Big D&D Beyond Update! Journals, Animated Reveals, 100+ Bug Fixes and More! | Nerd Immersion

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]What is going on folks? Ted from Nerd Immersion here and sorry I've been MIA for a little bit. I actually really appreciate all of the outreach from all of you wondering where I've been and what's been going on. Uh long story short of that is uh I was on vacation with the family for sixish days or so.

[00:00:19]Uh so I didn't really have a ro like a mobile setup to really do any recordings. Uh so expect a bunch of live streams and things in the next, you know, near future to play catchup. But we do have some really exciting news in the form of D&D Beyond updates that just dropped twice actually earlier this week. We had a variety of different improvements which we're going to go over here. And the big change is the addition of journals now officially rolled out within DND Beyond. If you don't know what journals are or you're curious about any of this, don't worry.

[00:00:53]We're going to go over it all here in a minute. There's a lot of stuff that's been going on, including as of me recording this, probably a state of the game that's going to be coming out uh regarding Ravenloft. There's obviously that's just around the corner, right?

[00:01:06]Ravenloft is uh a week away or less. Um so, we got a lot going on. So, let's go ahead and dive into this. By the way, if you like this kind of stuff, uh, and you know, you want to encourage me to get my butt out here and make videos more often, uh, please consider subscribing to the channel. All right, let's go ahead and dive in. We're on D and D Beyond. This is the change log here on DND Beyond, and this is for the 26th, but there's a bunch of different updates within this. So, let's talk about it.

[00:01:34]So, it says, "Improvement for maps, optimized 3D dice assets, reducing average file size by 40%." That is a massive decrease in file size usage. So, this should make the dice feel significantly snappier. Uh, also added support for animated reveals. We're going to test that out here in a second.

[00:01:54]And then fix uh fixed a layout glitch with HP. Character tools. Clear dice option is now available in the character sheet dice roller. We'll see what that looks like. Quick builder now includes detail pages for backgrounds. We'll look at that as well. And then some more bug fixes. Uh, then new content. Again, something that I meant to cover every Thursday, but I got hit with backtoback things. I had a work thing, then I had a vacation thing. So, I plan to do live streams going forward every Thursday.

[00:02:23]Uh, obviously I missed today as well.

[00:02:25]Another work thing to cover the new releases that are dropping because D and D Beyond is doing content drops every single Thursday. Next Thursday is going to be a big one as it's the first Thursday of the month. So, that's going to have a bunch of new player content as well. So, be on the lookout for that.

[00:02:41]Uh, but again, new drops, uh, weekly encounter, the demonic, uh, cult summoning, one for level six and one for level 17 for use in maps VTT. Uh, the new dungeon masters, uh, actual play playalong pack. This is the death's head tree. You can get this by pre-ordering Ravenloft, the Hordes Within. We have the Northlands World Book and the Northlands Sagas. This is Cobalt Press's Viking kind of theme. Uh I actually I don't think I have it in arms reach, but I do have copies of this. Uh we're definitely going to be reviewing that at least in some capacity. I also have two copies uh extra copies of a of Northlands World Book and Northland Sagas. So I'm going to be doing a giveaway on those. So be on the lookout for that. Uh Legends of Greyhawk Tales from Turtle Back Cove is out. Legends of Greyhawk being the uh organized play for 5.5e.

[00:03:31]new content. The haunted ghost ship digital map pack with animated reveals, the nightmare dragon layer digital map pack with animated reveals. And the haunted doside tavern digital map pack with animated reveals. So, we're going to actually get to see what that looks like using those. Fixed a variety of bugs, as you can see, a ton of them in here from a variety of different things.

[00:03:52]I'm not going to go over all of them, but there's a lot of stuff that was missing or broken. And all of these bug fixes, look at all that. It's like 150 bug fixes fixed there.

[00:04:01]Then the other thing I had mentioned was journals are now available here in D and D beyond. So we're introducing journals, a new feature in D&D Beyond 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. So uh it says, "From our user research and personal experience, we know that most DMs don't have time to take extensive notes during a play session. They're already busy trying to manage too many things. And we know most tables, if you're lucky, there's one player who steps it up and takes 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. So you can see campaign journal. We're going to go over all of this, like I said, in great detail here in just a second, but you can see you could type that out. And then here's a variety of information, kind of an animated thing. We'll look at that in a second. Here from maps, just type the J key. You can immediately start capturing what happened without slowing down the session. A major reveal, a bargain, an NPC secret, etc. 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 let you revisit entries from the current session or rewind through previous ones. That kind of recall changes the game. A well-timed call back lands harder when the details are still intact. We've already seen that in our play test with journals. But once note-taking becomes fast and easy and enough to fit naturally into the flow of a session, DMs will start capturing far more story moments. They didn't need to pause the table, all tab to a new program, etc. Starting small, getting feedback, and iterating rapidly. Again, this is kind of their new MMO with D and D beyond maps and D and D beyond in general.

[00:05:37]We're releasing journals in stages.

[00:05:39]Today, we're uh 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 uh them back uh read them back in the campaign journal. We wanted to get the first useful version into the real campaigns as early as possible so we could shape future iterations around how people actually use it. Uh 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, etc. Player journal.

[00:06:08]After that, we'll bring journals to uh players with a communal player journal.

[00:06:14]Everyone at the table can contribute 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. Their approach, it says, "We're building this on purpose." The first uh 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 new ideas directly from the community. If your campaign has ever lost an important detail, forgotten a brilliant setup or had to stop. Someone could ask, "Wait, did anybody write that down?" Journals is for you. So, let's go ahead and take a look here in maps. So, it says, "What's new in maps?" We talked about journals and etc. So, this was a previous bandit ambush drop map that we' covered. So, if you want to find them and you're unfamiliar on how to do that, you're going to go ahead and open up your VTT. Uh you can ob see here's the campaign journal. We'll get to that in a second, but you're going to hit open map browser.

[00:07:14]And you can see a variety of options here on the side. We have our basic maps that we covered. We have the maps that you can upload yourself. And then we have the variety of quickplay maps.

[00:07:24]Again, if you're unfamiliar, quickplay maps are maps that are already ready to go. They're fully set up with a spot for where the players are going to start.

[00:07:32]And then all of the different NPCs are already on the map, just hidden, and then you as the DM can reveal them as need be. So you can see what they're from, right? Dragon Delves, Asterians, Book of Hungers, Forgotten Realms, uh, you know, and a variety of different options here. So we're going to go ahead and move on. We have subscription maps.

[00:07:53]So we have all of these different maps.

[00:07:55]These are the new ones that came from Drops. And then we have the drop in encounters, right? So we had the bandit ambush was one. Then we had into the mummy lair. We have knight of the red dragon. And the most recent one was the demonic cult summoning. Now what's interesting is there is a level 17 version, which is pretty cool. So we're going to go ahead and add that. And you can see when we go to do it, we have the option, do we want to have a basic map with nothing on it or a quickplay map, which is a medium encounter designed for a level 17 party of five characters and contains six creature tokens and one sticker. So, we're going to go ahead and take a look at what that looks like. So, we've added that. We'll scroll all the way down to the bottom. Here it is. Now, here's the map. As you can see, it's already set up where it's revealed where the players are going to start. It's already got full fog of war on. And you can see we have a sticker here in the form of I believe the sticker.

[00:08:50]Actually, I don't know which one's the sticker, but we have two Mariliths and four cultists. So obviously they're hidden. You can go ahead and reveal them if you wish. Um actually they are attached or grouped and hidden. We can unlock and then we can say reveal. Oh, I think that's the sticker might be the actual Yeah, it's this. It's this sort of summoning circle.

[00:09:14]So we can go ahead and hide that and move it out of the way. And then we can reveal our mariliths if we'd like or our cultists. They're actually all grouped together. So they all reveal and unreveal together.

[00:09:25]And obviously if we wanted to, we could go ahead and click on our individual cultist. We're actually going to ungroup them because if they're all grouped together, um that's going to pose a problem for us in the long run when it comes to actually we need to unlock which they are locked and we need to ungroup.

[00:09:49]Ungroup. There we go. Maybe maybe not.

[00:09:54]Okay, there we go. Now we can select them individually. But you can also, as mentioned before, reveal the stat blocks and then you can see their entire stat block over here on the side uh and roll from it as need be. Or if you wanted to go to the full details page, you could click that and it'll bring you to the actual stat block page. But obviously the goal with these is to usually stay inside the map. So anyway, that's that cool new map. But let's see, we had reveals.

[00:10:23]So, they said there were animated reveals.

[00:10:28]So, these are D and D beyond drops. Are these the animated reveals? These I thought were just pieces of artwork.

[00:10:35]We click that. Okay. I don't see an option for animation.

[00:10:41]Maybe it's down at the bottom of D and D beyond drops.

[00:10:46]Go back and look at the change log here.

[00:10:50]Um, okay. added support for animated reveals. Okay, so new content haunted ghost ship digital map pack with animated reveals. Okay, so that must be where that is. So let's go ahead and go to the map pack.

[00:11:09]Haunted ghost ship.

[00:11:13]Okay, let's go.

[00:11:18]Uh we want one with probably ghosts, right? Well, how about Ruby ghost with grid? We'll go ahead and add that.

[00:11:28]And then we go down here to the Ruby ghost.

[00:11:33]Display scene. Hide scene.

[00:11:36]Hiding the scene will stop. Displaying the scene will share your active map with your players.

[00:11:44]It says hiding the scene will stop sharing your active map with your players.

[00:11:51]Okay, I'm still not entirely sure. This is new by the way, this aspect here.

[00:11:59]Um, the only thing that needs to happen too, I I will keep driving this home, the change log needs to be persistent because if I click like dice, it removes the change log. Or if I click like, you know, in a stat block, it will remove the chain or the the game log. This needs to be persistent. Or maybe we could pop it out so that we can keep it there. Actually would be really good for streaming if the game log was was visible there because if I go to click this and then roll, I don't have the game log and then I have to go, you know, and pull it back up.

[00:12:35]All right. So, uh I'm still confused about this reveals thing. Is it Maybe it's somewhere in here. Map pack.

[00:12:49]Uh, you know what? Let's go ahead and go into spectator mode for your DM to display a scene.

[00:13:01]Okay, here's the map. This is what we're seeing in player mode. Hide scene.

[00:13:09]Okay, so that just like allows you to like change the map, I guess, maybe. Okay.

[00:13:18]So, if you wanted to have mo I wish they would explain that a little bit more animated reveals.

[00:13:30]You know what? Let's go ahead and go back and see if they see if this is a Okay, it doesn't.

[00:13:36]There's no article.

[00:13:43]Maybe there's something on here.

[00:13:44]Animated reveals. Does it explain it?

[00:13:48]Oh, okay.

[00:13:51]So, it must be, do you see how they're changing like this? It must be that you can layer the maps multiple times in a way. And then that allows you to Yeah.

[00:14:02]See, look. This reveal is available.

[00:14:05]Oh, you know what? I'm an idiot. I didn't even look for the animated one. I just grabbed the one that I thought was cool.

[00:14:14]All right, let's go back and go to our map packs. We know the ghost ship has one. Haunted ghost ship.

[00:14:21]Is there one that was just animated and we didn't get there?

[00:14:30]I don't see one that says animated. What did it say?

[00:14:34]The reveal is available in 22 variations. Animated original day.

[00:14:40]Animated original night. Original day.

[00:14:42]original night. So, I think the concept is from what I'm understanding is that like you can set two like scenes. So, you could switch from day to night or switch from one to the other like this.

[00:14:57]Um, all right. Let's go back. So, was there original original day original night?

[00:15:08]I don't see animated.

[00:15:10]Let's go ahead and see if we just click original day and original night. Let's see if we can mess with that. We're doing this real time, folks, because we don't know. So, here's original day.

[00:15:28]And then if we wanted to go to original knight and we were the player.

[00:15:46]So this is I'm not sure how we layer them on top of one another like that cuz that's what they were very much showing, right?

[00:15:57]Okay. So, like I would have this and I could display the scene or hide the scene.

[00:16:19]This must be it.

[00:16:22]Oh, look. Okay, these are animated.

[00:16:26]These stickers, these reveals are animated.

[00:16:30]Is this it? We click this.

[00:16:34]Okay. So, we can show that this is an animated reveal.

[00:16:39]So, we could display the scene.

[00:16:44]Display the scene to show to players.

[00:16:46]I'm trying to click it, but it's not letting me do it. Okay. I click this one.

[00:16:53]No.

[00:16:57]Okay, let's see if we can do the animated one.

[00:17:00]Okay, display. And if we go as the players, we can now see this this sort of animated. So, this is what they mean, I think, by animated reveals is that most, if you were to look, most of the reveals that exist are static.

[00:17:19]You know, it's just an image. You show this. Hey, I want to show you this boat.

[00:17:22]I show you the boat. I want to show you this tavern. I show you the tavern, right?

[00:17:28]But now we have ones that are animated.

[00:17:30]So if I want to show you this, I could click this. And now you see this cool animated like dock. So that's pretty neat.

[00:17:40]And it looks like is there multiple options that are animated, right? We have that one.

[00:17:49]We had the ship as we saw was animated.

[00:17:54]show you. Yeah, you can kind of see them all moving in the browser like the in the um the sort of shortcut image there.

[00:18:03]So, here this boat is moving. This one is moving.

[00:18:08]Yeah, looks like that's it. Now, obviously we're just looking at ghost ships. There's multiple options. Now, the thing I don't understand is how they were doing Yeah. Okay. So, here's the digital reveals pack where you can see, you know, you pop these up on the screen to show them off.

[00:18:26]Um, okay. So, maybe these don't I thought what it was was like a way to transition to one of these from one to another, but that's not the case. We do have this ability to hide scene and display scene.

[00:18:42]So, I guess so if you're hiding the scene, this is displaying. If we hide the scene, your DM has hidden the scene.

[00:18:51]Draw overlays keyboard shortcut on the map to show areas of interest like remembering a trap. Show the area of effects. Oh, this is just showing off the sort of shortcuts.

[00:19:01]So like we can be logged into the game as the player. We can still be looking at our character sheet and the dice. And then I can say display scene. And then now you see the scene.

[00:19:15]Whereas I guess previously if I were to have done that you'd see it automatically. So if I wanted to transition to something. So let's see if I were to go back to something else.

[00:19:26]Okay. So I guess I have this new hide and display scene option no matter what.

[00:19:32]So, I could leave it on hide scene and then I could say, okay, I want to go to the zombie clot encounter and then display scene. And now you have the scene there. So, I guess this just gives you a little bit more if you're going to switch maps, you can go ahead and click something like hide scene. So, that way if you want to go to the next map and you're not prepared, you're like, let me just throw this map up.

[00:19:57]You're like, "Oh crap, I got to add some stuff real quick." You don't have to do that with your players there. And then when you're ready, boom, display scene.

[00:20:04]And then eventually, oh, they'll see it. But this is only revealed at the bottom here.

[00:20:12]So, I think that covers Yeah. And I guess the animated reveals are the ones that we saw here, right? So, you're seeing a variety of different adjustments to the area, which is very cool.

[00:20:28]I'm not sure how useful that is ultimately. So, 20 reveal variations, two animated reveal variations.

[00:20:37]Um, again, this is obviously just for the ghost ship itself.

[00:20:42]There were also the nightmare dragon layer as well as the haunted doside tavern. So, you have multiple options.

[00:20:49]Right here's the ghost ship we talked about. We're just looking at that. And then we have the nightmare dragon layer, which I'll also have some as you can see. So, okay, that covers all of our animated reveals. I think we now have an idea of what that means. Um, we showed off the new drop encounter.

[00:21:13]Again, you'll have the death heads tree encounter uh from Raven Loft. Let's see if we have that in here.

[00:21:21]Um, that going to be under map packs.

[00:21:29]That going to be under source books or is it going to be under adventures?

[00:21:37]See, Raven Loft. Oh, here they are. So, death heads death's head tree. And you can see you have the DM version and the player version. We can go ahead and hit the DM version, let's say, and head down there.

[00:21:51]Here is the DM's version.

[00:21:54]And then if we want to go and do that with do the players version as well, just to see. We hit that. And we can see we obviously have the quick play version, which is the one we want for this scenario. Go and take a look at it here. As you can see, pre-populated with fog of war where your players start. And then right over here, we have the death's head tree.

[00:22:21]And then there's obviously going to be it's pull up its stat block here as well. So I think oh journals right that was the other thing was the new thing.

[00:22:31]So we have at the top here campaign journal and then quick jot. So we're going to talk we're in this death's head tree. We can just hit J and it says add a journal entry. Press press J to quickly add an entry. Use shift and return to add a line break. So okay party has encountered death's head tree initiative initiative is not rolled party will be surprised when we resume next week. Okay, so I just typed in a couple quick notes and go ahead and hit this, which I think saves it. Now it removes it. I typed out my quick notes. It's gone. So I could just do that. And let's go ahead and make another one. So we'll go ahead and hit J again. Um, party has three unidentified magic items.

[00:23:37]No one has attempted to attune to them yet. Okay, so I just added that and we'll go ahead and add one more. And we're going to say uh let's say Jake brought Twizzlers.

[00:23:58]Jake gets free inspiration next week. Okay, we added a couple of different series of notes. Now, we're going to go ahead and hit our campaign journal. Here it is for the day we created. And you can see, uh, it's just basically bulleted points of what I just put in there, and they're all listed out. So, this is actually pretty useful.

[00:24:21]I don't know how much I'm going to use this as a as a GM or DM, but actually it's pretty easy honestly to just be like, "Hey, you know, don't forget uh you know the curse that way." You know, like there's a lot of things where you might just forget from week to week. So, you can go ahead and drop yourself quick hit notes like that. Oops.

[00:24:48]Go back. Whoops.

[00:24:50]to our campaign journal. And then here we can see. So obviously I think this is going to be much more useful when we get players in here as well. But I'm very curious to see how this is rolling out.

[00:25:01]And I like to see that they are rather than kind of waiting to drop this all at once. At one point when everything was done, they said, you know what, let's roll it out in a phased approach. That way we can get it out there. We can get feedback on the different aspects of it and just kind of roll from there. So, I think I'm a big fan of this update here.

[00:25:20]Again, D and D Beyond has just been churning out content, guys. Like, it's crazy. Again, if you're already in the DND Beyond um like like economy, like infosphere, ecos, whatever you want to call it. If you're in that on that platform and you don't have a virtual tabletop and you're looking for one, maps has been nothing but improving monthtomonth, even if some cases week to week. If you're already in and you're already subscribing, you're getting a bunch of new content every week, including new player content once a month. Um, and again, they're constantly trying to do things like improve cutting, like I said, cutting the 3D assets file size down by 40% on those digital dice, especially the ones with a lot of like animations and particle effects is going to be a huge deal. And again, I think journals will be, you know, I'm going to have to try it.

[00:26:14]Unfortunately, my campaign that I've been running in DND Beyond Maps for the past like two years or so is basically coming to a close the next time we play.

[00:26:22]We're basically got like one session left at this point, maybe two depending on how long the final sort of encounter goes. But, you know, the concept of testing out this quick hit note feature is very interesting to me. So, when we roll into our new campaign, um, I think it'll be very interesting to see how this goes and how useful journals are, especially because again, I don't have to jump over to a Google doc or some other tab or a physical notebook. I can just hit J, type out my quick notes, hit enter, boom, it's logged, move on.

[00:26:55]Because there's definitely a lot of times I tend to improvise a lot when I DM. And I often find myself forgetting things that I improvised because I wasn't like it wasn't part of my planned approach. It's just something I sort of designed in the moment to fit the need.

[00:27:12]But it's very easy for me to forget that I did that. and nothing kind of kills the immersion more of you being like and then this happens and then they're like oh wait don't we have a thing didn't that h like aren't they not allowed to do that because of XYZ and you're like oh I said that yeah no and you just kind of like have to roll with it and it's a bummer but I think maybe journals will be a way to just keep track of those in the moment quick hit decisions so anyway let me know your thoughts and opinions in the comments down below again a lot more content coming out soon. If you've made it to the end of the video, you'll know that I'm also in the process of like prepping to move.

[00:27:52]So, that's something else that's been happening. A lot of the times when I would normally make my videos at night, I've been busting my ass to clean this house and like do all of the projects that I said I was going to do, like the little things here and there, like trim work or touch-up paint. You can kind of see that like behind me all of my like all of the trinkets and stuff that I have have started to dwindle a little bit as I've been packing those up and moving those. So, it's unfortunate to see things just slowly start to disappear out of the background here, but it is what it is. So, anyway, thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you next time.