A suspicious innkeeper from two story arcs ago. A promise an NPC made that finally pays off months later. A throwaway joke that somehow became canon. These are the details that give a campaign texture. They are also the details most likely to disappear between sessions, buried in scattered notes or left to memory.
Today, we’re introducing Journals, a new feature in D&D Beyond's Maps VTT that helps you capture your campaign as it happens, so your group can keep track of the moments, clues, decisions, and callbacks that shape the story.
Changing Notetaking in Your Sessions
From our user research (and personal experience!) we know that most DMs don't have time to take extensive notes during a session. They're already busy trying to manage too many things! And we know that at most tables, if you're lucky, there's one player who steps up and takes almost all the notes. But that's a lot of burden on that player, and the whole campaign loses out if that player misses a session.
That's why Journals is built for speed, and is integrated into where you're already playing.
Play Now, Remember Later
From Maps, just tap the "J" key. Now you can immediately start capturing what happened, without slowing the session down. A major reveal, a bargain, an NPC secret, a player decision, a funny quote, a detail worth revisiting later... it can all be logged in the moment and saved for when it matters.
Then, when you want to look back, the full Campaign Journal lets you revisit entries from the current session or rewind through previous ones. The result is a campaign history that stays usable, instead of turning into a pile of half-finished notes and vague recollections.
That kind of recall changes the game. A well-timed callback lands harder when the details are still intact. A mystery holds together better when the clues survive contact with real play. Players feel the world has memory when names, choices, and consequences return with precision.
We’ve already seen that in our playtests with Journals. Once note-taking became fast and easy enough to fit naturally into the flow of a session, DMs started capturing far more story moments. They didn’t need to pause the table, alt-tab to a new program, switch contexts, or promise themselves they’d write it down later. They could keep running the game and still preserve what mattered.
Starting Small, Getting Feedback, Iterating Rapidly
We’re releasing Journals in stages, starting today with a DM-focused version first. Right now, Dungeon Masters can create journal entries with the Quick Jot shortcut in Maps and read them back in the Campaign Journal. We wanted to get the first useful version into real campaigns as early as possible, so we could shape future iterations around how people actually use it.
DM Edit
The next stages of Journals are already well underway. We’re adding editing tools to the Campaign Journal view, so you can make longer entries, add formatting, colors, hyperlinks, and other ways to add more detail to your journal entries.
Player Journal
After that, we'll bring Journals to players with a communal Player Journal. Everyone will be able to contribute to a shared record of the campaign (while DMs will still have their own private journal space). Later, collaborative editing will let players expand entries together, clean up mistakes, and fill in gaps from earlier sessions.
Our Approach
We’re building this way on purpose. The first version is already solving a real problem at the table, and the best way to make Journals better is to watch how people use it in live campaigns. That also means some features from early designs may change before release, and others may give way to ideas that come directly from the community.
If your campaign has ever lost an important detail, forgotten a brilliant setup, or had to stop so someone could ask, “Wait, did anybody write that down?” Journals is for you.
Help Shape the Future of Journals
We’d love to hear what you think. Join the conversation in the D&D Discord, on the D&D Beyond forums, or on the r/dndbeyond subreddit. You can also find me as WOTC_Zac in those spaces.
Want to learn more about using Journals? Check it out yourself in the Maps VTT today or visit our FAQs.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jun 1, 2026Ah yes, a complicated way to do what a shared google docs does with more steps and restricted to players that play online and not in person. Love that we get this before actually useful features. Nobody asked for this, let's be honest. Can we please get basic features first? Updated Encounter manager not tied to maps? A way to upload original images to reveals? More intuitive way to manage dice and way to have character specific dice? The list goes on...
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jun 1, 2026COMPLETELY AGREE. I'm so frustrated that time and development was spent on this useless feature. Every DM I know is perfectly fine using Google Docs (shared with players sometimes for live note taking) or Obsidian for note taking. This is such a waste of development time. Honestly shame on the development lead for even greenlighting this.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jun 2, 2026please put this into the character builder or some dashboard for those if us who play clasically in-Person but still use the aid of computers/tablets to help run our games.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jun 2, 2026Agree 100% with those sentiments. I dont take session notes. My players do.
BUT I do see the appeal of having everything we need in one seamless app rather than having to juggle 2 or 3 or however many apps dms use during their sessions.
This journal could be useful if my players were able to access and edit it in the character sheet page, but the MAPS APP? that doesnt make sense to me.
Its staggering how far ahead other VVTs are to this one.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jun 3, 2026How about the ability just to delete a journal entry if, for example, you were testing out the feature, and don't need the test journal anymore? I'm really not sure how much you're going to learn from a bunch of test journal entries, because how many people trust something they've never used before. It does seem elementary to me that if you have an ability to add something, you need a way to delete it. Or, how about the ability to clear the game log that fills to overflowing with test rolls. Or, the ability to use the encounter calculator outside of Maps VTT? Or, the ability to add our own images to the Reveals capability? @DM_PapaFunk and @MrSpinny both have great ideas for better and more important things to put on the priority list. I really like the idea of a journal attached to a character sheet. Notes doesn't cut it. No ability to format or to add images. While you're at it, have a journaling function that mimics the Legends of Greyhawk or Adventurer's League logsheet. That'd be really useful, and something that we who play in those organized play campaigns have been asking for years.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jun 3, 2026I think this is a solid next step in the evolution of the tool - love that it's integrated with DDB. Now, I've taken the idea many steps further with thread-fall.com. Welcome the input of anyone here. Build by me as a GM to address this and many other issues at the table, Threadfall captures Live audio at the table, lets the table assign voices to characters for diarization, captures quests and loose threads automatically (no need to type them in) and brainstorms with the GM to come up with interesting ways to tie loose threads together with its Fates feature. Plus the session recaps and codex is written like a book, but fully searchable - so you get a growing experience for the party and GM to come back to throughout and after the session!