The Cozy Dragon's Hoard of Dice

The obvious place to start when creating ‘cozy’ magic in your game is quality-of-life improvements. Of the 477 spells in the Dungeons and Dragons players handbook, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, only a small fraction can be described as anything other than totally martial. Of the balance, utility is mostly limited to something useful for dungeon delving in some other sense.

In some senses, this makes a great deal of sense; the game is generally known as Dungeons and Dragons, and it follows that most of the focus in the ruleset will be about exploring the former and doing battle with the latter.

However, it does mean that the game’s core spell list does not contribute, overmuch, to the worldbuilding. If we are to take the core spell list as the only spells available, the wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, bards, clerics, paladins, and occasional spellcasters from other classes have spent the majority of their time figuring out ways to manually increase the entropy in the form of their friends and neighbours. There are a few spells such as Plant Growth, which are likely useful first for agriculture, and then with martial applications as an afterthought, but these are few and far between. Arguably, the healing spells are not necessarily martial, but given that they focus primarily upon the restoration of health from grievous bodily injury, it seems reasonable to track that to encounters where you are likely to encounter same.

Too, there is the issue of scaling. Warm socks, a full flagon, and plentiful books to read next to a warm fire, even out in the woods, do not require powerful magic; one might argue that the highest level ‘cozy’ spell is Magnificent Mansion, which conjures the so-named dwelling out of nothingness complete with a staff of 100, capping off at a 7th level working. Potent as this is, it is difficult to imagine what an 8th or 9th level spell focused on the caster’s comfort might be; a small rural town, wished into existence?

Presumably, an imaginative mage could come up with a still more magnificent mansion, but at that point, you’re simply playing a game of arcane one-upmanship.

This is not to say that the potential is not there to create such spells. Perhaps you could call forth a celestial barque, with all the amenities of the mansion, as well as the ability to travel and defend itself, or feed a nation.

The point of all of this is to say, when you start to work out what spells do not simply work in a fight, but which are designed for homely or luxury work, you start to find out what the priorities a world has had. Perhaps some of the spells such as the cantrip firebolt were designed as ways of starting campfires more readily, refined and applied to martial prowess? Perhaps the original spellwork is still out there somewhere.

Deciding what magic can be used for in your campaign tells you about that campaign world within the context of magic. And that’s a conversation worth having.