What Wizards broke, and the hearth we built in the silence.

The first day of January, 2023, a draft of the OGL 1.1 leaked. One paragraph in it tried to revoke the licence that every third-party publisher of D&D content had been quietly leaning on since 2000. Within forty-eight hours, the creative tax base of an entire hobby was panicking that their income would disappear because a multinational publisher had decided — apparently unilaterally — that "open" was no longer a word they wanted.

That has not been the story this past year. The story has been the opposite: the people whose work we've loved for two decades quietly moved their tables somewhere off-Wizards, and onto licences they could trust. Pathfinder doubled its creator count. The Forge grew. itch.io reaped. A constellation of indie systems — Mörk Borg, Heart, Blades in the Dark, the Black Hack — suddenly stopped being "alternatives to 5e" and became the first choice for tables that no longer needed permission.

We were among them. And we built Dungeonhearth in that silence.

The letter we wrote ourselves

Before we wrote a line of code, we wrote a one-page letter describing what kind of product we did not want to build. Three lines mattered:

• No walled garden. No "your content lives only in our app" clause. Chronicles, wiki pages, and inventory must be exportable in open formats — JSON, Markdown, plain CSV.
• No single-publisher dependency. The marketplace must accept tokens from any game system. If we pivoted tomorrow, and rebranded the whole thing as a Pathfinder-native product, the dependency graph cannot explode.
• No rug pull. Pricing and revenue share for marketplace creators must be published once, in writing, and the structure must not change underneath them without written notice.

None of those properties are technically hard. All three of them were historically financially hard — because walled gardens monetise, and platforms routinely reserve the right to do whatever they want. We took the bet that a small platform with honest terms beats a large one with vague terms, even if the small one starts smaller.

What "open" now means, in code

The chronicle/wiki is, structurally, a graph. Chapters reference NPCs. NPCs reference towns. Items reference crafting recipes. A backlink query is a single join away, and every relationship is stored as a foreign key, not a magic link that only one application can parse.

The inventory ledger is the same. A drag-and-drop loot table is a row in a PostgreSQL table; nothing in the UI is required to read it. A DM who wants a CSV at the end of a campaign gets a CSV, not a screenshot, not a "Premium Plan" upsell.

The marketplace is the most interesting of the three, because it is also the most profitable. Creator tokens — items, stat blocks, spells, recipes — are data first. The rendering layer takes care of presentation; the underlying schema is system-agnostic, so a token published on Dungeonhearth can be dropped into a Roll20 campaign, a Foundry VTT module, or a plain Markdown session prep. The platform is not the customer; the platform is the shelf.

What we are not building

It is worth being explicit about the things we are not building, because the list is short and discipline matters:

• A replacement for character sheets. Player-side tooling is crowded and excellent. We focus on the four tools a DM opens every week.
• AI-generated campaigns. Our narrative tooling works from your bullet notes; the campaign is still yours. You are the Loremaster.
• Patreon-shaped tiers. We publish a single Loremaster tier at a flat monthly price. Creators earn through the marketplace; we earn through subscriptions. The two seats are not the same chair.

Join us, or watch

The alpha is small. We are onboarding tables in waves, reading every request by hand, and we will keep doing that until we cannot. If you ran a campaign through the OGL mess and emerged with a table that still meets on Thursdays, write to us — we want to know what survived, and what did not.

If you are building a system of your own, and you would like a creator storefront that will not change its revenue share on you without notice: the same offer applies.

Either way, the hearth is on.