Notion and Obsidian for D&D: What Works, and Where They Fall Short

Notion and Obsidian are two of the most popular places GMs keep campaign notes, and for good reason. Both are flexible, both are free to start, and both let you build exactly the system you want. The catch is in that last sentence: you build it, and you maintain it. For a lot of campaigns that’s fine. For a long one, the maintenance is where things fall apart. Here’s how GMs typically set each one up, what each does well, and when it’s worth looking elsewhere.

Disclosure: StoryGuard, further down, is our product. We’ve tried to be fair about where Notion and Obsidian are the better choice.

How GMs use Notion

A typical Notion campaign has a few linked databases:

• NPCs, with properties like status, location, and faction.
• Locations, linked to the NPCs found there.
• Sessions, one page each, with notes and a list of linked NPCs.
• Quests, with a status column, often as a kanban board.

There are plenty of free and paid templates that start you off with all of this.

What it does well: structure. Filtering every living NPC in Saltmere, or every open quest, is a two-click view. Pages are easy to share with players, and if you already use Notion for work, there’s nothing new to learn.

Where it falls short: Notion has no idea what a session is. When an NPC dies in session 2, you have to remember to change their status, and nothing records when it changed unless you add that yourself. Secrets are hard to manage if you share pages with players, since a page is visible or it isn’t. And the database is only as current as your last update, which is usually several sessions ago.

How GMs use Obsidian

Obsidian campaigns are usually a folder of Markdown notes: one per NPC, place, faction, and session. You link notes with [[double brackets]], and backlinks show you every session an NPC appeared in. Community plugins add calendars, dice rollers, initiative trackers, statblock rendering, and queries that work like lightweight databases.

What it does well: ownership and speed. Your notes are plain files on your computer, so they’ll outlive any app. It’s fast, it works offline, and the core app is free. The graph view genuinely helps you see which NPCs cluster around which factions.

Where it falls short: it shares Notion’s core problem. Backlinks show where an NPC was mentioned, not whether what you wrote is still true. The graph shows links you made, not the contradiction you missed. Plugin setups can also become a hobby of their own, which is great if you enjoy it and a tax if you don’t.

The problem both share

Both tools are excellent at storing what you write. Neither reads what you write. That matters in a campaign more than almost anywhere else, because your world changes every session, mostly in ways you didn’t plan. The party kills an NPC, steals an item, and turns a faction hostile, and every one of those changes has to be copied by hand from your session notes into the right entries.

That copying step is where campaigns drift. It’s tedious, it happens after a long session when you’re tired, and skipping it once means the next prep is built on stale facts. (The five mistakes this leads to are remarkably predictable.)

When to stay, and when to switch

Stay with Notion or Obsidian if:

• Your campaign is short, or your world is small enough to hold in your head.
• You enjoy building and tending your system. For some GMs that’s part of the fun.
• You need something these tools do that dedicated tools don’t, like Obsidian’s plugin ecosystem or Notion’s sharing.

Look at a dedicated tool if:

• Your notes are always a few sessions behind.
• You’ve been caught by a contradiction at the table.
• You spend more time maintaining the system than prepping the game.

The alternatives

If you want a dedicated campaign wiki, World Anvil and Kanka are the established choices, and both handle player-facing secrets better than a shared Notion page. LegendKeeper is the pick if your world lives on maps.

If the problem is specifically keeping notes current, that’s what StoryGuard is for. You write session notes the same way you would in Notion or Obsidian, @mentioning NPCs and places as you go. The difference is what happens after the session: What changed? reads your notes and proposes the updates (Old Wren died, Kestrel took the seal, the mayor’s secret is still hidden) and you approve them in a minute instead of copying them by hand. It also checks new sessions against what you’ve established, and drafts a spoiler-free recap for your group chat. If you have years of notes elsewhere, you can paste them in and pull NPCs and places out as you go.

Honest limits: StoryGuard has no plugin ecosystem, no player accounts, and no statblocks, and your notes live in our app rather than in files on your disk, though paid plans can export your campaign. If those matter more to you than the bookkeeping, Obsidian is the better home. For the full field, see our campaign management tools roundup, or the tool-agnostic system in how to keep track of your D&D campaign.