Avrae: a DM’s demo

Avrae is the table’s dice and combat bot on Discord — the official D&D Beyond bot, nicknamed Hlautteinn (the Old Norse lot-twig, cast to divine the gods’ will); it is one of the bots the server keeps. This page is a self-guided demo for the Dungeon Master: a walkthrough of the DM-facing commands, arranged so that nothing done here can affect player characters, the live campaign, or server settings. Everything in the demo is disposable and cleaned up at the end.

Why the demo is safe

Avrae keeps initiative per channel, so a combat started in a scratch channel is invisible everywhere else. The demo uses only ad-hoc combatants and stock monsters, never an imported player sheet, so no real character’s hit points or state are touched. Three things are deferred until after the demo because they do have lasting effects: linking the D&D Beyond campaign (!ddb campaign link), importing anyone’s character sheet (!import), and server-wide customization (!servalias, !servsnippet). Everything else below is read-only or evaporates with !init end.

Step 1 — start in #botspam

Run the demo in #botspam. Check the bot is awake:

!ping

Avrae answers with its latency. Two shorthands used throughout: !r for !roll and !i for !init. !help <command> shows exact syntax for anything (for example !help init add).

Step 2 — dice

!r 1d20+5
!r 2d20kh1+3
!r 8d6

The second is advantage (roll two d20, keep highest). Dice rolls are stateless — nothing to clean up.

Step 3 — lookups

These are read-only reference commands, useful mid-session forever after:

!monster goblin
!spell fireball
!item bag of holding
!condition grappled

Monster entries show the full stat block. Content beyond the free SRD appears once the DM’s D&D Beyond account is linked at avrae.io and the books are in their library.

Step 4 — a mock combat

Start initiative in the scratch channel:

!i begin

Add three kobolds from the stat block library — monsters added this way get their hit points hidden from players automatically:

!i madd kobold -n 3

Add a pretend hero as a plain combatant (no character sheet involved — just a name and an initiative modifier):

!i add 2 "Test Hero"

Then run a round. Advance the turn, attack, and apply damage:

!i next
!i attack dagger -t "Test Hero"
!i hp "Test Hero" -4
!i effect "Test Hero" Prone

!i next moves down the order; when a kobold is up, !i attack rolls that kobold’s own weapon against the target. !i hp and !i effect adjust a combatant directly. !i status shows the current state of everyone; !i remove <name> takes a combatant out.

Step 5 — clean up

!i end

The combat, the kobolds, and Test Hero cease to exist. #botspam keeps its scrollback but holds no live state, and stays useful as a permanent dice playground.

Going live

When the demo feels comfortable, three real steps wire Avrae to the campaign, in this order:

First, the DM links their Discord and D&D Beyond accounts at avrae.io (each player does the same once). Second, in the channel where the game will actually run — not #botspam — the DM runs !ddb campaign link <campaign url>; only the campaign’s owner can do this. Third, players run !import <character sheet url> on their own sheets (a sheet must be set public on D&D Beyond, or its owner’s accounts linked, for Avrae to read it).

After linking, rolls made on D&D Beyond appear in the Discord channel and Avrae’s rolls flow back into the campaign’s Game Log, and player characters join combat with !i join using their real sheets. From that point damage applied in initiative is tracked against real characters, so the mock-combat habits above — stock monsters, ad-hoc dummies — remain the safe way to test anything new. !tutorial lists Avrae’s own interactive lessons, including one on running initiative.