Roll20

D&D Beyond is the official digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons, originally launched in 2017 and acquired by Wizards of the Coast in 2022. It serves as the primary ecosystem for the 5th Edition ruleset and the updated 2024 "5.5e" core rules. In 2026, the platform is undergoing a massive "Game Platform" rebuild, moving away from its original hard-coded architecture to a data-driven engine. This allows the platform to support more complex customization and the new "Season" based content release model introduced this year. Description D&D Beyond is the definitive "companion app" for D&D. It combines a high-speed character builder, a digital library of all official sourcebooks, and a native 2D virtual tabletop called Maps. The platform is designed to be the easiest way to play the game, handling all calculations, spell slots, and inventory management automatically. With the 2026 "Season of Horror" and "Season of Magic" updates, it has become a living platform that delivers monthly content drops and themed community events directly to player character sheets. System Overview & Key Features The 2026 Game Engine Rebuild Wizards of the Coast is currently rebuilding the backend of D&D Beyond from the ground up. This move allows the site to finally support highly requested features like custom classes, complex homebrew non-magical equipment, and more responsive rules validation that doesn't rely on legacy code from 2017. The Maps VTT The integrated 2D virtual tabletop is now free for all users to host games as of late 2025. It features "Quickplay Maps" for all official adventures, allowing GMs to launch a session with pre-placed tokens and fog of war. New "Reveals" functionality lets GMs share high-resolution gallery art and monster lore directly to players' screens during play. New "Quickbuilder" Flow To improve onboarding, the 2026 character builder features an "art-forward" Quickbuilder mode. It guides players through the most impactful decisions—like subclass and background—while using optimized defaults for smaller details, allowing a new hero to be ready for play in under five minutes. Content Sharing (Master Tier) The Master Tier subscription remains the most popular for groups. It allows a single user to share their entire digital library—including the new 2026 Ravenloft: The Horror Within and Arcana Unleashed books—with up to 12 players across five different campaigns. Legacy vs Core Toggles Following community feedback, the platform now features robust toggles to enable or disable "Legacy" (2014) content. This ensures that groups can choose to stick strictly to the 2024 rules or mix in older subclasses and spells without the interface becoming cluttered or confusing. Digital/Physical Integration Most new 2026 book releases now feature a "Physical + Digital" bundle. When you buy a hardcover from the official store, you receive an instant unlock code for D&D Beyond, ensuring your character builder and digital library are updated before the physical book even arrives in the mail. Additional links dndbeyond.com : Official D&D Beyond website dndbeyond.com/roadmap : The 2026 Development Roadmap Hub Maps - D&D Beyond's VTT

Codex Cryptica is an AI-assisted worldbuilding and campaign management tool built around a living knowledge graph instead of a folder of loose documents. Every character, faction, location, and event you create becomes a linked entity, so your world stays connected and explorable as it grows. Genre-agnostic across fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, horror, post-apocalyptic, western, steampunk, and more.

Hedron is a one-stop shop for everything TTRPG. Design and play entirely new TTRPGs, build robust worlds for your home games, and connect with your community – sharing your lore, worldbuilding, homebrew, and other creations! Links projecthedron.com - Official website discord.gg - Discord server reddit.com - Hedron subreddit

World Anvil is the largest and most feature-rich world-building and campaign management platform. Launched in 2017, it has evolved into a massive "All-in-One" suite that combines a wiki-style lore presentation, interactive mapping tools, and software for novel writing. While it is known for a steeper learning curve than rivals like Obsidian, it is unmatched in its ability to present a "public-facing" version of your world. In late 2025 and early 2026, the platform underwent a major "Athena" UI overhaul, introducing the Articles & World Manager and Quick-Inline Creation, which significantly streamlined the speed of entering new lore. Description It is built to organize, display, and even sell your world. The platform provides hyper-specialized templates (e.g., Traditions, Military Units, Flora/Fauna) that prompt you to fill in details you might otherwise overlook. In March 2026, World Anvil introduced a significant Dashboard Upgrade, allowing users to drag, drop, and hide widgets to create a personalized "writing cockpit." While the sheer number of buttons can be intimidating for beginners, its ability to manage secrets, interactive maps, and professional-grade manuscripts in one place is currently unrivaled. System Overview & Key Features The Athena 2.0 Dashboard (March 2026 Update) The newly released dashboard customization allows you to tailor your entry point. You can now pin "Recently Edited" articles, word count goals, or community prompts as modular widgets. This update effectively turned the homepage into a personalized HUD for your creative workflow, cutting down the "where do I click?" frustration of previous versions. Advanced Article Management A new "Article Management" tab was added in early 2026, allowing for the creation and editing of articles on the fly without leaving your current category view. This "focus mode" is a godsend for large-scale projects where you need to spin up ten minor NPCs or locations at once without losing your place in the world-tree. Interactive "Deep-Link" Mapping World Anvil’s map system remains its "killer app." You can place pins that link to other articles, and as of 2026, it supports multi-layering for vertical dungeons and "Region-Hiding." This allows you to show players the town square while keeping the "Thieves' Guild Basement" layer hidden behind a private subscriber permission. System-Specific Statblocks Beyond just text, World Anvil hosts thousands of community-made statblocks. Recent 2026 additions include a dedicated Cult Worksheet for Call of Cthulhu 7e and adversary blocks for the Cosmere RPG, allowing GMs to integrate mechanical data directly into their narrative articles. Manuscripts and Novel Writing The "Manuscripts" module is a full-featured writing suite that sits alongside your wiki. It allows you to drag world-building "secrets" directly into your writing notes. As of March 2026, co-owners of a world now have shared access to manuscripts, making it a viable tool for professional co-authors and writing teams. The Worldbuilding "Social Media" Unique to World Anvil is its social ecosystem. The "Global Feed" allows you to follow other creators, participate in monthly "Worldbuilding Showdowns," and compete for the annual Worldbuilding Awards. It’s less of a tool and more of a global "Writing Room" for the hobby. Additional links worldanvil.com - Official website and lore-hub blog.worldanvil.com - Development news and world-building tutorials

Fully Automated is an open source tabletop roleplaying game set in a solarpunk future. Dive into a wild, hard-science post-scarcity future and go on thrilling adventures across Los Angeles in the 2120s! Description The game is meant to allow players to go on street-level adventures in a solarpunk future. If you’re not familiar, solarpunk is a genre adjacent to cyberpunk, but which largely challenges and inverts most of its dominant themes. It envisions a world in which technology and our societies are brought into harmony with nature. It rejects cynicism about the futility of fighting to challenge power structures. In place of themes of scarcity and selfishness, it imagines abundance shared convivially. And in place of a nihilistic view that life is valueless, it imagines not just that every person is priceless, but that personhood can be granted to far more things than just humans. But while it is growing fast, tools for running solarpunk tabletop games are still too few.

The Cosmere Roleplaying Game is an officially licensed tabletop RPG based on Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe - the shared setting behind The Stormlight Archive, Mistborn, and a dozen other series - designed by Andrew Fischer and published by Brotherwise Games in partnership with Sanderson's own Dragonsteel Entertainment. Announced in late 2023, its August 2024 Kickstarter raised over $15 million, making it not just the most-funded tabletop RPG in the platform's history but the most-funded tabletop game of any kind. The first campaign setting, covering Roshar from The Stormlight Archive, released digitally in mid-2025 and in print that October; a second setting covering Scadrial from Mistborn is planned for 2026, with more of the Cosmere expected to follow as Sanderson's novels do.