Publish the thing you’ve been sitting on

The fear is not irrational. OGL 1.0a is genuinely confusing, and the 2023 OGL 1.1 episode taught this community that getting the license wrong can be existential. So good work stays hidden — whole campaign settings, material better than plenty of what’s on sale — because nobody wants to find out the hard way.

The actual work of publishing an OGL derivative is bookkeeping: carry every upstream Section 15 notice, add your own copyright line, state which parts are Open Game Content and which are Product Identity. That is exactly the kind of laborious, error-prone task a tool should do for you.

1. Build it in the Forge, or bring what you have

   Create your monster, feat, spell, or class — or paste in homebrew you already wrote. It stays private, owned by you, until you choose to publish it.

2. The Forge stages your attestation

   As you work, you record the parts the license cares about: your contributor name, what you derived from, and any protected names the work references but does not release as Open Game Content.

3. Publish — the flow builds the Section 15 chain

   The publish step walks every upstream source, carries its notices forward, adds your own copyright line, and produces the OGL 1.0a declaration the license actually requires.

4. It is live, with a receipt anyone can verify

   Your record shows its full provenance chain — content status, attestation, the resolvable Section 15 — for free, without anyone having to trust us.

Open Game Content attestation is free on every tier, Hearth included — we do not gate the thing that makes publishing legal. Paid tiers add a named publisher imprint, Product Identity tagging, and owned campaign worlds. See the plans →

The system records the assertions you make as a contributor. It does not certify that your work is legally clean, and it is not a substitute for qualified legal counsel. If a rights holder ever raises a concern, here is exactly how that process works.