Dungeons & Dragons app enters open beta next week

The venerable Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing game is partnering with Curse to build a next-generation web application. The platform, called D&D Beyond, was unveiled last week during PAX East in Boston. The team has announced that it will enter open beta on Monday. Sign ups are now open.

Curse got its start managing mods online for games like Minecraft. It later morphed into a kind of community-centric chat system, allowing players to find and play with each other more easily. The company was purchased by Twitch in August, bringing its voice-over IP technology and 30 million users along with it.

Since the announcement last week, the Curse-managed Twitter account for D&D Beyond has gone to great lengths to assure fans it would be building in features for homebrewed content.

The application will be accessible on virtually any device, including smartphones and tablets. It will include a rules found in sourcebooks, a character builder, digital character sheets and more.

The app will allow users to buy official D&D content, but in smaller parcels than are commonly found on existing, licensed platforms such as Fantasy Grounds and Roll20.

“If you only play fighters,” project lead Adam Bradford wrote on Reddit, “you’ll be able to just pick up the stuff you need to track swinging that giant two-handed sword. This is NOT a microtransaction model - we aren't forcing anyone to buy the content in small chunks — it can still be bought all at once. It's all just flexibility.”