D&D Beyond campaign notes: where they live, who reads them, and what they miss

How to use a D&D Beyond campaign: setting one up and inviting players

A D&D Beyond campaign is the group, not the story: one DM, the players, and the characters they bring. It is where the DM sees the whole party's sheets in one place, hit points, inventory and spell slots included, where games on Maps (D&D Beyond's virtual tabletop) are run from, and whose Journals you open inside Maps rather than on the campaign page. None of that needs a subscription: the free tier includes creating and joining campaigns, and any registered account can host a game on Maps. Every figure and quotation about D&D Beyond on this page is in the table at the bottom, read on D&D Beyond's own pages on the date shown.

Players join by invitation only. The DM opens the campaign page, copies its invite link and sends it in a message; a player who is signed in opens the link and joins with a character — a new one, a premade, one the DM has made available to claim, or one they already have. That character then appears on the campaign page beside the others. A player bringing a second character opens the link again.

Two numbers to know before session one: a Maps session holds up to 13 people including the DM, and a free account keeps up to six characters. The second is the one a player in several campaigns tends to meet first.

Where D&D Beyond campaign notes live, and who can read them

Notes on D&D Beyond live in four places, and the question worth asking of each is who can read it. The newest are Journals, which arrived in stages through 2026: a DM-only first version on 27 May, a shared journal for players in July, and collaborative player editing in September. If you read that D&D Beyond was adding a shared player journal, it has shipped: it is the Party's Journal below. Journals cost nothing extra; they are part of Maps.

• The DM Journal, for the DM alone. Press J during play for a quick note, or write longer entries in the Campaign Journal, with headers, lists, colours, emphasis and links. DM entries are headed automatically with the name of the map you were on, which helps more than it sounds when you are hunting for a scene three weeks later.
• The Party's Journal (D&D Beyond's posts also call it the Player Journal), one shared record the players and the DM can all write in and edit. An entry locks while someone is editing it, so two players cannot overwrite each other, and players can read it between sessions even when the DM does not have Maps open. When a DM wants the players to see something, D&D Beyond's own answer is to put it here.
• Scene Prep, the DM's notes for a scene before it happens, pinned to the spot on the map where it plays out. The pins are visible only to the DM. It shipped on 31 August 2026, and it is for the session you are about to run rather than the one you just played.
• Character sheet notes, written by each player: a Notes section with Allies, Enemies, Backstory and Other headings, plus freeform notes. A player can hide their sheet from the other players in Maps, but the DM can see any player's sheet, so a player's private theory about the villain is never private from you.

How to keep D&D Beyond session notes you will actually reread

D&D Beyond says Journals were built for speed, and the method that works leans into that. During play, one line per beat and nothing more: a name the moment you say it, a promise the moment it is made, a ruling someone will hold you to. Press J, type the line, get back to the game. A quick note is an index, not a record; the DM note-taking guide covers what earns a line mid-session and what can wait.

Within an hour of the session, turn the quick notes into one Party's Journal entry. The Campaign Journal already lets you step back through earlier sessions, but start each entry with the session number and the date anyway: a number is what everyone says at the table ("back in session nine"), and D&D Beyond's own FAQ still lists search as planned rather than shipped. Until there is a search box, a consistent first line and one spelling per name are your search; the session notes templates have fuller sheets if two entries are not enough.

Keep the secrets in the DM Journal and nowhere else: what an NPC really wants, which rumour was true, the plan for the thread the party has not found yet. That is your GM-only block. Copy across only what the players learned on screen, and when in doubt leave a line where it is. Moving it to the Party's Journal later costs nothing; a secret that reached the shared journal may already have been read.

Then give the Party's Journal to the players. In D&D Beyond's own words, a shared journal means "one person doesn't have to carry the entire responsibility of remembering the adventure", so rotate which player writes up each session; the player note-taking guide is the one to send them. Entries are text only for now, with no map screenshots, and the pages we read state no length limit, so describe a handout in a line rather than trying to attach it.

At a physical table, the catch is that Journals live in Maps. For tables that never use a battle map, D&D Beyond added a free Theater of the Mind Organizer map, built for Scene Prep and pitched as useful if you play in person; it is a map in Maps, so open it before the session and check that the Journal is there before you rely on it at the table.

PARTY'S JOURNAL - one entry per session
S14 2026-10-24 - Greyport docks
HAPPENED (one line per beat, in order):
- 
NEW NAMES (name - who they are - where):
- 
PROMISES (who - to whom - what - by when):
- 
NEXT (what the party said they would do):
- 

DM JOURNAL - same session, never shared
S14 2026-10-24
TRUE BUT UNKNOWN (what the party believes that is false):
- 
IMPROVISED, NOW CANON:
- 
WHAT I WANT NEXT SESSION:
- 

D&D Beyond campaign sharing: it shares books, not notes

Campaign sharing on D&D Beyond means content sharing, and it is easy to mistake for something it is not. When one member of the campaign — the DM or any player — has a Master Tier subscription and switches content sharing on, the content anyone in the campaign has unlocked becomes usable for characters and items in that campaign. One subscriber can do that for up to five campaigns, each with up to 12 participants plus the DM.

It does not share notes. Shared content reaches a player only through an active character in that campaign, and the notes stay where the section above put them: the Party's Journal is the shared record, the DM Journal stays private, and character sheet notes stay on the sheet. If what you want is for the players to read the story so far, that is the Party's Journal's job, not the sharing toggle's.

What D&D Beyond campaign notes do not keep

Everything on D&D Beyond is something somebody typed or clicked. The Game Log keeps the dice — rolls from character sheets, the app, Avrae on Discord, the encounter builder and the combat tracker — and the sheets keep hit points, spell slots and, through Party Inventory, who is carrying the loot. None of the D&D Beyond pages we read describes recording a session, transcribing one, or summarising what was said.

So the gaps are the ones any typed system has. A journal holds what someone stopped to write, and the moments most worth keeping are the ones where nobody could stop: the NPC's exact words, the joke that became canon, the promise made in passing mid-fight. The post that introduced Journals says as much — most DMs, it says, do not have time to take extensive notes during a session.

Three practical limits sit on top of that. Journals are reachable only in Maps for now, though D&D Beyond says it hopes to bring them to more places; entries are text only; and there is no search yet. A table that plays in person without opening Maps takes no quick notes that night; whatever reaches the Journal later is what someone opened Maps to type from memory.

Keeping a session record beside D&D Beyond

The missing half is the record of what was said, and it is a different job from the notes. You can keep it yourself: a phone in the middle of the table or Craig on a Discord game captures the session, and the recording guide covers getting audio worth keeping. Ask the table first; the consent guide covers that conversation. A recording you never open is worth nothing, which is why the quick notes still earn their place as an index into it.

Or a tool built for tabletop turns the recording into text for you. DM Scribe, which publishes this guide, is one, and the comparison pages cover the others. It records in the browser or takes an audio or video file, and returns a transcript, a session recap and campaign wiki entries for the NPCs, places, items and factions the table mentioned. Every wiki entry has a GM-only notes block that is never shown to players, and a read-only link lets the party read the rest, on the Dungeon Master plan at $7.99/mo and up.

Be clear about what putting the two side by side does not do. Ours does not connect to D&D Beyond: nothing imports your characters or Journals from it and nothing exports back, so a recap reaches the Party's Journal by copy and paste. Its transcripts carry no speaker labels, so a quote tells you what was said rather than who said it. And it keeps none of what D&D Beyond is for: no character sheets, no rules, no dice.

The plan facts, since they decide whether it is worth a try: the free Adventurer plan gives you 2.5 hours of transcription a month plus 3 one-time bonus hours, for one campaign, with no credit card to start. The paid plans are Dungeon Master at $7.99 a month for 10 hours and Guild Master at $14.99 for 30, and transcript import is on every plan — two a month free, ten on Dungeon Master, unlimited on Guild Master.

Using D&D Beyond as a campaign manager: which note goes where

If D&D Beyond already holds your characters and your books, keeping the notes there too is a sensible default; one place per campaign beats three. It covers more of a campaign than most tables use it for, as long as each kind of note goes in the place built for it. If you would rather have a page per NPC than an entry per session, the campaign wiki guide covers building one.

• Secrets, plans, and what the party believes that is not true: the DM Journal.
• What happened, who the party met and what was promised: the Party's Journal, written up after each session by whoever's turn it is.
• The scene you are about to run: Scene Prep, pinned where it happens.
• Who is carrying the unidentified ring: Party Inventory, which shows which character has an item equipped.
• A character's allies, enemies and backstory: that character's sheet notes, kept by the player.
• NPCs and factions that keep coming back: a card of their own. The NPC tracker template and the faction tracker template are plain text, and a Journal entry holds text, so they can be pasted in.
• What was actually said at the table: a recording, or nothing. None of the above keeps it.