We’re really excited to announce the most significant update to Adventurer’s Codex since our launch in September 2016, and we’re proud to unveil a number of improvements to the Player Tools as well as the first set of DM Tools: Overview and Encounters. The team has worked hard to bring these features to life, and we’d like to spend some time here to go over these amazing new features. If you’d rather see what they’re like for yourself, you can get started here.

Note: There's a lot more features in this release than we have time to mention here, and you can see a full changelog for this version on our GitHub page.

DM Tools

Versions 1.0 and 1.1 have been focused on the Player’s side of D&D, but we haven’t forgotten about all you DMs out there. Today we’re releasing the first two in our planned set of DM Tools: Campaign Overview and Encounters.

Overview

Overview provides a convenient way to track the many details of your campaign’s new and exciting world. There’s a lot of important details about your story/world that you’ll need to write down, and this is the place. Here is where you’ll also see how long your campaign has been running as a nice reminder of all the good times you’ve had.

Encounters

By far the most exciting new feature is what we’ve called: Encounters. A lot of work went into this, and we hope that all of our DMs out there enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it. Encounters allows DMs to plan out, well, encounters that their players will come across or stumble into during the campaign. These encounters have several parts depending on what you as a DM want to throw at the players. Currently, we’ve added seven Encounter Sections to help you build your adventures:

  • Environment
    • Weather and Terrain: Is it cold enough to be hurtful, a cool summer day, or a dry and arid heat?
    • Link to an image to help you and your players visualize the terrain, and keep notes on the effects of the weather or terrain.
  • Points of Interest
    • Keep track of all the small places in your world that are worth noting: Mystic runes, a strange altar, or even a common road sign.
  • Non-Player Characters
    • Jot down details of the various NPCs in an encounter. That Half-Elf shopkeeper has a secret to hide, and you don’t want to forget it.
  • Monsters
    • Feel like putting your players through the wringer? Add some monsters, and track their abilities.
  • Read-Aloud Text (Boxed text)
    • Often times you’ll have an important monologue, or bit of narrative to set the tone of your campaign.
  • Treasure
    • Everyone loves loot! This section allows you to track all types of treasures, and SRD items will even auto-complete for you!
  • Notes
    • For everything else, there’s always Markdown powered Notes!

We have many more Encounter Sections planned to help you increase your player’s immersion in your campaign. We are excited to hear about your experience using our new DM Tools, and how we can help you tell a better story.

Players Tools Improvements

Like we said, we haven’t just built new tools for DMs, we’ve worked hard to improve our Player Tools as well by adding Preview Cards, more autocompleting from the SRD, and an enhanced Notes section.

Preview Cards

All items now have a unified preview card that lets you glance an item’s details in a more meaningful way. This idea was inspired by those old, paper D&D spell cards, and we decided to use it with other items, like Magic Items, Weapons, Armor, and so much more.

Auto-complete

Previously, we added Auto-complete for Items and Spells to the Player Tools. Now Players and DMs have full access to all the Items, Spells, Weapons, Armors, and Magic Items available in the SRD! Try it for yourself!

Markdown and Multi-Note Support

Another popular request, and one we’ve been excited to add: Markdown in notes, and support for multiple notes. Now you can track your quests, diary, and rock collection journal seperately!

We would like to thank all of the early adopters of Adventurer’s Codex. We’ve had a great time building these new tools, and we hope you’ll love them as much as we do. With this release, we’re going to take a break for the holidays, but we’ll be back next year for an amazing 2017.

Questions, Comments, Concerns?

We’d love to hear what you think of Adventurer’s Codex, what features you love, what features you want, and what features you don’t like or want changed. We built this tool for you, and we want to make it the best that it can be.

Talk to us on Twitter or send us an email at support@adventurerscodex.com with any suggestions, or comments you have! We can’t wait to hear from you.

If you want to contribute, and make Adventurer’s Codex even better, as always, drop by our Github page and checkout the project. We’re always looking for great new ideas, and if you find any bugs, file an issue!