Introduction
Worldbuilding done seriously, for a novel, a TTRPG, a video game, or just for the joy of it, eventually creates a problem that has nothing to do with creativity. At some point you will find that you’ve imagined too much stuff to remember on your own. For me, that happens approximately five minutes after an idea strikes, but it happens to everyone eventually. Locations, characters, factions, magical items, historical events, economy, ecology, systems, and the tangle of relationships connecting all of them. After two years of working on a setting you might have eight hundred notes, or eight thousand notes, and the question stops being “what should I write?” and starts being “did I already write this?” or “where did I put that?”. Or worse, to me: “why are these things inconsistent?”.
This is a wiki problem, not a writing problem. And the right tool for a personal wiki, in my opinion, is Obsidian.
This is the first in a four-part series on using Obsidian for worldbuilding. The series builds on itself. This post explains why Obsidian is worth the investment. The next helps you to get the metadata foundation right, to allow you to build the finding/linking/sorting structures you’ll need as your content corpus grows. After that, the third post covers directory structure and how to think about folders, notes, links, and searchability. The fourth will cover options about how to query your vault like a database to extract genuine value from all that structure.
A small preview of what’s possible by the end:
Show me every NPC in Landfall who’s a member of the Landfall Guard, and indicate if they’ve been used in any stories or games yet.
That’s not pseudocode. With the right metadata, it’s a four-line snippet that returns to you a live, always-up-to-date table or list. By the end of the series you’ll know how to write that query, and countless others like it, against your own world.
Why Obsidian Specifically
There are plenty of tools for this job. There are world building apps, campaign management apps, note taking apps, wiki apps, plain text files in a folder, handwriting in notebooks. They all work. The reasons I pick Obsidian, and the reasons this series is Obsidian-flavored:
- Plain markdown files on disk. Your notes are
.mdfiles in a folder you control. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow you could open them in any text editor. There’s no proprietary format, no lock-in, no migration project waiting for you. This matters more than it sounds, if you’ve ever experienced an app you use daily shutting down or changing in ways you can’t adapt to, or changing up their pricing plans. Plain text is forever. - Sync is your choice. Obsidian Sync (this is a paid, official solution) is excellent. But iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, and other cloud sync services all work. Git is an option too, and if you’re worldbuilding using an LLM or planning to, git might be the right answer for a variety of reasons, relating to building automations, accessing worldbuilding content remotely, or employing version control and having the ability to revert easily when the LLM makes unexpected changes.
- Bases and Dataview turn it into a database. This is the killer feature for worldbuilding. Bases is the built-in query system Obsidian shipped recently; Dataview is the long-running community plugin that does similar things with more power and a steeper learning curve. Either one lets you ask questions of your vault, such as “show me all the unused NPC ideas tagged for the Drowned Coast”, and get answers in seconds. A later post in this series is dedicated to this.
- The plugin ecosystem. Obsidian has hundreds of community plugins, many of them excellent. Templater for note creation, Omnisearch for fast and comprehensive search, dozens of TTRPG-specific tools. You don’t need most of them, and if you delve too deeply there you’ll get lost in the sauce of the setup and config and tinkering and not be doing your writing, but the ecosystem means you’re rarely stuck. It’s worth mentioning that you should be deliberate about your choices here. The “it’s plain Markdown” benefit fades the more your system depends on external tools and snippets with odd syntax embedded in your notes.
- It’s fast and offline. A vault with a thousand notes opens instantly. Thousands is not much slower (my previous TTRPG setting vault had around 6000 notes in it; my current one has 2500 or so). Like Sam-I-Am, you can work in a car, on a train, or on a boat. No spinning wheel of doom, no “couldn’t reach the server” message. Just you and your words.
A Caveat Up Front
Before we go any further: don’t go overboard, as I stated in the plugin section.
Obsidian, like any tool with a deep customization story, is a great place to do “performative productivity” instead of doing the actual work. There’s a whole genre of YouTube videos about people’s elaborate Obsidian setups, color-coded graph views, and seventeen plugins they tweaked on a Sunday afternoon. None of that is worldbuilding. None of it is writing.
I’m not saying it’s not fun. I’m not even saying it’s not useful. I’m just suggesting you be intentional about your time. If you’re intentionally sitting down to do systems work this Sunday, then by all means, do that. But if you’re sitting down to be a productive worldbuilder and wind up playing with plugins or building systems and routines for yourself, well, you didn’t actually do what you intended.
If you’re just getting started: open Obsidian, create a note, start writing. Title your notes well. Capture the information. Once you’ve built the habit of getting things on the page, then come back to this series and others like it, get ideas, and add structure on top.
The structure is genuinely valuable. But it’s only valuable on top of content. Empty scaffolding is just a different way to procrastinate.
What’s Coming
The rest of this series:
- Metadata-First Worldbuilding in Obsidian. YAML frontmatter, building a taxonomy of note types, defining type-specific properties, tags vs. metadata fields. This is the foundation. Without it, none of the queries in the fourth post work.
- Structuring an Obsidian Worldbuilding Vault. Directory layout, the case for hierarchy vs. flatness, linking philosophy (and the single most important rule: no anticipatory links).
- Querying Your Obsidian World. Bases, Dataview, world dashboards, useful templates, and the maintenance queries that keep large vaults healthy.