How to Organize Your D&D Campaign Notes

Your campaign has fourteen NPCs you can never find, three sub-plots you abandoned by accident, and a session-notes folder only your past self can parse. The cure is not another worldbuilding app — it is a plain-text vault with wiki-links, a session template you actually fill in, and a weekly prep routine that lives on one page.

D&D turned fifty in 2024, and Wizards of the Coast's anniversary press release placed the player base at "more than 50 million" fans worldwide.¹ The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, released November 12, 2024, ships with a set of printable tracking sheets — NPCs, campaign goals, magic items, travel — because the designers know what the average DM forgets.^{2 3} r/DMAcademy hosts more than six hundred thousand subscribers asking the same three questions every week: where did I write that down, what was that NPC's name, what did I promise the players in session six.⁴ Mike Shea, writing as Sly Flourish, has said the working principle plainly: "Our notes are just for us. Only document what you need to remember and reference for running sessions."⁵ Markdown plus wiki-links answers all three questions, costs nothing, and outlives any tool that hosts it.⁶

Why most D&D campaign notes fail

Most D&D notes fail because they were written for nobody. The DM scrawls during play, never returns to clean them up, and by session eight no one — including the past self who wrote them — can locate a single NPC. The disease is not bad handwriting. It is a missing distinction between capture, cleanup, and prep.

Mike Shea, writing as Sly Flourish, has been running a weekly D&D table since 2005 and has published more on this exact failure mode than anyone alive.⁷ The trap is the opposite habit — writing fan-fiction-style session reports in third person, capturing every die roll, building a worldbuilding wiki that no player and no future-self ever reads. The 2016 Sly Flourish DM survey found that most DMs play weekly for about four hours, with one to two hours of prep.⁸ A note system that demands more than that collapses inside a month.

Matt Mercer, the Dungeon Master of Critical Role — a show streaming since March 2015 with more than 375 episodes across three campaigns — confirms the same constraint from the opposite end of the prep spectrum.^{9 10} Mercer spends roughly one to two hours of prep per hour of gameplay and uses printed sheets because tactile review is faster than scrolling.¹¹ The lesson is not "prep more like Mercer." The lesson is that every working DM, lazy or maximalist, has a system that fits inside a fixed weekly budget. The notes that survive are the notes that fit inside the budget. The rest get abandoned in a Google Doc nobody opens.

The vault structure that works for most campaigns

The vault is a folder tree, not an app. Six folders carry a campaign for two years without strain: sessions, npcs, locations, plots, items, and lore. A seventh — rules — holds house rules and Sage Advice rulings that recur. Every file is a plain markdown file. Every cross-reference is a wiki-link.

campaign/
├── sessions/
│   ├── 2026-05-10-session-01.md
│   ├── 2026-05-17-session-02.md
│   └── ...
├── npcs/
│   ├── veronica-thorn.md
│   ├── lord-mavros.md
│   └── ...
├── locations/
│   ├── threshold.md
│   ├── the-grey-tower.md
│   └── ...
├── plots/
│   ├── the-missing-courier.md
│   ├── the-bound-fiend.md
│   └── ...
├── items/
│   └── the-broken-crown.md
├── lore/
│   ├── factions.md
│   ├── deities.md
│   └── calendar.md
├── rules/
│   └── house-rules.md
└── templates/
    ├── npc.md
    ├── location.md
    ├── plot.md
    └── session.md

This structure is the consensus pattern across the Obsidian TTRPG community.¹² Nicole van der Hoeven, whose D&D-in-Obsidian tutorials have become standard reference material in the r/ObsidianMD community, uses an almost identical layout in her published nvdh-ttrpg-vault sample.^{13 14} Mike Shea publishes a parallel pattern in his open-source lazy_gm_tools repository on GitHub, with the same separation of session notes from NPC pages from campaign support.¹⁵ Date-prefixed filenames — 2026-05-10-session-01.md — keep the sessions folder chronologically sorted in every file manager on every operating system. No frontmatter required. No special app required. Any text editor opens any file.

In-session capture: the five things that matter

During a D&D session, capture only five things: (1) a name the players invented, (2) a promise the DM made, (3) a question the players asked, (4) a die roll that mattered, and (5) a piece of loot whose ownership is now contested. Everything else can be reconstructed. Most of what gets captured cannot.

The five-item rule is not arbitrary — each item is the kind of detail the table will ask the DM to remember in week four. The player who named their warlock's patron "the Quiet Bargain" in session two will expect that name to still be canonical in session twelve. The promise the DM made — "I'll roll for that next session" — will be cited verbatim by the player who heard it. The question the players asked — "is the courier's brother still alive?" — is the only reliable signal of which plot threads the table is tracking. The contested die roll, and the contested loot, are the two artefacts a table will argue about at the next session if they are not written down at the current one.

The five-item rule borrows directly from Mike Shea's "scenes" step in the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master methodology, which treats sessions as catch-all containers for the few details that survive into next week.^{16 17} Mercer, prepping the opposite way, captures the same five categories in his pre-printed session sheets.¹¹ Whether a DM is lazy or maximalist, capture is the same. Cleanup is where the systems diverge.

Cleanup, 24 to 48 hours after the session

The rule for D&D campaign-note cleanup: within forty-eight hours, or it does not happen. Open the session file, expand each shorthand line into a sentence, link every new NPC and location with double brackets, and write a single paragraph titled "What happened" at the top. That paragraph becomes the recap the players hear at the next table.

The forty-eight-hour window is not a productivity-system flex — it is the practical span across which the DM still remembers the inflection of an in-character line, the player's facial reaction to a reveal, and the half-finished plot beat that was meant to land but didn't. Past that window, the session melts into "the one with the kobolds" and the file becomes useless. Brennan Lee Mulligan, the DM of Dimension 20, runs an "eighty percent improv, twenty percent planning" style that only works because a tight cleanup loop replenishes the prepared context.¹⁸ His own notes live as bullet points in Google Docs.¹⁹ The bullet point's job is to be expanded, not to be elegant.

# 2026-05-17 — Session 02: The Courier's Brother

## What happened
The party reached Threshold, met [[Veronica Thorn]] at the inn,
learned the missing courier is [[Veronica Thorn]]'s brother, and
agreed to recover his last delivery from the ruins under
[[The Grey Tower]]. They did not yet meet [[Lord Mavros]].

## Promises the DM made
- [[Veronica Thorn]] will share what she knows about her brother's
  employer once the party returns with the satchel.
- Mira's player asked whether her old mentor lives in Threshold.
  DM said "I'll let you know next session." Answer: yes — and her
  mentor is [[Lord Mavros]]'s cousin.

## NPCs introduced
- [[Veronica Thorn]] — innkeeper, brother is the missing courier
- [[Old Petros]] — town watch, suspicious of strangers, owes
  [[Lord Mavros]] money

## Rolls / rulings that mattered
- Insight DC 15 against [[Old Petros]] — Mira rolled 17, learned
  he is hiding a debt.

## Loot
- 1x sealed satchel (unopened, [[plot: the-missing-courier]])

The Markdown above is not a template — it is a worked example of what fifteen minutes of cleanup produces. The full session template (later in this post) adds "Locations visited" and "Player questions to answer next week"; both are omitted here for brevity. Every wiki-link is a backlink waiting to happen. The "Promises" section is the only safeguard against the DM contradicting their own past-self in session five.

Prep for the next session: one hour, one page

Prep for the next session takes one hour and produces one page. Mike Shea's Lazy Dungeon Master condenses prep into eight modular steps — review characters, strong start, scenes, secrets, locations, NPCs, monsters, treasure — and a one-page note written in any markdown editor.¹⁷ Most weeks, four of the eight are enough.

Shea's eight steps, as published in the October 2023 Eight Steps essay on slyflourish.com, are: Review the Characters, Create a Strong Start, Outline Potential Scenes, Define Secrets and Clues, Develop Fantastic Locations, Outline Important NPCs, Choose Relevant Monsters, and Select Treasure and Magic Item Rewards.¹⁷ Shea is explicit that the list is modular: "You can choose different steps depending on whether you're running homebrew or published material or whether you're running a single-session game or a long campaign."¹⁷ His own one-page prep template, kept on the site for free, is markdown.²⁰

The single most important step is Define Secrets and Clues, because the secrets list interacts with Justin Alexander's Three Clue Rule from 2008: "For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues."²¹ One clue is a chokepoint; three is a node. The DM who writes ten secrets per session and never references them is wasting prep. The DM who writes three and seeds each one in two locations is running the table the players think is brilliant.

# Prep — Session 03

## Characters to remember
- Mira (cleric) wants to learn her mentor is alive
- Davos (rogue) carrying the sealed satchel
- Renn (fighter) owes [[Old Petros]] from session 2

## Strong start
The satchel begins humming the moment the party leaves Threshold's
gates. The hum aligns to a heartbeat that is not theirs.

## Scenes (potential, not required)
- Ambush on the Threshold road — 3 cultists of [[the Bound Fiend]]
- The Grey Tower's outer ring — [[Lord Mavros]] is waiting
- The satchel speaks

## Secrets (need 3 per conclusion)
- The courier was killed; his body is in the Grey Tower cellar
- [[Lord Mavros]] hired the cultists, not the courier's employer
- The satchel contains a bound fragment of [[the Bound Fiend]]

## NPCs ready to step on stage
- [[Lord Mavros]] — voice quiet, hands always folded, lies easily

## Monsters
- 3x cultist (CR 1/8), 1x acolyte (CR 1/4) if pressed

## Treasure
- One letter addressed to the courier's brother

A one-page prep note in this shape will fit on a folded sheet of paper. Save it as prep-NNN.md in the sessions folder, or in a prep/ subfolder if the DM prefers. Shea recommends a "single-page two-column" PDF export for table use.⁵ The same file is the input for next session's cleanup. The cycle closes.

Wiki-links: how a campaign remembers itself

Wiki-links are how a campaign remembers itself. A wiki-link is the double-bracket syntax — [[Veronica]] — that turns any phrase into a backlinked node. Type Veronica's name in three session files and her page collects three backlinks automatically. The question "where did I write about Veronica again?" stops being asked.

The syntax originated in WikiWikiWeb in 1995 and survived into every modern note tool — Obsidian, Logseq, Roam, and MNMNOTE all parse [[wiki-link]] identically.²² When a player asks the DM "what did we learn about Mavros last month," the DM opens lord-mavros.md, scrolls to the backlinks panel, and reads every session, plot file, and NPC file that mentioned him. The links collect themselves while the DM is doing other work.

For the D&D-in-Obsidian community, the workflow has been refined for half a decade.^{14 23} The Obsidian TTRPG Community on GitHub maintains the Initiative Tracker plugin, the Dice Roller plugin, and the 5e Statblocks plugin — each one a wiki-link-aware extension of the same plain-text vault.^{24 25} The Dataview plugin alone has crossed 3.7 million downloads and is the standard mechanism for querying "all NPCs in this city" or "all sessions where Veronica appeared."²⁶ None of this requires leaving plain markdown. The plugins are read-only over the files.

The same wiki-link convention works in MNMNOTE. The link is the data; the renderer is replaceable.

Templates for NPCs, locations, and plot threads

Templates remove the cognitive cost of a blank page. Three templates carry most of the workload: an NPC sheet, a location entry, and a plot-thread tracker. Each is a fenced markdown block kept inside a templates/ folder. New entity, paste the template, fill the fields, link the entity into the world.

The templates below are deliberately shorter than the World Anvil or Kanka entity forms. World Anvil's lowest paid tier costs $5 per month or $50 per year and unlocks unlimited articles; Kanka's free Kobold plan is generous but the paid Wyvern tier is $9.99 per month; LegendKeeper is $9 per month or $90 per year.^{27 28 29} These are all good tools — for some users, the right tools. For a DM who already lives in a text editor, the templates below cost zero and fit on one screen.

NPC template — templates/npc.md:

# {{name}}

**Race / class:** {{race}}, {{class-or-occupation}}
**Where they live:** [[{{location}}]]
**Faction:** [[{{faction}}]]
**First appeared:** [[2026-05-17-session-02]]

## Voice / appearance
One sentence of physical detail. One sentence of vocal tic.

## Motivation (1 sentence)
What they want this month. Not their life goal.

## What they know
- One secret they will share if pressed
- One secret they will lie about
- One secret they don't know they know

## Relationships
- [[Other NPC]] — kind of relationship in 5 words

## Notes
(Cleanup notes go here. Wiki-link liberally.)

Location template — templates/location.md:

# {{location-name}}

**Region:** [[{{region}}]]
**Population / size:** {{number-or-vibe}}
**Faction control:** [[{{faction}}]]

## Three aspects (Mike Shea-style)
- Aspect one — sensory, concrete
- Aspect two — political or social
- Aspect three — the thing that is wrong here

## NPCs here
- [[NPC name]] — role

## Plot threads anchored here
- [[plot: thread name]]

## Sessions visited
- [[2026-05-17-session-02]]

The "three aspects" line is borrowed directly from Shea's Fantastic Locations step: three short evocative descriptors per location, no more.^{17 30} A location described in three aspects is a location the DM can run from memory. A location described in three paragraphs is a location the DM will skip past at the table.

Plot-thread template — templates/plot.md:

# Plot: {{thread name}}

**Status:** seeded | active | climaxing | resolved | abandoned
**Started in:** [[2026-05-17-session-02]]

## What the players know
- One bullet per piece they've heard. Cite the session.

## What is actually true
- The reveal, written plainly. Spoiler-fenced if shared with players.

## Clues seeded (Three Clue Rule)
- [[Location or NPC]] — clue text
- [[Location or NPC]] — clue text
- [[Location or NPC]] — clue text

## Next move
One sentence. The thing that happens if the players do nothing.

## Resolution paths
- If players go to X, the thread climaxes via Y.
- If players ignore it, the thread reshapes into [[new plot]].

Every plot thread carries one of five states. The honesty is in the "abandoned" tag — three sub-plots that quietly die because nobody wrote down that they died is the failure mode no DM admits.

Session template — templates/session.md:

# {{date}} — Session {{n}}: {{title}}

## What happened
(One paragraph. Written within 48 hours. This is the recap.)

## Promises the DM made
- 

## NPCs introduced
- 

## Locations visited
- 

## Rolls / rulings that mattered
- 

## Loot
- 

## Player questions to answer next week
- 

Four templates. Four files. Every campaign artefact the DM needs slots into one of them.

Session zero: the campaign bible in two pages

Session zero produces a campaign bible. The bible is a single file, two pages long, that names the tone, the table contract, the world's iron rules, and the safety tools in use. Wizards of the Coast's 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide includes a Game Expectations sheet that maps cleanly onto this file.^{2 3}

Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, published November 2020, was the first official 5e book to formalise session zero — the book opens with the framing that has carried the practice since: "Session Zero is the perfect time for you and the players to discuss the experience they're hoping for, as well as topics, themes, and behavior they deem inappropriate."³¹ The 2024 DMG goes further, shipping a printable Game Expectations sheet that the Wargamer review called "one of our absolute favorite parts of the new DMG."³ The same content fits in a single markdown file. Two pages is the upper bound — anything longer becomes a contract nobody re-reads.

# Campaign Bible: {{campaign name}}

## Tone
Three adjectives. Two negative space adjectives ("not grimdark,
not romance-driven"). One reference work the table all know.

## The table contract
- Session length, frequency, start time
- Phone policy
- Alcohol / food policy
- Absence rule (what happens to your character if you miss)
- Lateness rule

## Safety tools in use
- Lines and veils — list each player's veils privately
- X-card or equivalent, mid-session
- Open door rule (no penalty for stepping out)

## Iron rules of the world
- Three to five sentences. Things that cannot be retconned.
- Example: "Magic existed but was outlawed two centuries ago."
- Example: "The gods are silent. No cleric has heard a god in living memory."

## House rules
- Three rules max. More than three and people forget.

## Out-of-character touchstones
- The DM's three favourite published modules (sets expectations)
- One TV show or novel that captures the tone

## Player goals
(One bullet per player. Updated every six sessions.)
- {{player}}'s {{character}}: wants to find their estranged mentor
- ...

The session-zero file is the only file in the vault that lives in the campaign root, outside any subfolder. It is the file the DM re-reads before the first session of every arc.

End of arc: the one-page arc review

At the end of an arc, the DM writes a one-page arc review. The review names what worked, what dragged, which NPCs the players cared about, which sub-plots they ignored, and one structural change for the next arc. That single page is the only artefact carried forward into the campaign bible.

The discipline of writing the review is the discipline of admitting which prep was wasted. The seven NPCs the players never asked about — they get archived, not deleted. The dungeon the players skipped — its three rooms become a future side-quest, or they don't. Shea's organisation guide is explicit about archiving rather than retaining: "Resist the urge to copy over previous secrets and other information. That stuff is better thrown away and rewritten between sessions."³²

# Arc Review — {{arc name}} (sessions {{first}}–{{last}})

## What the players cared about
- Top 3 NPCs by player-mentions
- Top 2 plot threads they pursued

## What they ignored
- NPCs introduced and never asked about
- Plot threads seeded that nobody touched

## What dragged
- One scene type that fell flat
- One mechanic that slowed the table

## One structural change for the next arc
- (Be specific. "Run more roleplay" is not a change.)

## Carry-forward
- NPCs that survived: list them
- NPCs archived (still alive, off-screen): list them
- Plot threads still open: list with status

## Players' standing requests
- (From their characters' goals)

The arc review file is the only document a DM should ever email to themselves between campaigns. It is the receipt that the campaign existed.

What not to track

Some things should not enter the vault. Every coin in inventory, every roll the players made, prose recaps written in third-person novelistic voice, and the dice-rolling app's session log all fail the test: they cost time to write and yield nothing to next week's session. Cut them.

The anti-pattern list, in order of how much time each one wastes:

1. Per-coin inventory tracking. The party's gold piece total is a player problem, not a DM problem. The DM tracks treasure parcels — "the sealed satchel," "the broken crown" — not currency totals. Roll20 added a coin tracker years ago; the average DM does not need it.³³ If the campaign rewards loot every session, group it: "a parcel of gems worth roughly 800 gp."
2. Every die roll. The roll that mattered goes in the session file's "Rolls / rulings" section. The other forty rolls do not. Critical Role's in-house stats site CritRoleStats logs every die roll because the show is a performance; a private home campaign is not.³⁴
3. Prose recaps in novelistic voice. "The wind howled through the broken stones of the Grey Tower" is a paragraph for a future short story, not a campaign note. The recap is one paragraph in present tense, bulleted by event.
4. Voice notes you will never transcribe. Mercer prints sheets; he does not record himself.¹¹ If the DM records the session, the audio is archive, not source.
5. Worldbuilding that does not touch a session. Three pages on the Threshold cathedral's interior, written six months before the party reaches Threshold, will be rewritten when they get there anyway. Worldbuild in the location template's three aspects, then expand on demand.
6. A statblock for every NPC. The DMG's statblocks cover most cases. Custom statblocks belong in the NPC's file only if the DM is sure the encounter will happen — and even then, a one-line note ("uses Veteran statblock, +2 to Stealth") is faster.
7. A full transcript of in-character dialogue. Mercer's printed sheets contain "the gist of the description"; they are not transcripts.¹¹ The gist is the recoverable artefact.

Each of these is a habit that produces feeling — the feeling that the DM is "doing prep" — without producing anything next week's table needs. Mike Shea's framing again: "Focus on what matters and omit what doesn't."¹⁷ The one-page prep note exists so that everything not on the page is, by definition, omitted.

Where MNMNOTE fits

MNMNOTE is one of several editors that read this exact vault. The files are plain markdown; the wiki-links are double-bracket syntax; the templates are fenced code blocks. Obsidian, Logseq, VS Code, and MNMNOTE all parse the same files. The point of the workflow is the workflow, not the app.

MNMNOTE's specific contribution is that it runs in a browser tab, stores notes on your own device, and requires no install and no account.³⁵ A DM who already runs the table from a laptop can open a tab, paste in the templates above, and have a working vault before the players sit down. A DM who runs from a tablet at a friend's house can open the same vault on any device with a modern browser. The same plain-text files, in a different reader. Steph Ango's principle — that "the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them" — is the entire point.³⁶

The closing principle, for any DM choosing tools, is portability before features. World Anvil, Kanka, LegendKeeper, Obsidian Portal, and Roll20 are all real products built by real people, and each one is the right call for some campaigns.^{27 28 29 37 38} None of them owe the DM their data back in a format that survives the company. Markdown files in a folder do.

Frequently asked questions

Seven questions surface in every DM's first month with this workflow — about system compatibility, app choice, World Anvil and Kanka equivalence, session zero discipline, player-visible vaults, cleanup time, and published-adventure prep. Each answer below carries the working consensus from the practitioners cited above.

Does this workflow only work for D&D 5e?

It works for any narrative-heavy tabletop RPG. The eight-step prep frame originates with D&D 5e¹⁷ but is system-agnostic — Shea has applied it to Pathfinder 2e, Shadowdark, and Lazy-DM treatments of Call of Cthulhu-style investigation games.³⁹ Index Card RPG uses an even smaller version of the same loop.⁴⁰ Mythic Game Master Emulator's scene-and-question structure fits the templates above unmodified.⁴¹ For Call of Cthulhu specifically, Chaosium ships free handouts packs that drop straight into the items/ folder.⁴²

Should I use Obsidian, MNMNOTE, or something else?

Whichever opens markdown files and renders [[wiki-links]]. Obsidian has the largest TTRPG plugin ecosystem — Initiative Tracker, Dice Roller, 5e Statblocks, Leaflet — and Mike Shea, Nicole van der Hoeven, and most of the published D&D-in-Obsidian community converged on it for that reason.^{15 14 24 25} MNMNOTE runs in a browser without an install and stores notes locally on your own device.³⁵ LegendKeeper is purpose-built for campaign worldbuilding at $9 per month.²⁹ Pick the reader; keep the files.

How is this different from World Anvil or Kanka?

World Anvil, Kanka, and LegendKeeper are structured-database tools — every NPC is a database row, every location is a database row, fields are typed and validated. That structure is a strength for some campaigns and overhead for others. World Anvil's Journeyman tier is $5 per month or $50 per year; Kanka's Kobold plan is free; LegendKeeper is $9 per month.^{27 28 29} The markdown-vault workflow trades typed fields for portability — every file is plain, openable in any editor in any decade.

What about session zero — do I really need a separate document for it?

Yes, and one file is enough. Tasha's Cauldron of Everything introduced formal session-zero guidance to 5e in 2020,³¹ and the 2024 DMG ships a printable Game Expectations sheet for the same purpose.^{2 3} The two-page campaign bible above maps onto both. The discipline of writing the bible — three adjectives of tone, three iron rules, one paragraph per safety tool — is what makes session zero stick. A DM who skips this file always has at least one player who thought the campaign was a different show.

How do I keep my players from spoiling themselves on my notes?

Two vaults, or one vault with private folders. Nicole van der Hoeven runs two distinct vaults — a private DM vault for prep and a separate player-facing vault containing handouts and recaps.¹³ The same separation works inside one MNMNOTE workspace by convention: plots/ and lore/ never get shared, while the sessions/ folder's "What happened" paragraphs do. The player-facing recap is the only artefact the players ever see.

How long should a session note take to clean up?

Fifteen to twenty minutes within forty-eight hours. Past that window, the inflection of the table is gone and the file becomes archaeology. Mercer's roughly one-to-two-hour-per-hour prep ratio¹¹ includes both cleanup and forward prep; Mulligan's "eighty percent improv" style¹⁸ requires the same cleanup loop to refill the prepared context. The cleanup pass is the load-bearing step in the workflow.

What if I'm running a published adventure instead of homebrew?

The vault structure is the same; the contents shift. Sessions, NPCs, locations, and plot threads all still apply, but the canonical source for each entity is the published book. Shea is explicit that the eight-step prep frame works identically for published material — "Outline Important NPCs" becomes "select two NPCs the players will meet this session from the module's NPC list and write one line per NPC."¹⁷ The 2024 DMG's tracking sheets — campaign journal, travel planner, NPC tracker — are themselves a worked example of how WotC expects published-adventure DMs to take notes.³

The discipline is the tool

A campaign deserves a notebook that respects plain text and links its own world. MNMNOTE (mnmnote.com) does both — opens in your browser, no account, no install.³⁵ The vault structure above will work in any markdown editor on any device on any date. The discipline is the tool. The files are the campaign.

References

All URLs verified live as of 2026-05-15.

Tier 2 — Mainstream press / official publisher communications

Tier 3 — Industry blog / community analysis

Tier 4 — Personal site / expert practitioner

Tier 6 — Tools / vendor documentation