How to take notes for D&D in Obsidian with Leah Ferguson

D&D note-taking in Obsidian works best when it’s treated like a session-ready control panel—built around fast lookups, templated pages, and lightweight “signal” notes that can be expanded after the game. Leah Ferguson, an Obsidian community mod and D&D player, runs her campaigns entirely through notes (using Roll20 only for live character interactions) and organizes her vault around two Obsidian Workspaces: one for one-shots and one for ongoing campaigns. The goal is simple: keep the right references open during play while using templates and Dataview to generate session structure and summaries without slowing the table down.

Her in-session setup uses Workspaces (and Workspaces Plus for quick switching) to maintain three key panes: a pinned sidebar “heads up display” for campaign identity and quick jumps to NPC/backstory notes, a conditions reference (like paralysis or petrification) for immediate rules reminders, and a custom file explorer feel created through Obsidian’s tab views. For ongoing campaigns, she keeps a character reference tab and a session notes tab open by default, with the session notes page deployed by template at the start of each session. Those templates pre-fill metadata such as the session date, in-campaign day, participating PCs, and—via Dataview—placeholders for locations and other details that get filled in later.

During play, her notes stay intentionally sparse: bullet-journal style, focused on character introductions and only the combat details that matter for future recall (spells, distinctive traits, or story-relevant outcomes). After the session, she switches to a “review workspace” where she updates character pages, links new NPCs, and uses Dataview to track where characters appeared across sessions—so long-forgotten threads can be recovered quickly when a DM drops a subtle callback. She also uses links as cheat sheets, including Dataview-driven summaries for class features (like trickery cleric actions) and spell templates that ensure key fields such as casting time aren’t missed.

A major theme is automation with guardrails. She templates spells and actions so she doesn’t forget mechanical fields, but she still rewrites and learns in her own words rather than importing everything wholesale. She also relies on a consistent numeric system inspired by Johnny Decimal: campaign and character identifiers are encoded into numbers so searching “62 04” instantly surfaces the right campaign context. Beyond Obsidian, she uses the Mac launcher service Bunch to one-click launch a “gaming mode” setup—opening the correct Obsidian Workspace, browser links, focus mode, and even campaign music—so prep becomes repeatable even when mornings are chaotic.

For character creation, she builds a DM-ready document with TLDR mechanical essentials plus backstory and relationship context, linking out to atomic notes and inspiration images. She pairs Obsidian with Eagle, an image reference manager that supports tagging and smart folders, then deep-links those image collections into character notes. She finishes by recommending community plugins for D&D: Templater and Dataview as core infrastructure, plus Supercharged Links for at-a-glance status indicators (like an anatomical heart emoji for “alive” and relationship emojis), and Dice Roller for generating prompts and content on the fly—especially useful for DMing when improvisation is required.