Hey all,

New to D&D Beyond (15 minutes New),

I have been playing, DM'ing since the 70's.  Had all the original books from Men & Magic and Greyhawk to the first edition of MM.

Anyway... I have a fully developed (read, multiple 3 ring binders) excel files, hand drawn maps, etc. that I want to bring into the digital age.

Is there a road map for me to bring my universe in to this new age for my players.

So basically... HELP!

Rogris The Terrible, aka Patrick  

I don't think D&D Beyond has the campaign architecture to handle binders full of information. It's a character-driven toolset; even the map tools are about visualizing the encounters.

You'll want to use something else to host all the information about your setting, NPC relationships, etc. (I use Google Docs, but several tools exist).

You want something like World Anvil. 
This site is mostly just rules reference and the character builder, with some maps from published adventures. They are working on a VTT, but there’s been no announcements about its functionality. Though accommodating all the details of a homebrew world is not likely to be an option at launch. 

So, yeah, World Anvil. There’s a few others out there as well. 

All that stuff is what you'd want to input into a VTT if you're playing online

Thanks for the info.  Much appreciated!

Patrick

thanks!  I'll take a look.

Patrick

Thanks for the feed back.  BTW what does VTT stand for?

Patrick

Virtual Tabletop

thanks! 

I'd also throw in a couple of other World Building solutions for you.

Kanka.io

Chronica.ventures

Both are platforms that allow the construction of a world and the organisation that makes it accessible to players. Having used these two and World Anvil, my honest opinion is that World Anvil is the least intuitive and least well visually designed. Adding new entires can feel a bit like a chore and is especially difficult if they need to link back to lots of other entries.

Kanka is really nice to use, and is the most reasonably priced. Adding entries is quick enough, but there is a bit of a learning curve because it's not quite as intuitive as it could be. For my workflow though, it's an order of magnitude faster than World Anvil.

Chronica is visually and from a UI & UX point of view the best of the lot. It's pleasant and simple to use, but has massive depth. It blows World Anvil and Kanka out of the water. However, it's key weakness is if you have multiple groups encountering the same world. It gets tricky to compartmentalise that stuff largely I think because they want to you pay 'per campaign' which seems excessive. It is though hands down the best of all the world building platforms I've tried.