I understand why the D&D 5e OGL is the way it is. Wizards of the Coast wants to avoid a repeat of their path being stolen. The downside is the amount of work it takes to create something fully playable. I further understand this is exactly the point. The workload is higher so that IP contribution is easy and attractive under the DMs Guild, and OGL setting creation is much less appealing. Wizards of the Coast controls the majority of the marketplace at the moment. It’s not impossible for third-party sites to do well, and several of them are, but it’s not the Wild West of yesteryear.
In order to support some other OGL connect I am working on, I have had cause to look at the existing cantrips. The list is woefully short, except for cleric. Cleric doesn’t have any missing cantrips. I mean, spare the dying is missing, but it’s pretty bad. I understand wanting to limit at-will healing, but there are other options to explore. Anyway, there are a lot of options here. I haven’t exhausted anything by any means, and if you want to see the arcane and kahin cantrip options for Al-Qadim you can look here and here, but it’s hopefully a step in the right direction.
One of the things I do when I create new spells for play is include a prop for the spells with snippets of text included to further shed light on the setting’s lore. The players can follow up with the information in the spell or not, some are new leads and some are further info on existing interests. It would be ideal to do this for every spell in a setting, including existing spells, but that’s quite a project. However, all projects start with a step, so it’s included here. These are all setting agnostic flavor texts, and can easily be changed to fit your setting with hopefully minimal effort.
Big thanks to Shieldhaven, Zyrial, and Onai for the sets of eyes, editing, and questions. The images below are meant to be used in Fantasy Grounds or Roll20, but you can view the text only version here.
