How to organize a D&D campaign in Obsidian

Why campaign notes rot

The first three sessions are tidy. Then you improvise a blacksmith, invent a rival guild mid-combat, and promise the party a favour from a noble you named on the spot. None of it gets written down properly, because writing it down properly would mean deciding where it goes.

Twelve sessions later you have notes everywhere and answers nowhere. The party asks who the blacksmith's sister was, and you cannot tell whether you invented her, whether she has a name, or which file you would even search.

The cure is not writing more. It is one note per thing, a link every time two things touch, and a dashboard that reads those notes back to you. Here is that structure, from an empty vault.

The setup, step by step

1. Make the vault, ignore the settings

   Open Obsidian → Create new vault → name it after the campaign or just "Campaigns". Pick somewhere your backup tool already watches: a Dropbox, iCloud or Syncthing folder, or a git repo. Then leave the settings alone. Themes are for later; structure is now.

   One vault for all your campaigns is fine and usually better — cross-campaign search, one dashboard, one backup. Separate vaults only if you play in two systems with nothing in common.

2. Seven folders. No more.

   The number-one mistake is a folder tree that mirrors your world — a folder per region, a subfolder per city, a sub-subfolder per district. Two months in, you cannot remember whether the blacksmith lives under Places or People, and you file him in both.

   Folders answer "what kind of thing is this", never "where does it belong in the world". Links do the world-shape. So:

   00-Start-Here/    your own cheat sheet: conventions, shortcuts
   01-Campaigns/    one hub note per campaign
   02-Characters/   every NPC and PC, one note each
   03-Locations/    towns, dungeons, regions, taverns
   04-Sessions/     prep and recap notes
   05-Quests/       one note per thread, each with a status
   06-Factions/     groups that want something
   07-DM-Tools/     the DM Screen, random tables, rules you forget

   Flat inside each folder. Yes, even with 80 NPCs — search and links do the finding, and a flat folder means there is never a question about where a note goes.

3. One note per thing, named the way players say it

   The blacksmith gets his own note, even if it is three lines long. A note that says only "Garruk Stonefist — dwarf, runs the forge, gruff, owes the Guild money" is worth ten times a paragraph buried in session 7, because it has a name, and a name is a link target.

   Name notes exactly as the words come out of a player's mouth: Garruk Stonefist, not NPC - Garruk (blacksmith, Oakhaven). Sessions are the one exception — they want to sort, so number them: S07 - Prep, S07 - Recap.

4. Add frontmatter — this is the step that pays off

   Frontmatter is the small block of properties at the top of a note, between three dashes. Obsidian treats those as structured fields, which means you can later query them. Without it, your vault is a pile of prose. With it, your vault is a database that happens to be readable.

   02-Characters/Garruk Stonefist.mdCopy

   ---
   type: npc
   race: Dwarf
   role: Blacksmith
   location: Oakhaven
   faction: The Caravan Guild
   status: alive
   campaign: The Missing Caravan
   tags: npc
   ---
   
   # Garruk Stonefist
   
   | | |
   |---|---|
   | **Race** | Dwarf |
   | **Role** | Blacksmith |
   | **Location** | [[Oakhaven]] |
   | **Faction** | [[The Caravan Guild]] |
   
   ## Appearance
   Soot-grey beard, burn scars up both forearms, never sits down.
   
   ## Motivation
   Pay off the Guild before they call in the favour.
   
   ## Secrets
   The debt is his brother's. He has not told anyone.
   
   ## Appears in
   - [[S07 - Recap]]

   Keep the field names identical across every NPC — location, never place on one note and where on another. Dataview matches on exact field names, and this is the single most common reason a query returns an empty table.

   Locations get type: location, region. Quests get type: quest, status: open, questgiver. Sessions get type: session-recap, date, session_number. Five minutes of consistency now, months of working queries later.

5. Link constantly. Tag rarely.

   Type [[ and Obsidian offers every note you have. Every mention of a place, person or faction inside another note should be a link — and if the note does not exist yet, make the link anyway. Obsidian will create the note the moment you click it, which is how half a world gets written: you link to a village that does not exist, and a month later you fill it in.

   The payoff is backlinks. Open Oakhaven and the panel at the bottom shows every note that mentions it — NPCs, quests, the session where it burned down. You never have to maintain that list. It maintains itself.

   Links or tags? A link is a thing (a person, a place, a faction). A tag is a state or a category — #hook-unused, #needs-stats, #recurring. If you could write a note about it, link it. If it only describes a note, tag it. Ten tags total is plenty; forty tags is a second filing system you now have to remember.

6. Install Dataview and build the DM Screen

   Settings → Community plugins → Browse → "Dataview" → Install → Enable. Then make a note in 07-DM-Tools called DM Screen and paste this. It is not a template you fill in — it reads your actual notes, every time you open it.

   07-DM-Tools/DM Screen.mdCopy

   # 🎲 DM Screen
   
   ## 🎯 Open quests
   ```dataview
   TABLE campaign, location, questgiver, status
   FROM "05-Quests"
   WHERE status = "open" OR status = "in-progress"
   SORT campaign ASC
   ```
   
   ## 🧙 All NPCs
   ```dataview
   TABLE race, role, location, faction
   FROM "02-Characters"
   WHERE type = "npc"
   SORT file.name ASC
   ```
   
   ## 🗓️ Recent sessions
   ```dataview
   TABLE campaign, date, session_number
   FROM "04-Sessions"
   SORT date DESC
   LIMIT 10
   ```
   
   ## 🏰 Locations
   ```dataview
   TABLE region, type
   FROM "03-Locations"
   SORT region ASC
   ```

   Switch the note to reading view and it looks like this — populated entirely from the frontmatter you wrote in step 4:

   DM Screen

   🎯 Open quests

   Quest	Campaign	Location	Status
   The Missing Caravan	Oakhaven	Thornwood Road	open
   Debt to the Guild	Oakhaven	Oakhaven	in-progress

   🧙 All NPCs

   Name	Race	Role	Location	Faction
   Thalia Brightwater	Human	Innkeeper	Oakhaven	—
   Garruk Stonefist	Dwarf	Caravan master	Thornwood Road	Caravan Guild
   Mara Vell	Half-elf	Fence	Oakhaven	The Quiet Hand

   Illustration of the output, not a screenshot. On your machine the rows are your NPCs, and clicking one opens that note.

   Empty table? Ninety per cent of the time it is one of three things: the folder name in FROM does not match exactly, a field is spelled differently on some notes, or the frontmatter block is not the very first thing in the file. More query patterns: the Obsidian NPC tracker guide.

7. Stop retyping fields — add Templater

   You will create dozens of NPC notes. Typing that frontmatter each time is how the convention dies. Install Templater (same Browse dialog), point it at a _Templates folder, and make one file per note type: npc, location, quest, faction, session prep, session recap.

   _Templates/npc.mdCopy

   ---
   type: npc
   name: "<% tp.file.title %>"
   race: ""
   role: ""
   location: ""
   faction: ""
   status: alive
   campaign: ""
   tags: npc
   ---
   
   # <% tp.file.title %>
   
   ## Appearance
   
   ## Personality
   
   ## Motivation
   
   ## Secrets
   
   ## Appears in
   - 

   Bind "Templater: Insert template" to a hotkey. New NPC becomes: new note, type the name, hit the hotkey, fill three fields, back to the game.

8. Run the loop: prep → run → recap

   Structure only survives if maintaining it takes less effort than not maintaining it. The loop that works:

   • Before the session — a S08 - Prep note: last session in two lines, three scenes you expect, the NPCs involved (as links), one thing that happens whatever the party does.
   • During — write names only. A bare list is fine. You are running a game, not taking minutes.
   • Within 24 hours — ten minutes on S08 - Recap: what happened, loot given, loose threads, hooks for next time. Every new name from your scratch list becomes a note — three lines is enough — and every mention becomes a link.

   Ten minutes after each session is the entire maintenance cost. Skip it twice and the vault starts lying to you; that is the only way this system fails.

The rules, on one line each

• Folders describe kind, links describe world.
• One note per thing, named the way players say it.
• Same field names everywhere, or Dataview goes quiet.
• Link things, tag states.
• Three lines beats no note.
• Ten minutes of recap within a day.

Questions DMs actually ask