What's new
Everything below is already live. We build in the open and ship most weeks, so this page is the honest record of what changed and when.
Everyone at the table gets a microphone
- NewYour DM can now switch on the microphones for the whole table at once. You join from your own campaign page — no link to paste, no QR code to scan — and your name is already filled in from your character.
- NewEveryone at the table can read the transcript as it is written, live. If you are deaf or hard of hearing, or you simply missed a line while you were rolling dice, it is on your screen.
- FixedWhen several people sit in one room, every phone hears every voice. Lore & Play now works out which microphone was actually closest to whoever was speaking and keeps only that copy, so the transcript stops filling with faint garbled duplicates under the wrong names. We measure loudness only — no recording is kept and no voice is identified.
- FixedThe recognition language now comes from your DM's setting instead of from your own phone, so one player with a differently-set phone is no longer transcribed as nonsense.
- FixedA DM can put their own name on their own words. Until now every line a DM spoke was filed as “Table”.
- BetterYou are asked to agree to being transcribed once, not on every page load, and you can read what you agreed to — and take it back — from Settings at any time. Withdrawing stops your microphone everywhere; it does not delete lines already written, and your DM can delete those for you.
- BetterCloud transcription is never switched on for you automatically. Speech-to-text in your own browser is free and is what everyone uses; if your browser cannot do it, your DM decides — one player at a time — whether to pay for the alternative.
Being let into the beta actually works now
- FixedIf you asked for access, you now get an email when there is room, with a link that signs you up. Before this the waiting list was worked by hand and the message did not always reach the person waiting. If you asked and never heard back, that was us, not you.
- BetterThe invitation link is yours alone, works once, and lasts a fortnight. You set your own password — nobody here ever knows it, and nobody makes an account on your behalf.
- FixedThe two language flags in the header are drawn now instead of being typed as emoji, so they look the same in every browser. In Chrome on Windows they used to read as the letters GB and GR.
Two heavy pages got much lighter
- BetterMaking a character and opening the Workshop were sending the whole rulebook to your browser before you had chosen anything — every spell, every class, every magic item. They now fetch only what you actually picked. The character builder downloads 61% less than it did, the Workshop 43% less.
- BetterIt shows most on a phone and on a slow connection, which is where a table's players usually are.
Your Codex, read as a web
- NewCodex entries mention each other in their own text all the time without ever being linked. The Codex now reads your own prose, spots those names, and offers the connections for you to accept or ignore — one click each, nothing saved unless you say so.
- NewA Connections view beside the list shows what an entry touches and what those touch in turn, two steps out. Useful when a player asks who someone works for and the answer is three names away.
- BetterYou can now change what a link means after you have made it — it says serves, rules, is inside, and six more, each with the right words from either end. Until now a link could be created but never corrected.
- BetterThis runs on our own machines with no AI involved: your campaign's writing is not sent anywhere to produce it, and it costs nothing on any account.
The app uses your whole screen
- BetterWide monitors now show more, not bigger. The monster pool, your characters, the gallery, campaigns and the codex add columns as the screen gets wider instead of stretching the same four cards across it.
- BetterSettings, your profile, the guild page and the character sheet were laid out for a narrow window and have been rebuilt for a wide one — the guild board and its roster now sit side by side, and a sheet's skills spread out instead of queueing up.
- BetterReading pages keep their measure on purpose: the manual, the changelog and the legal pages stay a comfortable line length however wide your monitor is.
Guilds get a board
- NewTable talk: every guild now has a board its members can post on — plans, recruiting, rules arguments, and what happened at the last session. Only members can read it.
- NewReply to anything, edit your own words, and see at a glance what is new since you last looked — the guild list tells you before you open it.
- NewGuild officers can pin the post everyone should read first, and remove anything that does not belong. Your own guild, moderated by your own people.
- BetterA DM's dashboard now has a Player view button beside the rules reference, and the admin screen leads with the queues that have someone waiting on the other end.
Worlds: one setting, more than one table
- NewRun a second campaign in the same setting without retyping it. A world holds the cities, factions and people every table shares, and each campaign reads the same copy.
- NewMove a codex entry up to the world when a second table needs it, or back down when it turns out to belong to one campaign after all. The links you drew come with it.
- NewAnything you move to the world goes back to DM-only first. A table that has not been somewhere yet should not read about it because another table got there.
- NewGather campaigns you have already played: open a world and add them, then move as many codex entries up to it as you like in one go.
- BetterIf you never make a world, nothing changes at your tables: a campaign shows one only when it is in one.
Telling us when something breaks
- NewA Report a bug button on every page. Write one sentence; it attaches the page, your browser and the request that failed, so nobody has to play detective.
- NewWhen something actually fails, the error message itself offers to report it — already filled in.
- NewA separate Suggest an improvement button, because asking for something is not the same act as reporting a fault. We reply to both.
- NewYou can attach a screenshot if you want to, and paint over anything private before it is sent. It is never taken without you choosing the window.
Scheduling, and a calendar for guilds
- NewGive a session a future date and ask your table who is coming. Everyone answers yes or no in one click, and the tallies sit on the session row.
- NewYour dashboard shows the next session across every campaign you are in. One reminder goes out the day before, and only one.
- NewGuilds have a calendar: month, week and day. Officers move dates; everyone else reads them.
Campaigns have people in them
- NewInvite your players to a campaign. They accept, then bring a character of their own or take one you made.
- NewA character plays in one campaign at a time, because it levels up and takes damage in that campaign. Clone it if you want it at two tables.
- NewWhen a character dies you can hand that player another one, and the handover is written into the campaign's chronicle.
- NewA campaign can be finished. Nothing is deleted, everything stays readable, and the characters are freed for whatever your players run next.
- NewSee a campaign exactly as one of your players sees it. One button, read-only. It tells you whether you have leaked the twist.
- NewProfile pictures everywhere a person appears, a friends list at its own address, and the guild rank that used to be called admin is now Officer.
- BetterA character at 0 hit points now reads as unconscious, stable or dead at a glance, with its death saves on the card instead of buried in the sheet.
- BetterSession rows say what they hold: how long was recorded, how much transcript, who spoke, whether the recap is ready.
Bring a campaign that already exists
- NewPaste your D&D Beyond game log and your chronicle gets a past: every roll, on the day it actually happened.
- NewAfter a session, ask what was said that never made it into your notes. It reads the transcript against your Codex and proposes the gaps.
- NewTake your whole campaign away again in one file, and bring it back the same way.
- NewTranscribe a session on your own machine, free, and bring in the text. The audio never leaves your computer.
- BetterOne set of dice everywhere in the app, one way to put them down, and a chronicle that opens on the story rather than on four hundred perception checks.
Documents, recordings, and eight fixed defects
- NewHand over Word, PDF, OpenDocument, RTF, Markdown or plain text, or a .zip of the whole campaign folder. Every entry quotes the line it came from, and one click undoes the lot.
- NewSession dates are read from your filenames, your headings, or the recording's own clock, so an imported campaign arrives in the right order.
- FixedUploads over 10 MB failed with a bare error on nine different routes. They work, and when a file really is too big the message says so before you wait.
- FixedRe-importing the same character sheet is a choice now, not a silent duplicate at a different level.
What we're working on
No dates. A small team that misses a public date has spent something it cannot get back, so we would rather tell you what we are building than when it lands.
Seeing the whole shape of your Codex
You can follow the connections two steps out from any entry today. Seeing a whole campaign's web laid out at once is the part that is still missing — and it is only worth drawing once there are enough links in it to make a picture rather than a scatter of dots.