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Check out my Worldbuilding Cheatsheet on Cheatography.

For worldbuilding, it should support both Top-Down and Bottom-Up worldbuilding. This does not need any specific structure or scripting, since out of the box, Obsidian lets you choose how you want to organize, whether by only files and tags, or with folders, or a combination.

It is possible for one Obsidian Vault to accommodate all of the following, but it’s practicality will depend on what types of information is shared between genres and rule systems.

Another practical example is Nicole van der Hoeven’s player notes and gm notes templates and javascript files. For me, it is less confusing to have a separate vault for GM duties and keep player efforts separate. If there were information to share between vaults, I would just copy the *.md files or copy & paste the data.

Josh Plunkett’s YouTube is dedicated to showing different ways to use Obsidian for RPGs.

Genre Specific

Any effort at worldbuilding should be planned to complement the genre selected, such as science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, intrigue, horror, apocalyptic, etc.

Many genres have sub-genres, and some genres are a combination of two genres, for example science fiction can have a horror element like Alien, and fantasy can be high or low in regards to magic.

Science Fiction might be wide open to explore multiple galaxies, solar systems, planets, times, dimensions, etc.

Fantasy could have similar variety, but the majority focus is usually on one world, and often only one continent on that world.

Genre is independent of system and one could run any genre with any ruleset, but most games were designed with a specific genre in mind.

Rule Specific

Once a GM has chosen the rules for the game/campaign they want to run it will determine how they organize things. While a player will have the choice of rule from the GM, unless the GM seeks player input or the player exercises their own agency to choose which ruleset(s) they wish to play.

Rules handle the situations one expects in play at the table. Exploration rules for a game with an exploration component, creatures in the bestiary, character generation, magic or mental powers, equipment, etc.

Rules have as much variety as genres. No ruleset covers everything, but those that try have multiple rulebooks and tend toward complexity. Some rulesets encourage GM rulings where there is no rule. Story type RPGs may have minimal rules and focus on the roleplaying amongst friends.

The rules one chooses will be guided by one’s preferences and the experience they seek with those at the table. Often the choice of rules is in favor of the game that was our first experience playing RPGs. It sets in our mind what an RPG is and for many, anything that falls outside that box isn’t desired. Others will play any game any time and have no preference for rules and just want to game with their friends.

What Do I Need To Prepare?

This all depends on your selected worldbuilding model, top-down or bottom-up, or a combination of the two.

Top-down worldbuilding in a fantasy campaign would decide what is the top element and drill down from there. For example, the world or planet and go down from there.

This also brings up how much of that world do you create? Do you deal with the origins and creation myth and the rise and fall of deities and civilizations? Or do you plan the world in media res with a moment in time and refer back to the past as it comes up in play?

Whichever end of the scale, or the middle, that you start with, what you end up with will be largely the same information.

World

What makes up your world?

How and when was it formed?

What sets your world apart?

How is is special?

Continents

Is there one big continent, like Pangea with scattered islands on the periphery, or multiple continents separated by varying distances from the others?

Or is your world a collection of scattered archipelagoes?

The way you choose to organize this leads to many variations you may not have considered.

Regions

How many regions will there be across a continent or archipelago?

Nations

How many nations are there currently?

How many nations have fallen into the past? This is usually the source of dungeons and tombs for exploration.

How many nations are in a region?

Settlements

These can be villages, towns, or cities.

Adventure Locations

These can be found in many varied places:

• Tombs
• Ruins
• Dungeons
• Caves & Caverns
• Mines
• Forests
• Swamps
• Wilderness
• Etc.

Bestiary

What kinds of people and creatures populate your world?

Which are specific to certain regions, environments, or locations, and which are ubiquitous?

Will you only use creatures from official rules, or will you modify existing creatures, or make up your own?

Religion/Deities

What role will religion play in your world? Will places of worship be rare or common? Will there be any named deities, only one, or multiple pantheons with each nation or ancestry having its own?

NPCs

Who are the people the players’ characters will interact with? Townsfolk, merchants, minions of the chief evildoer, the chief evildoer, etc.?

Lore/History

How much detail will your world involve? If you decide to start with the top, how much is really needed to begin play? If you write a book will that vast amount of information be relevant to actual play at the table?

It is my experience that while worldbuilding in all its details is fun as a GM, all the time spent coming up with elaborate descriptions of the overall setting is not necessarily supportive of time around the table.

This can include calendars. What time keeping system is used in your world? Do all use the same calendar, or does each nation and ancestry have their own way of tracking time? This alone can be quite complex, especially if the year is different from our own, or your world has more or less moons than Earth.

Magic

High magic, low magic, or something in between?

Spells

Will you have any custom, AKA homebrew spells?

How will your player characters learn of them?

Will this be in a handout from the beginning, or only learned of through discovery in lost and forgotten tomes or hidden ancient scrolls?

Items

Similarly, will you have homebrew magic items. How will knowledge of them find its way to your players?

Information Tracking

How will the actions of the players be organized for keeping track of things?

What does one need to track?

In my experience, tracking what occurs in each session from the places visited, NPCs met, monsters dealt with, treasure gained, time tracking, and so forth are the points that are connected by the roleplay at the table. This interaction makes the game world come alive.

If the GM allows the players to change the world by either saving it or letting it burn, it has more verisimilitude.

Sessions

A folder for Sessions and a Template to create “buckets” to place session related information, plus link to other parts.

Dates

Some means of tracking your calendar and placing date specific entries that are tied to your calendar.

Will you track only the real world calendar and what happened each game day, or will you track the in-game dates, or both?

The Fantasy Calendar plugin can help with that.

Will you plan out certain events that will happen unless the party interacts with the time and place involved? Tracking when such things happen in the game world lets you know when to bring it up during play.

Places

Tracking where the players have been and plan to go helps the GM keep track of the situation between sessions.

Some places, like an adventure location, may have something of interest, be it a landmark, hidden entrance, special treasure, hints to other places, etc.

Weather

How will you generate each day’s weather for your game?

Sometimes the players will stay in one location for many days and you need several days worth of weather. Will you generate each day as it happens in game, or generate it ahead of time so minimize delays at the table?

Events

These can be weather, harvests, festivals, accidents, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, eclipses, comets, meteors, prophecies, etc.

This is another use of a calendar and the effects of those events are better planned in advance.

Putting It All Together

Once you have decided how you will approach each aspect of worldbuilding, you can build the structure to support it in your Obsidian vault.

Even if you use folders to subdivide things, a clear understanding of the tags you will use will help you find things without having to spend a lot of time.

Templates can be made for each relevant type of note you need, such as for Monsters, Spells, Gear, Magic Items, etc. Each template can be set with the tags relevant to that type of information.

To consolidate a large amount of notes into an index or MOC (Map Of Content) you can do it manually, or use the Dataview plugin. I prefer the Dataview plugin as it saves so much time getting information in one place.

The system you devise in Obsidian will lend itself to continued worldbuilding, session planning, notetaking about the session, and even running a game.

In the next article I explain how I use Obsidian to run games.