How to set up Obsidian for a D&D campaign that lasts

Session one: a vault you can keep up

Make one vault per campaign and give it four folders: People, Places, Sessions and Prep. That's enough for now. Factions, items and a lore folder can wait until there's something to put in them.

Then make one note, the session note, and treat it as the only note you have to write. Everything else in the vault grows out of it.

The session note does the heavy lifting

Turn on the core Templates plugin and save a template with four headings: who played, what happened, names, and open threads. After the game, write what happened in five or six lines and list every name that came up.

Wrap each name in double brackets the first time it appears, like [[Mira Vell]]. Obsidian makes the link even if Mira doesn't have a page yet, and that's fine. The link waits until she matters. When you finally click it and write her page, every session she turned up in is already sitting in her backlinks.

That one habit is the difference between a vault and a folder of text files. Link names in the session note and most of the wiki builds itself.

The open threads list is the other half. Next week's prep starts there.

Session ten: give the regulars a page

By now a few names keep coming back. Check which links have the most backlinks and give those people and places a proper page, with two or three lines about who they are and what they want. Leave the one-off names alone. The ferryman from session two doesn't need a page until the party goes looking for him.

Add a few properties to the top of each page, like type, faction and status. They take seconds to fill in, and they're what makes the next step work.

Session thirty: tables without code

Long campaigns need lists. Every NPC in the Ashen Hand, every place the party hasn't been back to, everyone who's dead. For years the answer was the Dataview plugin and its query language. Obsidian now has Bases built in, a core plugin that turns those properties into a table you can sort and filter by clicking. If Dataview always looked like programming to you, start with Bases.

One trick worth stealing: give each page a revealed property and build a base that only shows the pages where it's ticked. Before you share anything with your players, check that view instead of trusting your memory about which page has the twist in it.

The plugins worth installing, and the ones to test first

The best-known TTRPG plugins started as one developer's projects and are now looked after by the Obsidian TTRPG Community on GitHub. Two of them were updated this year:

• Fantasy Statblocks renders 5e-style statblocks from a short block of text.
• Initiative Tracker runs combat from a sidebar and can pull monsters straight from Fantasy Statblocks.

Dice Roller, Leaflet for interactive maps and Calendarium for in-world calendars are all popular, but none of them has had an update in over a year. Try them on a copy of your vault before you build a campaign around them.

Install a plugin when you notice you need it. If you haven't missed initiative tracking by session five, you probably don't.

Where vaults stall

Even the slim version asks for ten minutes after every game, and that's the part that slips. Miss two sessions and the backlinks stop being true. The innkeeper's page still says she's alive, and the party knows better.

When the session note writes itself

This is the part I built SCRY for. It records your game in a Discord voice channel and writes the session note for you, with a recap, the names that came up and wiki pages linked to each other, each line showing where in the session it came from. Export the campaign and you get markdown files with the links intact, so it opens as an Obsidian vault and every plugin above still works on top of it. You can bring an existing vault into SCRY too.

The SCRY and Obsidian comparison has the details. SCRY only records Discord voice, so it's no help to an in-person table yet.