Obsidian - One Vault or Many?

Keeping tabletop RPG notes straight in Obsidian comes down to a practical rule: use one Obsidian vault per game system, then layer campaign- or group-specific material on top. The core problem isn’t organization—it’s linking conflicts and duplicated work when two systems with overlapping names (monsters, spells, items) live in the same vault.

The approach starts with a clean separation by ruleset. One vault is dedicated to D&D 5th Edition, with everything from that system stored together. When the group shifts to Pathfinder Second Edition, the notes move into a separate Pathfinder vault. Even if both games run in the same setting—he uses the Forgotten Realms as an example—mixing systems inside one vault creates ambiguity. Searching for something like “Goblin” can surface multiple entries that look similar but belong to different systems, forcing manual commitment to the correct link and making it harder to trust what a result actually references.

That linking friction becomes more likely because many RPG elements share names across systems. Spells, monsters, and common items (like health potions and even “fireball”) often exist in both ecosystems under the same or similar labels. When those overlapping concepts sit side-by-side, the same search term can produce multiple near-identical options, and the vault’s internal linking becomes less reliable.

The alternative—one vault per system—also reduces duplication. His Forgotten Realms “world” notes are intentionally generic and reusable. Locations, NPC descriptions, and module-based adventure scaffolding are written at a high level so they can be applied to any group that shows up, without tracking player-specific consequences like who killed which NPC. Mechanics, spells, and magic items are treated as largely static references that get updated over time; when a new monster is needed, it’s copied into the system vault once.

Group-specific differences are handled with folders rather than separate vaults. For D&D 5th Edition, he keeps multiple party folders inside the same vault—such as an “adult group,” a “family” group for Christmas play, and other ad hoc groups. Because his campaigns are modular and his world notes avoid timeline-heavy tracking, he doesn’t need separate vaults per party.

He does acknowledge a potential workaround for people who insist on separate vaults per group: Windows symbolic links (Sim link). In theory, changes in one folder could propagate to another, keeping mechanics and world topics synchronized. But he considers that effectively replicating the same effort and not worth the added complexity.

Finally, session journals are treated as the place where outcomes belong. Those journals record what happened at the table and are published using Obsidian Publish. If another long-term party joins, the system can reuse the shared world and mechanics vault while creating a new session-journal folder for that party’s history. The takeaway is less about a universal rule and more about minimizing duplicate work while keeping system-specific linking clean: one vault per ruleset, with group-specific tracking layered in where it actually matters.