spell slot and I suspect it’ll get the most mileage from shield but overall it’s elegantly designed and in the right kind of campaign it’s perfect. Uncommon rarity feels a little light though.
10. Wand of Speak with Dad. Changing or removing letters from existing 5E D&D material to create puns and other unusual situations is certainly in my wheelhouse. There’s a lot of storytelling potential in this wand!

Top 10 most viewed wands

1. Fork of Bees
2. Wand of the Broken Unicorn Horn. Heady name for this wand! I don’t have any hard and fast parameters when it comes to magic items with charges and the variety of effects they generate with them but even at very rare rarity this seems like an awful lot. The effects are behind a d100 random chart roll to mitigate the power a bit but doing so up to five times each day feels like too much.
3. BEARSTICK. The No. 1 wand for druids shows up again! The same sheer wild natural fun contained in this wand still sounds awesome to me.
4. Swiss Army Wand
5. Wand of Pyrotechnics. Pretty straightforward. I’ll give this one props for shedding some light on pyrotechnics, a classic D&D spell I haven’t seen cast in several editions.
6. Wand of Cure Wounds. Ever notice how there’s no official 5E D&D magic wands with healing spells or effects attached? Speaking to the extreme subjectivity of gameplay you’d need a pretty perilous campaign to make renewable sources of healing relevant and not just making the game even less deadly for players.
7. Wand of Counterspell
8. Wand of Identify. Look, if it’s that big of an issue in your campaign why even go through the trouble of putting this wand into the mix? If your campaign features a high volume of magic items and identifying them immediately is of utmost importance then sure, this is terrific. Otherwise it’s about as boring as they come.
9. Wand of Dispel Magic. Like a number of wands on these lists here’s another example of reducing the resource management aspect of 5E D&D even further. In earlier editions when characters weren’t nearly as powerful and did not gain so many features internally then something like this makes a lot more sense.
10. Adventurer’s Wand

Top 10 most added wands

1. Swiss Army Wand
2. Fork of Bees
3. Adventurer’s Wand
4. Wand of Counterspell
5. Bone Wand of Healing
6. Wand of Cure Wounds
7. Beholder’s Gaze
8. Wand of the Broken Unicorn Horn
9. BEARSTICK
10. Wand of Wondrous Sounds

Wands rising to the top

A few themes emerge from these 16 items collectively across the three lists. Also noteworthy after the last few of these posts is these are all actually wands. A handful of these homebrew wands are simply spells on a stick for one thing. This gets into murky territory for me. I mentioned subjectivity a couple of times here and just about every time I discuss D&D with anyone too. Items like these are wholly boring and diminish the already scant resource management aspect of the game as it’s widely played these days. So none of those interest me whatsoever. (Except the wand of pyrotechnics because that spell could use some love!)

This quality ties into the concept of charges as well. Your mileage may vary but when I ponder items with charges, how many charges the effects cost and what a typical adventuring day turns out to be for most folks in my experience then these fall way short on being cool. This is because they’d essentially replace the character’s features since they can be used so often. Finally there’s the fun theme, which is what interests me. I’ve always liked magic items with unusual effects because I imagine the kinds of intriguing situations they might facilitate.

“A magic wand is about 15 inches long and crafted of metal, bone, or wood. It is tipped with metal, crystal, stone, or some other material. VARIANT: WANDS THAT DON’T RECHARGE A typical wand has expendable charges. If you’d like wands to be a limited resource, you can make some of them incapable of regaining charges. Consider increasing the base number of charges in such a wand, to a maximum of 25 charges. These charges are never regained once they’re expended.” — from the 5E D&D DMG

Can you guess which wands I found most intriguing based on what I thought about the emergent themes? The Swiss Army Wand ranks high on my list because it relates to my favorite part of 5E D&D (exploration) with some useful effects but not ones that makes those parts of the game irrelevant like the Adventurer’s Wand. I like the Wand of Wondrous Sounds perhaps most of all because it’s so low key but seems likely to create interesting situations. I like the Wand of Speak with Dad for similar reasons. Aside from these and despite the powerful effects contained within some of the other wands my favorites here are Fork of Bees and BEARSTICK. Both conjure creatures out of thin air but there’s no charges or multiple uses — just once each day — and they don’t scale up. To me this means they’ll still be fun and somewhat functional at any level of play but won’t steal the spotlight from any player characters.

5E D&D wand resources

I mention our own forays into homebrew content creation for 5E D&D several times to plant the seed in your mind. Now you’re wondering, “What kind of homebrew content do you create, Nerdarchy? I’m extremely interested!” In addition to the monthly rewards our Patreon supporters receive we’ve presented tons of material in our videos and right here at Nerdarchy the Website ready to drop right into your games too. Another place we frequently create new content for Dungeon Masters and players to drop right into games is Nerdarchy the Newsletter and you’ll also get several gifts including $9.99 in store credit so you can add whatever you like there to your own collection when you sign up. Here’s a selection of content focused on or including wands in a significant way:

• D&D Ideas — Rods, Staves and Wands
• Hairable Ideas includes the Arcane Razor
• Muckwuggle the Frog God includes the Fabulous Frog Wand
• Secrets of the Vault: Mage Forge Vol. 2 includes the Shock Stick and Wand of Fire
• Mage Forge — Magic Items for 5th Edition includes the artifact wand Taphos

*Featured image — How would you adapt the Chaos Wand from Magic: The Gathering’s Adventures in the Forgotten Realms Commander expansion for 5E D&D? The mechanics of the Abjurationist Wand above seem like a solid place to start. Randomly eliminate prepared spells or spell slots to cast an unpreprared or even completely unknown spell seems like a fun way to go. [Art by Kari Christensen]

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