What's New

Every hero used to begin at the same empty box marked Backstory, which is how so many adventurers end up as orphans raised by wolves. That box asks questions now. The Backstory Wizard wants to know about your life in this world: where you grew up, who raised you, the moments that shaped you, the scar you carry and why you are here. Then it writes your backstory, traits, ideals, bonds and flaws from your answers. Never opened a rulebook? Tell the game what your hero would actually do and it works out the class that fits, with a species, background and skills to match. Eighteen new backgrounds belong to Brightvale, Old Armis or anywhere at all, and the Name step suggests names from your world, with a dice button for more.

The DM also spends a lot less time clearing its throat. The first words of a reply reach you much faster, the first paragraph appears as it is written, and while the DM works the waiting line tells you what it is doing: reading the rules, rolling dice, checking your sheet. It leaves your character's words and choices to you, and when you ask for something the game cannot do, it says so and you keep your turn. Identical items fold into one tidy line in your pack, and the long list of fixes below came, as ever, mostly from your reports. Thank you for writing in.

For weeks the DM kept quoting the 2014 rules at you with total confidence, and several of you wrote in, politely, to say so. We finally found out why. Whole chapters of the rulebook the DM checks, backgrounds, species, tools, equipment and much of the core rules, came back blank whenever it looked something up, so it answered from memory, and its memory is the old book. Every one of those chapters now reads properly, so the answer comes from the rules this game actually uses. Equipment packs had the same trouble and now open into their real 2024 contents, including the ones already sitting on your sheet.

The rest came straight from your bug reports. A matched pair of rapiers can finally be held one in each hand, enemies wait for their own turn instead of cutting the queue, a Champion spelled in lowercase still gets Improved Critical, and raising your Constitution at level up now raises the hit points of every level you have, as the rules always said it should. Thank you, again, for writing in.

Three wolves walked into a clearing and, as far as the game could tell, they were all the same wolf. Your killing blow on the third landed on the first, already lying dead, while the one you actually hit kept biting. Killing one of two gnolls could mark both dead, end the fight and wipe the tracker mid-round. Enemies that share a name are now numbered apart and told apart, so every hit lands on the creature you aimed at.

The other fix you asked for most: heroes who could not level up. The level up was never the problem. A hero who had been given a flying speed was crashing the game screen over and over, and that crash kept sending you back to the start. It is fixed, those characters repair themselves, and the level up goes through. Also on the list: dead enemies stop freezing the fight, the combat bar stops lying about what you have left, and Reckless Attack finally has its price.

You have been the only one at this table for a long time, and the empty chairs were starting to take it personally. Multiplayer is here. Host a table for up to seven, invite friends by share link or by the email they sign in with (nothing lands in their inbox, the invite simply appears in their app), and everyone brings their own hero to the same story with the same DM running it. Play it live in one sitting or a message a day, whichever your friends can actually manage. A Table panel shows who is with you, what they are playing, how much health they have left and exactly how much trouble they are in, and when the spotlight lands on you the game says so out loud, even if you wandered off to make tea two hours ago.

The world also stopped being yours alone. In a Living World every campaign in that adventure shares one map, one calendar and one clock that runs at the same speed yours does, so the bridge another player burned is still down when you get to it, and the arena's reigning champion is a real person who really won the fight. Your own absence counts too: close the tab for a night and, if your party was somewhere safe, they sleep, so you come back with your hit points and spell slots restored instead of yesterday's leftovers. Underneath all of it sits the largest rules pass we have ever shipped, roughly sixty class features that were only ever text now rolling real dice, temporary hit points that finally exist, and a wolf called Wolf 3 worth exactly as much experience as a wolf called Wolf.

The DM cleared their throat, and it turns out they have a lovely reading voice. Press Listen and your story is read aloud, each word lighting up as it is spoken, with a menu of narrators to choose from and a preview of each. Or go further: switch on voice mode and the table runs itself like a radio drama, paragraphs spoken as they arrive, dice rolling themselves the moment the story goes quiet, and your turn taken by simply saying it out loud. If you prefer reading in silence, the dice will still roll themselves for you; that is its own setting now, no voice required.

We also hired a Fixer. A small wrench now sits beside Send, and when something looks wrong, a companion marked dead who is standing right there, a dice card that never arrived, numbers that refuse to add up, you tell the Fixer and it reads the actual records, mends what is genuinely broken, and tells you what it did. It works on its own daily credits, so asking for help never costs you story messages. Neither do dice anymore: rolls stopped counting against your day entirely. And beneath all that ride the hundred small mercies of the title: victories paying their full experience, smites finally spending the bonus action they always owed, magic armor counting all the way, rests that rest the whole party, death saves for companions who fall, and a feat shelf brought fully in line with the 2024 rules.

The druids have been circling the tower for weeks, and we finally let them in. Wild Shape is now the real transformation: take a beast's form and its armor, strength, speed and actual attacks take over, temporary hit points included, while your gear folds safely into the shape and returns when you do. A new Wild Shape tab on your sheet lists the forms you know, with a filter so you can find something that bites without scrolling past every frog in the forest, and Circle of the Land arrives whole: Circle Spells, Natural Recovery, Nature's Ward, and the level 20 capstones for druids who have outlived several parties.

The martial classes refused to be shown up by people who turn into badgers. All ten Fighting Styles now work through your actual hands, including Two-Weapon, Thrown Weapon and Unarmed Fighting, which until now were purely decorative. High level Rangers get Relentless Hunter, Precise Hunter and Foe Slayer as written, and the spells that promise advantage or resistance, Faerie Fire, Blur, Heroism, Protection from Poison, now move your actual dice instead of merely setting the mood.

The quartermaster finally got shelves. Your equipment now lives on a paper doll of body slots, so the game knows which hand holds your sword, whether your shield is actually raised, and what that ring is doing on your finger. You can equip and unequip gear yourself, instantly, without spending a turn asking the DM to help you get dressed, and your coins sit in their own tidy row above the pack instead of rattling around between the torches. The art got a polish too: clean item illustrations, names colored by rarity, and your attack bonus and damage shown right under whatever you are holding.

Combat learned to show its work. The tracker now displays temporary hit points on the health bars and your action, bonus action, movement and reaction at a glance, quick action buttons moved in right under the message box and now compose your turn instead of firing it early, and dice results spell out their sums with advantage rolls showing both dice. Elsewhere, your side panels remember what they loaded, so opening a sheet mid-fight is instant rather than a small loading ritual, and tapping any hero in your roster opens their full sheet, with a snapshot button for keeping a favorite exactly as they are.

You wake face down on warm sand with no memory of arriving, which the management insists is normal. Farthreshold Arena is a brand new campaign: a gladiator pit in a city built between worlds, where you fight your way up the card, take work from four factions who all assure you the other three are lying, and slowly find out who is really running the show. There are rivals, patrons, fixers and monsters of the pit to meet, a city of broken portals to wander between bouts, and a win-loss record the arena keeps for you, since gladiators are famously honest about their statistics.

The pit also keeps its matches interesting: signature rivals scale to your party, so the champion who nearly took your head at level three is still worth fearing at level nine. And any companion you recruit along the way now arrives properly armed and armored, with the right number of attacks for their class, instead of showing up to a knife fight holding a strong opinion.

Somewhere around the third tavern, most parties lose track of what they promised the first one. Your quests now have a home: a Quests section in the side panel lists everything you are on, each under a proper title with its latest lead, and you can tap one to read the story so far. Old campaigns tidy their own records, duplicates stopped breeding, and anything finished or abandoned can be archived, though the innkeeper you stiffed remembers regardless.

The masons have been through, and the cellars go down further than they used to. The DM can now raise a whole dungeon on the spot: room after room, easy trouble near the door building to something genuinely deadly at the bottom, creatures that belong to the place, and a named villain waiting in the final chamber instead of a vague sense of menace. The map holds, too: where you are, what you have cleared, and which door you have been pointedly avoiding all stay remembered. The Shattered Crown already puts this to work with two new sites, the Bramble Hollow Den, a first honest errand for Eldon and Mira, and a rebuilt Shattered Keep, where Krag the Foul is holding Isla Ash and would rather keep her.

The dice took an honesty oath while the dust settled. A called-for roll now always reaches you as a card, the card stays put while you use it, and your bonus damage rolls where you can see it, Rage and Sneak Attack and Smite on the same card as the weapon dice, with every resistance and feat named beside the number it changed. Bless and Bane move rolls instead of merely describing them. Your companions grew up as well: level-ups finally stick, one hero levelled the same companion seventeen times before it took, stragglers catch up to your level, and tapping their card opens a full sheet, so the person holding your torch is no longer a polite stranger.

You would hire a cleric and receive a soldier with a holy symbol and no particular opinions about healing. Companions now play the class they were recruited as, built on the official Sidekick rules: warriors get Second Wind and extra attacks, experts get Cunning Action and Evasion, and spellcasters arrive with a real spell list and the slots to cast from it. Recruit a healer and healing occurs. Recruit a scout and things get scouted.

The rules lawyer took a few smaller cases and won them all: Sneak Attack now also triggers off an ally within five feet of your target, rogues are offered the weapon mastery picks they were always owed, and masteries like Graze, Vex and Slow genuinely do things in a fight. The quartermaster, meanwhile, took up watercolours. Many weapons and armors now carry a painted illustration on their card, and your spellbook has sorted itself by level, which it maintains it always meant to do.

For a while the monsters rolled their dice under the table, and you were expected to take the wound on faith. No longer. Every attack, save and check a creature makes now appears as its own compact line, right where it happened in the story, coloured from your side of the table, their hit in red, their miss in green, and you can tap a line closed once you have read it. Advantage and disadvantage also stopped being a stirring description and became an actual second die, and your AC shows its math when you tap it: armor, shield and buffs, with Shield of Faith and its friends genuinely moving the number and keeping it moved.

The rest is a stack of your reports, honoured one by one. Sentinel Shield grants the initiative advantage it kept promising, Searing Smite goes on burning by itself, a +1 scimitar counts however you spell it, and a dozen small snags, from a button that did nothing on an attuned item to your NPC notes wrestling the phone keyboard, have been shown the door.

The rules lawyer came back, and this time brought the errata. Your level 1 paladin had spells prepared and nothing to cast them with. Your monk's fists were the one weapon in the game that magic flatly refused to improve. A hard climb asked about as much of you as a firm handshake. All of it now runs by the current rulebook: the slots are there, a punch counts as a real attack, and difficulty sits where the book puts it. Which does mean your campaign will feel a step tougher than it did last week. Sorry.

The app took a warmer look while it was at it. Paper is what you open into now, unless you already chose otherwise, in which case nothing moved. Building a hero is clearer, every weapon can be mastered rather than the twenty one someone happened to type in, and if you write a line of narration and then tap a spell, the two arrive together instead of your sentence being quietly thrown away.

Every table collects people. The trouble was that yours collected them in a heap: the companion who joined you at the crossroads turned up with stats that meant nothing, the codex introduced you to strangers as though you were old friends, and your notes lived wherever you last wrote them down, which was nowhere. Companions now arrive scaled to your level, and their feelings about you are stated in one honest word. The codex remembers only the people you have actually met, and you can keep notes on each of them.

Your campaigns are tidier too. Sort them, rename them where they sit, and see at a glance who you are playing. There is a real notebook now, four pages of it, with a Save button that admits out loud whether it saved. And if a reply never arrives, the day's message comes back to you, because you should only pay for turns you get to read.

Adventurers have always played on the road: in queues, on buses, in the ten minutes before something else starts. The app had not entirely noticed. On a phone the story would haul itself down to the end of a paragraph exactly as you started reading it, the character and combat panels planted themselves on screen and refused every invitation to leave, and turning the phone sideways summoned a layout that clearly expected a desk. The panels are proper drawers now. Swipe them open, swipe them shut, tap the story to dismiss them, or just press back like a reasonable person.

A few other things had been quietly broken down there. Damage rolls ran off the edge of the card, so the one number you cared about was the one you could not see. The death screen kept its second door somewhere below the floor. Back closed the whole app instead of returning to your campaigns. All mended, along with a good deal of speed and battery that the scenery had been helping itself to.

The rules lawyer at the table had a point, and worse, receipts. Your fighting style was written plainly on your sheet and just as plainly ignored by the dice: Archery, Dueling, Great Weapon Fighting, all of it purely decorative. It counts now. Savage Attacker rolls your damage twice and keeps the better result, a Champion's edge finds a critical on a 19, and Hunter's Mark and Hex have stopped being polite suggestions. Their damage lands every single time you hit the marked target, without anyone at the table having to remember it.

Your character sheet had been keeping things from you. It knew every skill you were trained in, every saving throw you were good at, every weapon you had been taught to hold properly, and it mentioned none of it. It talks now. All eighteen skills and every saving throw are listed with your proficiency and expertise marked, and a new section spells out your armor and weapon training, your masteries, your tools, and the languages you speak.

Building a hero got considerably less like guesswork, too. The choices your class actually owes you at level 1, a Cleric's Divine Order, a Warlock's first invocation, a Fighter's style, now arrive when they should, with the rules text sitting right there so you are not guessing what a pick does. Feats that ask a question finally ask it. And a dozen subclasses that used to shrug and say there was nothing to choose at level-up were, it turns out, holding out on you.

The scribe had developed an unfortunate habit of turning the page a moment before you finished reading it. Tapping to reveal the next paragraph now leaves you at the top of the new text rather than the bottom, which is broadly where reading works best. While we had the ink out: Parchment stopped casting vine shadows across your own words, the illuminated first letter stopped bullying the opening line on a phone, and your message box was given room to breathe.

A monk walked into the tavern and filed a complaint, which is unusual, because monks usually file them into tables. For a while, a punch thrown by a trained fighter was being scored like someone swinging a bar stool: gamely, but without credit. That is over. Unarmed strikes now land as the trained attacks they are, with your full proficiency behind them, and a Monk's Martial Arts does everything the brochure promised, scaling die, quick hands, the lot.

Somewhere in the fine print, a few rules were quietly shortchanging your hero, and the party's rules lawyer has finally won a case. Feats like Resilient and Fey Touched promise a +1 to an ability of your choice; that +1 now actually arrives, and you are asked which ability gets it, whether you pick the feat rolling a new hero or at level-up. Humans, long handed their destiny pre-folded, now choose their Origin feat at creation like everyone always assumed they could.

Begin your story already a few chapters in. A hero who starts at level eight has, presumably, been busy for seven levels, and their purse now agrees: heroes created above level 1 arrive with the wealth and gear the rules intend instead of a stick and a dream. When your starting kit includes something magical, you choose it yourself, and for gear defined by its shine rather than its shape, a +1 weapon, say, you pick the exact form it takes. A rapier for the duelist, a maul for the diplomat.

Every tavern has that one stranger whose past does not fit any of the usual songs. Now you can write it yourself. Craft your own background while rolling a new hero, its skills, its ability boosts, its one strange talent, and save it to reuse whenever you roll someone new. Pick your extra proficiency from a proper list instead of typing and hoping, and edit or retire your creations whenever the past needs revising. Your backgrounds are yours alone, kept private to your account.

Building a hero involves six numbers, and until now they played hide and seek while you scrolled. The Ability Scores step now pins all six to the top of the page, big and readable, in the order the gods intended: Strength through Charisma. Choose the optimized path and they fill in at once; roll or assign by hand and you watch them land one by one, like a very small, very consequential game of bingo.

The tavern hired a bookbinder. The whole story now reads like a proper book: your adventure flows down a reading column in a serif hand, each session opens on an illuminated capital, new scenes settle in from a soft blur, and older paragraphs recede gently, the way memory does. Two new looks join the classic one, warm aged Paper and deep ornamented Parchment, and you can switch between them in Settings whenever the mood strikes.

Sharp-eyed adventurers will notice the version number vaulted clean over 1.0, like a rogue over a tripwire. The game stopped feeling like a work in progress some releases ago; the number has finally caught up.

Somewhere on your shelf there is a campaign you always meant to run, a fat PDF, a battered book, or a folder of notes you scribbled at two in the morning and never found a table for. Now you can hand it over. Upload your campaign, and we read every page and build a private, playable world from what we find, its towns and dungeons, the people who live there, the factions scheming in the corners, and the quests already waiting to go wrong. Then you pick a hero and step inside, the same as any of the worlds we built ourselves.

It works with the campaigns you bought, the ones you downloaded, and the ones you wrote yourself. Bringing your own world is part of the Adventurer and Legend plans. While that was cooking, rolling a new hero got smoother, the Dungeon Master's words now arrive line by line the way a story should, and a fistful of combat and inventory gremlins were shown the door.

The towns filled up with people who want things. Merchants now keep real, priced stock, and the Dungeon Master handles buying and selling right there in the story, limited by what a shop actually carries and what is in your purse. The folk you meet act on their own beliefs, desires, and goals now, so a recurring rival stays a rival and a loyal friend keeps their nerve, instead of quietly changing personality between scenes.

Rolling a hero got prettier. Choose-a-Hero lets you pick your world, your adventure, and your character from illustrated pastel-watercolour cards, whether you take a ready-made hero with a painted portrait or build and describe your own. Level-up got its explanations too, showing the full text of each ability and spell right where you decide, and spelling out the features you simply gain along the way.

We timed it, and rolling up a hero the slow way was taking about one geological age. So Express creation now builds a solid character in a handful of choices, while Full mode, still here and now the default, gives you the fiddly control and gathers all your spell picks into one tidy step at the end. The Review screen finally tells the truth too, showing your real spell loadout and the level you are actually starting at.

Meanwhile the Dungeon Master learned to think before it speaks. It works out its plan for a scene in private now, so you get the finished scene rather than the DM thinking out loud on the way there. Brightvale and Old Armis also come in level-banded tiers now, each tuned to its own slice of the journey, and you can start typing your next move while the DM is still writing its reply.

Adventuring solo is romantic for exactly one dungeon, and then you would quite like someone to hold the other torch. So we gave you a party: travelling companions you recruit who fight at your side, draw from a shared party experience pool, and bed down with you when you rest. And there is a whole new world to drag them through, Old Armis, a complete setting with its own history, factions, cities, creatures, and quests, not a bolted-on zone.

The Dungeon Master also learned to keep the backstage door shut. The stray tool names, the bracketed system notes, and the sheepish out-of-character apologies stopped slipping into the story where they never belonged. Fights got sturdier too: no more freezing on initiative, and a battle that once got stuck, right down to a total party wipe, now resolves and closes properly instead of hanging forever.

A barbarian and a wizard really should not play the same, a thing we now hold as sacred. Six classes got their own dedicated toolkits this time, the bard, cleric, druid, monk, ranger, and warlock, so their signature tricks work like themselves rather than like a generic spellcaster in a funny hat.

A new Buffs card on your sheet keeps an honest tally of every blessing and poison ticking away on you, turn by turn. And if the ready-made worlds are not your thing, a blank campaign now opens with a 'Describe Your World' step: up to four thousand characters of your own setting, with a few inspiration prompts to shake an idea loose when you are staring at the cursor.

Combat used to move at the pace of a subcommittee. Not anymore. Your attacks now resolve in one motion, the to-hit rolling straight into damage without waiting on the DM to nudge things along, and enemy hit points finally reflect reality, so a bloodied ogre stays bloodied and the lava you stood in keeps mattering.

Off the battlefield, your gear and your coin now live on your sheet with tappable details for every item, and Heroic Inspiration became a real thing you can spend, a chip you tap when you want to bend luck your way. Bringing a hero over from another table got easier too, with a guided import that reads a character sheet and lets you review the draft before it is truly yours.

The wizards filed a complaint, and this time it was about the fine print. So we taught every caster to play by its own rules. Sorcerers got Sorcery Points, Flexible Casting, and a spread of Metamagic; warlocks got a stack of Eldritch Invocations, a Pact Boon, and Mystic Arcanum; paladins learned to Divine Smite; and wizards started copying new spells into a spellbook that grows as they climb. Half-casters, third-casters, and always-prepared subclass spells all landed in their right places.

Concentration now breaks when you take a hit or go down, as it always should have, and the spell picker grew some manners: a live preview and tooltips so you know what a spell does before you commit to it. We also gave you a per-campaign notes pad that saves itself, because 'the innkeeper was Gerald, or Gerard, or possibly Steve' is a shaky foundation for a five-session revenge arc.

Every tavern eventually slides you the tab, and so, gently, did we. Three plans arrived: a Free road that stays genuinely open, plus Adventurer and Legend for people who want more turns in a day, more campaigns running at once, and more slots to hoard heroes in. Nobody gets dragged to the counter.

We also handed you the keys to your own account. Signing up now confirms your email, and if you ever decide this whole heroism business is not for you, a single tap deletes your account, cancels any billing, and wipes your data on the way out. No hostage situations.

Four days after the doors opened, we handed you a proper place to get into trouble. Brightvale is a besieged kingdom with its own noble houses, grim factions like the Slayers, and a great deal that would like you dead, which is a meatier thing to sink into than a single room with a single door. Around it, combat and spellcasting both grew teeth as more of the 5e ruleset came online.

Leveling up stopped being a spreadsheet you dreaded and became a small guided ceremony that walks you through each new feature and spell, one choice at a time. And experience now finds its own way to you: win a fight or finish a quest and the points land on their own, without anyone having to remember to hand them over.

In the beginning there was a blank character sheet, and it was good. The Endlessness opened its doors with a Dungeon Master who never cancels, never forgets a rule, and never fudges a roll to spare your feelings. Build a hero from all twelve classes and nine species, pick a background, and settle your ability scores however you like: standard array, point buy, or the honest chaos of rolled dice. Then step into one of two opening adventures, the classic dungeon crawl of The Shattered Crown or the darker survival of Brightvale, or wave both away and describe a world of your own.

Underneath the story runs a full D&D 5e table that actually enforces itself: initiative order, actions and bonus actions and reactions, conditions, concentration, resistances and immunities, death saves, and 339 spells with real slots, rituals, and prepared lists. Your character sheet keeps track of all of it, hit points down to hit dice, and every die is rolled in the open, with natural 20s and natural 1s getting their moment. Wander off, come back next week, and the world remembers exactly what you did and who is still cross about it.