Harry Potter Spell Picker
What does the wand cast?
Spells in the sky
Tap a spell to hang its star in the sky (up to 20 — all of them fit at once).
Pick which spells are in the sky, then let the wand find one. Sparks break from the tip, gather into a wisp of light and drift star to star until they settle — then the wand waves and actually casts, because every spell here ends differently instead of just glowing a different colour.
- Fanfic and duelling scenes
- Tabletop prompts
- Quiz and trivia rounds
A random wizarding spell, actually cast
The Harry Potter Spell Picker chooses one of twenty spells at random — but instead of spinning a wheel at a list, the spells hang in a night sky as stars and a wand finds one for you. Sparks break off the tip, gather into a wisp of light, and it drifts star to star, slowing, until it settles on one. Then the wand waves and casts it — and what happens next depends entirely on which spell it landed on, because all twenty end differently.
How it works
Choose the spells
Tap the ones you want in the sky. All twenty fit at once, or narrow it to the shortlist you are genuinely choosing between.
A wisp goes looking
Sparks break off the wand tip and gather into one light, which wanders star to star — flaring and ticking each as it passes — and slows the whole way.
It settles, then the wand waves
The rest of the sky dims. The wand gathers back and snaps forward — the wave — and a beam runs the length of the frame to the chosen star, which bursts.
The spell goes off
The name plate lands first, so you already know the answer. Then the spell plays out for a few seconds: fire, water, light, darkness, a shield that holds.
Twenty spells, twenty endings
This is the part that took the work. A random spell generator that changes the colour of the result is doing almost nothing — you learn as much from a coloured word as from a plain one. So each spell here got its own ending, built to match what the spell actually does. Lumos is the obvious one: the sky floods to white and then settles down to a glow. Nox is the answer to it, and snaps everything to black with only the wand tip left alight.
They are also deliberately unhurried. Each ending runs for two to three seconds with the whole sky to happen in, and the name plate lands before it starts — so you have your answer immediately and the spectacle is there to watch rather than to wait through. Not every spell was slowed down, though. Stupefy is one hard pulse and Avada Kedavra is a snap with no build-up; being instantaneous is the whole character of those two, and stretching them would make them weaker. They keep the instant hit and hold the aftermath instead.
The table below is the whole set: the spell, what it is for, and what you will see happen on screen when it comes up.
| Spell | What it does | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Lumos | Lights the wand tip | The sky floods to white, holds, then settles back to a glow |
| Nox | Puts the light out | Snaps to darkness and holds it — only the wand tip is still burning |
| Incendio | Conjures fire | Embers rise from the tip, flicker and burn out |
| Aguamenti | Produces water | A jet arcs out of the wand and the droplets scatter |
| Wingardium Leviosa | Levitates an object | The name plate lifts off its rail and hovers there |
| Expecto Patronum | Conjures a guardian | A silver flare blooms outward in expanding rings |
| Avada Kedavra | The killing curse | A hard green snap with no build-up, and the dark holds after it |
| Expelliarmus | Disarms the target | The name plate is knocked clean sideways, then recovers |
| Protego | Raises a shield | A shield ring expands across the sky and holds, slowly turning |
| Stupefy | Stuns the target | One hard pulse, and three shock rings ringing outward |
| Accio | Summons an object | The sparks rush inward to the tip instead of away from it |
| Alohomora | Unlocks a door | A lock turns a quarter circle, glints twice and opens |
| Obliviate | Erases a memory | The name fades away entirely, waits, then slowly re-forms |
| Riddikulus | Defeats a boggart | A mixed-colour burst — the least serious thing on the page |
| Crucio | The torture curse | A jagged shake that will not settle |
| Sectumsempra | Cuts from a distance | Three slashes wipe across the frame and the wounds linger |
| Diffindo | Severs an object | One clean cut line, and the halves drift apart |
| Episkey | Heals small injuries | A gentle green glow gathers in and knits itself together |
| Levicorpus | Dangles you by the ankle | The name plate flips upside down, hangs there, then drops back |
| Imperius | Controls the target | A slow hypnotic ripple keeps spreading across the sky |
Why the wand wave stayed
An earlier version of this page was a wand that waved and then named a spell, and the wave was the best thing about it. It is the gesture the whole idea rests on: you do not press a button to cast, you move a wand, and the movement is the spell.
So the wave was kept exactly where it was, at the moment of casting — gather back, snap forward, settle. What changed is everything around it. Before, the wave ended and a word appeared in a colour. Now the wave ends and something happens, and it is a different something every time.
What did not survive was the first attempt at the search. That version put the wand at the centre of a ring of spells and turned it like a clock hand, which is a wheel with a wand painted on the pointer — the one thing this page most needed not to be. The wand moved to the corner, the ring became a scattered sky, and the thing that does the searching became a wisp of light that wanders rather than a hand that sweeps.
The three Unforgivable Curses
Avada Kedavra, Crucio and Imperius are on the list, and they are deliberately the three that feel worst on screen. The killing curse is a single green snap with no build-up and no aftermath — it happens and it is over. The torture curse shakes the frame and refuses to settle. The controlling curse is the slowest thing on the page, a ripple that spreads out and keeps going.
They are worth including precisely because they are not fun. A spell list where everything is a charm has no weight to it, and the moment one of these three comes up in a duelling scene you are writing, the scene changes. It is also why two of them are the shortest effects on the page and the third is the longest — the killing curse is over before you have registered it, and the controlling curse simply will not stop.
Charms, jinxes, hexes and curses
The list is not all one thing, and the differences matter if you are writing with it. A charm changes what something does without changing what it is — Lumos, Accio, Wingardium Leviosa, Protego, Alohomora. A curse is meant to do harm and generally means it: the three Unforgivables, Sectumsempra. In between sit the spells that are simply tools — Diffindo cuts, Aguamenti pours, Episkey mends.
Levicorpus is the odd one. It is not really any of those categories; it is a prank that got out of hand and stayed in circulation because it is funny until it is you.
A shortlist beats the whole sky. Twenty spells means each one comes up about one run in twenty. If you are picking something you have to build a whole scene around, cut it down to the five or six that would genuinely change what happens next.
Ways people use it
Writing a duel
Draw for both sides, alternating. It forces openings you would not have chosen — a duel that opens with Aguamenti is a far more interesting scene than one that opens with Stupefy.
Tabletop and fan RPGs
Roll for what a wild wand does, what a cursed object fires back, or what a first-year manages under pressure. The result is rarely the one anybody wanted.
Quiz and trivia rounds
Draw a spell and ask the table what it does, who invented it, or where it first turns up. The obscure ones make far better questions than the famous ones.
Settling something silly
Which spell would you actually want if you got exactly one. Start from a random draw rather than everyone naming the same three.
Why the artwork is objects, not scenes
Every drawing here is original, which rules out anything lifted from a film or a cover. Each spell is a plain object instead: a feather, a shield, a keyhole plate, a pair of scissors, a horseshoe magnet, a snuffed candle with the smoke still rising.
The objects also have a job. A star is small — at twenty in the sky, each one is about the size of a fingernail on a phone — so the emblem has to read as a silhouette, not as a picture. An object with a distinctive outline survives that; a scene does not. It is the same constraint the character picker and the professor picker work under, which is why the three pages look like one set.
They are drawn once and shown twice. On the chooser and the winner card they are dark ink on parchment, the way the rest of the wizarding pages do it; out in the sky the same files are turned to light, so the pale highlights that punch the skull's eye sockets and the keyhole become dark holes in a glowing shape rather than disappearing into it.
What this page is not
It is not a spellbook and it is not a reference. The one-line descriptions are written to be useful when a spell lands in front of you, not to be authoritative — for anything canonical you want a proper wiki, not a picker.
It is also not a skill game. There is no aiming, no timing and no way to influence the result: the whole journey is decided before the wisp starts moving. The only controls you get are which spells are in the sky and how fast the whole thing plays — and the first of those is the one that actually matters.
A fair pick, every time
The winning star is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random generator before the wisp moves, and its route is then built to end there. Spells are shuffled into different stars on every run, the scatter is re-rolled each time, and the wisp can reach any point in the sky with no limit on how far it may wander — so no star, no corner and no edge of the frame is luckier than another. Measured over 2,500 runs, every spell and every position came up within the expected range. The search is theatre; the decision was already made fairly.
More wizarding pickers
After something other than a spell? Try these:
- Not sorted yet? Put on the Hogwarts House Picker.
- Find out which wand chooses you at the HP Wand Picker.
- After a person: the HP Character Picker.
- Or a teacher: the HP Professor Picker.
- Want more? Browse all random pickers.