Lore & Play

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.

A recap for every session

  • NewPlayers can choose a session in their book of the campaign and read what happened in it. The DM decides what they read: write it on the session's own page, or share a recap the assistant drafted, after seeing exactly what the players will get.

Battle odds

  • NewThe battle map's XP box can fight the battle on the map a thousand times with the dice — your party's sheets against the monsters' stat blocks — and tell you how often the party wins, how often someone drops or dies, and who is most at risk. Untick who isn't in the room. Only the DM sees it, and it says plainly what it can't know: where everyone stands, spells that don't deal damage, and your players' cleverness.

The Library

  • BetterThe bookcase and the books are painted now: every theme has its own carved bookcase in its own wood, and a book's cover is real leather, cloth, dragon scale or vellum in the colour you chose, its spine with raised bands.

The Library

  • BetterEvery book on your shelves opens as a book: the Workshop with its parts as ribbons, your characters, Worlds, the Gallery, the Tavern, guilds, friends, settings and the rules. And a session is a chapter of its campaign's book — on the battle map, the session's notebook lies beside it with the transcript, the rolls and the effects under it, one click to bring each on top.
  • BetterA campaign is one book now. Its ribbons turn to its parts — the overview, the sessions as its table of contents, the party, the maps with a picture of each, the Codex, the rulings, the chronicle — and the notepad beside it holds the campaign's cover, backup, Tavern listing, finishing and archiving. A character opened from the party shows its sheet in the notepad.
  • BetterPlayers' homes are a library too: tonight's game is an open book in the cover its DM chose, with your invitations in a notebook beside it, and your characters and games on the shelves.
  • BetterAt the table, the session's other pages hang as ribbons above the DM's map and open as a notebook over it; the turn order hangs as ribbons too. Preparing a session, it is a book bound in its campaign's cover, with the campaign's sessions as chapters beside it.
  • BetterYour home is now a bookcase: your campaigns and the games you play in on the top shelf, the Workshop's books in the middle, the Tavern and company below — and your notebook beside it, with what needs your answer and what is coming up. On a phone the books lie in stacks.
  • NewOpen a campaign's book to prepare its next session, run it, or see its sessions so far — and give it a cover of your own: leather, cloth, dragon scale or vellum, a colour, the lettering and a typeface.

Your character on a notepad

  • BetterOn a computer, your character sheet is now a spiral notepad lying on the map, so the map keeps its full width. Bookmarks down its left edge open each page: Sheet & Combat, Main, Spells, Inventory, Features, Companions & Bio.
  • NewPut the notepad aside and it slides to the edge of the screen with its bookmarks still showing; any bookmark brings it back at that page. While you pick a target on the map it moves out of the way by itself.
  • NewA Sheet & Combat page with what a turn needs — hit points, rests, armour, initiative, inspiration, your actions and attacks — and death saves at the top when you drop to 0. Every other page starts with a line showing your armour and hit points.
  • NewPages turn with a little animation and, if you want it, a quiet page-turning sound. Both have their own switch in Settings → Motion & sound; the sound is off until you turn it on, and nobody else hears yours.

Experience points and milestone levels

  • NewChoose how characters advance, on the campaign's Overview: Free (players level up when they like — every campaign stays on it until you change it), Milestone (you grant each level), or Experience points.
  • NewAward XP from the session's party or from Wrap up: an amount, what it was for, and who gets it — it is split among them, and every award can be undone. Each sheet shows its XP and how far it is to the next level.
  • NewWhen you end a battle in an XP campaign, the map lists the creatures and what each is worth — the defeated already ticked — and nothing is given until you press Award.
  • BetterPlayers see “Ready for level N” the moment a level opens, and the level-up editor stops at the level they have reached and says why.
  • BetterThe campaign's Overview shows the whole story so far, and on a wide screen lays it out in three columns.
  • FixedLevelling up in the editor no longer wipes a character's experience points.

Prepare, run, play — and run it from your phone

  • BetterThe DM's home now opens on three choices: create and prepare (campaigns, sessions, maps, the Workshop), run a game you have prepared, or play in someone else's.
  • NewA session has two modes, Prep and Run. Run keeps only what you use at the table — the tools that build a map, the prep brief, imports and exports wait in Prep, one click away.
  • NewRun the table from your phone: “Open on phone” shows a QR code. On the phone the session's tabs sit along the bottom, and the battle map becomes a remote — go live or hide, fog, whose turn and next turn, music and artwork — while the map itself stays on your computer.

Battle mode on the map

  • NewThe map is for exploring until the DM starts a battle. Then every player is asked for their initiative wherever they are in the app: roll it with the app's dice, or roll a real d20 at the table and type the number on the die — your bonus is shown and added for you. The DM sees who is in, can enter a number for anyone, and begins round 1 when they choose.
  • BetterIn a battle, whose turn it is stays on screen on every tab of the live table, with who comes next; your phone buzzes when your turn comes. Players see the order, not the initiative numbers. Attacks and spells now live in your sheet's Actions card instead of a button over the map, folded away while you explore.

The right session, and both sides of the table

  • NewTell a campaign how you play — the same room on your own devices, the same room with a TV, online, or hybrid — and the table sets itself up to match: phones stay awake at a table, the TV plays the music, people at home see whether they are connected.
  • BetterSpells cast from your sheet now do what they say: pick the slot, pick who you heal, roll, and apply — the slot is spent only then, with an Undo. Text is never smaller than 12 pixels, every theme shows where the keyboard focus is, and the dice result on a phone tucks itself into a corner instead of covering your sheet.
  • BetterDice fade away by themselves four seconds after they land — on everyone's screen, the DM's too — so nobody has to clear the table after every roll. Tap a die to put them away sooner; the result stays in the Rolls list.
  • BetterThe character builder says what is still missing before Next opens, counts every choice, and on a phone shows an option's details in a sheet you can open from the bottom of the screen. Rolling from a sheet on a computer gets full-size Advantage, Normal and Disadvantage buttons. Players can bring their own characters to a game they play in straight from their character list.
  • NewA screen for the room's TV: “Table screen (TV)” on the battle map opens the map your players see with every name in big type, whose turn it is along the top and each roll large for a few seconds — and nothing of yours. With no map revealed it shows the campaign and the story so far.
  • FixedRolls at the live table go to the session you are actually playing. Making a new session mid-game no longer pulls the table into it — you are asked whether the current one stays live — and the Timeline can move lines that were filed under the wrong session.
  • NewIf you run games and also play in someone else's, the account menu switches between the two sides from any page, your dashboard lists the games you play in, and a welcome screen shows what is next on both — until you tell it which side to open.
  • BetterA campaign page shows the character you play there, with its HP, the sheet one tap away, and Level up when your DM allows it.
  • BetterOne name per screen: “Player view” on your dashboard shows a campaign as one of your players sees it; the battle map's button for the TV is now “Table screen (TV)”; and the map list copies a “battle-map link”.
  • FixedThe Chronicle and a session's Timeline speak the same language — Story, All, Rolls & combat, Events (and Markers in a session) — and every count is right before you click it. A session played without a microphone now shows its rolls and events in the session list instead of “Nothing recorded yet”.
  • BetterA session's screen starts with one slim bar — Back, the campaign, the session and whether it is live — instead of half a screen of header, so the map gets the rest. Full screen is remembered on each device, and a reload brings you back to the map you had open.

Playing from your phone

  • BetterThe live table is a full-screen app on a phone or tablet: Map, Me, Dice, Story and Chat along the bottom, one tap each. The map no longer scrolls the page when you drag it, and your microphone's state is always at the top — listening, off, or stopped.
  • NewYour character opens “at the table” on a phone: big HP with − and + buttons, conditions you tap on and off, your saves and most-called-for skills, your attacks and spells with their rolls, spell slots and resources. The full sheet is one tap away.
  • BetterRolling on a phone opens a panel from the bottom of the screen with big Advantage / Normal / Disadvantage buttons and a box for the number you rolled with real dice — no more tiny pop-up that the keyboard covers.
  • BetterPlayers get a bar along the bottom of the screen on phones and tablets — Home, Table, Characters, the Tavern, and a menu with everything else. The Table button takes you straight to your game, with a red dot when your DM is live.
  • BetterOn a touch screen, press and hold a button to see what it does. Menus open as full-width lists, the back button closes them, and text boxes are big enough that your phone doesn't zoom in on them.
  • NewYour own notes at the table: write them during a session and they stay pinned to it, then read them back from any later session — newest first, with a search box. Only you can see them.
  • BetterOn a computer the live table keeps the map on the left all the time, with your character, dice, the transcript, chat and notes on the right, chosen from a bar down the side.
  • FixedAt a table with no battle map, players can now roll from the live table — its dice button was answering with an error.

Fixes from a real game night

  • BetterThe DM assistant answers in your interface language — and its Recap, Threads, Prep and What-next briefs now read the whole session, not just its last minute, and no longer mistake your prep notes for things that happened. Ask in another language and it answers in that one.
  • FixedWhen you reveal another battle map, your players move to it by themselves — no more leaving and coming back. One map is on the table at a time: revealing a map hides the one before it.
  • Better“Copy player link” on the battle map is now “Player view”: it opens what your players see in a new tab, ready for the table's shared screen, and it follows you from map to map. To invite someone, copy that tab's address.
  • FixedBackground music on the battle map is heard again — YouTube links were being blocked by the browser, for the DM and for players. If a browser still refuses to start the sound on its own, a “🔊 Enable sound” button appears. Players now hear the volume the DM sets.
  • FixedYour dice look is used for every roll you make — from your character sheet, attacks, saves and healing too — not only for rolls from the dice button.
  • FixedOn phones, the top bar and the bottom of the page no longer hide behind the browser's address bar and toolbar, the menu scrolls when it is taller than the screen, and typing the number you rolled with physical dice no longer closes the keyboard.
  • FixedPicking up the dice no longer also clicks whatever was underneath them.
  • FixedLive transcription at the table works on phones, where it often silently wrote nothing, and it no longer switches itself off after a quiet stretch. If your phone thinks the voice it hears is someone else's, it now tells you how many lines it skipped.
  • FixedThe DM assistant follows the whole session, not just its last minute: asked “what can we do now?” hours in, it reads back through tonight's transcript instead of answering as if the game had just begun. Long sessions' transcripts also keep updating past the first hour.

Players level up their own characters

  • NewA player you assign a character to can now level it up themselves — “Level up” is on their character card and on their character page. Until now only you could. While the character is in a campaign that is all they change: its name, species, background, ability scores, class and earlier choices stay yours. If you'd rather keep a sheet in your hands, untick “Can level up” under the player's name on the character card. Their HP, conditions, prepared spells and inventory stay theirs either way.
  • FixedReopening a saved character to edit it no longer warns that its background skills were chosen twice, and no longer says it has no weapon or armor when it does.

Notes on the battle map

  • NewPin your notes to a square on the battle map. Use “Pin note” in the map's toolbar, click a square, and write a new note or pick one you already have. A note icon marks the square; click it to read the note, edit it, move it or unpin it. Only you see the icon — your players never do. Pinned notes keep showing in your Notes panel, and the AI assistant knows where each one is pinned.
  • BetterA full backup of a campaign now keeps each note as its own note — with its title, its session and the square it is pinned to — instead of merging a session's notes into one long note when you import it back.

Tidying up your campaigns

  • NewYou can rename a campaign. Its name, setting and description are all editable from the campaign's Overview tab — until now the name was fixed at the moment you created it.
  • NewYou can rename a session from inside it — click its title at the top of the session screen. Renaming from the campaign's Sessions list still works as before.
  • NewGroups, for your own filing. Put campaigns on named shelves — “Tuesday group”, “one-shots” — and sessions into story arcs. Arcs are headings over the sessions you already have: the list still runs in the order you played, so an arc can never move a session out of sequence. Nobody else sees your groups.
  • NewArchiving. Archive a campaign and it leaves your dashboard, your campaigns list and every picker, keeping everything inside it — one click brings it back. This is the one for a campaign that simply stopped: finishing a campaign says the story ended and hands every character back to its player, which is still a separate thing. Sessions can be archived too, and an archived session stops catching tonight's dice rolls.
  • NewClearing or deleting a session. A session can be emptied in place — keeping its number, title and date — or removed from the campaign entirely, and either way what happened in it leaves the campaign with it: the transcript, the recap, its chronicle entries and its table events. Before anything happens you are shown the exact counts, what will NOT be touched (your battle maps, your notes, and every character sheet — nothing is rolled back), and you type the session's title to confirm. Campaigns themselves cannot be deleted, deliberately.

A pass over the rough edges

  • FixedA roll you make during a session now appears in THAT session's timeline. Rolls could be filed under a different session of the same campaign — nothing was ever lost, but the history was shown under the wrong evening.
  • BetterThe battle map is usable on a narrow screen. On a phone you get the turn order, the roll feed, the library and the spell effects one at a time, and the map itself as a read-only view you can pinch and pan. On a tablet the map keeps its room.
  • Fixed"Back" goes back. Opening a session or a character in a new tab and pressing Back used to leave the site entirely instead of returning to the page it names.
  • Better"Copy to Note" takes you to the note it just wrote, with the cursor in it. It used to leave the draft waiting on a tab you were not looking at, and a reload threw it away.
  • BetterA character you create from a campaign is now in that campaign when you get back to it, and notes from other sessions say which session they came from.
  • FixedWeapons and armour in the rules reference show their damage, properties, weight and cost. Opening one used to show an empty box.
  • FixedThe manual's contents links land on the section you clicked the first time, and the sign-in fields now work properly with password managers and screen readers.

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.

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