Free D&D campaign manager

Free is easy. Free that still works in session 20 is the hard part.

Any tool can hold six pages of notes. The question is what happens after eighteen months, when your campaign has 60 NPCs, nine locations, four factions and a plot thread you planted in session 3 and forgot. At that point a campaign manager has exactly one job: give you the right note in under ten seconds while five people watch you.

That is where most free setups quietly fail — not because the tool is bad, but because a long document has no structure, a shared drive has no links, and a note app with no dashboard makes you remember where you filed things. Here is how the six realistic free options hold up, and how to set each one up properly in five minutes.

The six that are actually free

1Obsidian — the one that keeps working

Strengths. Notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you own. Typing [[Thalia]] makes a link; the backlink appears on Thalia's note automatically, so you discover connections you did not plan. Search is instant and offline. And with one free plugin (Dataview) your notes start answering questions: every open quest, every NPC in Oakhaven, the last five sessions — as tables that rebuild themselves each time you open them.

Weaknesses. It opens as an empty room. No folders, no templates, no dashboard. The first hour is structural work, and a surprising number of DMs quit inside that hour. It also has no built-in maps or player-facing site without a plugin or a paid add-on.

Five-minute setup. Make a vault, then make exactly these folders — resist adding more:

01-Campaigns/     one hub note per campaign
02-Characters/    NPCs and PCs, one note each
03-Locations/     towns, dungeons, regions
04-Sessions/      prep + recap, named "S07 - Recap"
05-Quests/        one note per thread, with a status
06-Factions/      groups that want things
07-DM-Tools/      the DM Screen dashboard, random tables

Then the full walkthrough — frontmatter, links, first Dataview query — is in how to organise a D&D campaign in Obsidian.

2Notion — the best one to share with players

Strengths. Databases are the real draw: an NPC table you can filter by location, sort by faction, and flip into a board view. Sharing a page with your players is one click and they need no account to read it. The free personal plan is generous enough for a campaign.

Weaknesses. It wants to be online. Offline support is thin, and a big workspace on a slow connection is a bad experience at the table. Your notes live in their format on their servers — the export exists, but it is not a folder of clean files. Large pages get sluggish.

Five-minute setup. Make one database called Entities, not five separate ones. Give it a Type select field (NPC / Location / Quest / Faction / Session), a Status field, and a Related relation pointing at itself. Then build views: "NPCs by location", "Open quests", "Sessions, newest first". One database with views beats five databases you have to keep in sync.

3OneNote — the one for stylus users

Strengths. Genuinely free, genuinely offline, syncs everywhere, and unbeatable if you prep by hand on a tablet. Paste a map, scribble on it, drop a text box anywhere on the page. Sections and pages map neatly onto campaigns and sessions.

Weaknesses. It is a stack of pages, not a web of notes. Linking between pages is possible but manual and fragile, there are no backlinks, and nothing can query your notes for you. Finding a name from session 4 means search and hope.

Five-minute setup. One notebook per campaign. Section groups for NPCs, Places, Sessions, Rules. One page per NPC — never one page holding twelve NPCs, or search will only ever point you at the same page. Put the NPC's name in the page title exactly as players say it.

4Google Docs — the honest starting point

Strengths. Zero setup, works on anything, co-DM editing is flawless, and the outline sidebar is a better navigation tool than people give it credit for. For a 6-session mini-campaign, this is a perfectly rational choice and you should not feel bad about it.

Weaknesses. One long document has no structure beyond headings, no links between entities, and no way to ask it a question. Past twenty pages you are scrolling, and scrolling at the table is the thing you are trying to eliminate.

Five-minute setup. Split into three docs — World, NPCs, Sessions — not one. Heading 2 per entity so the outline becomes a clickable index. Put a bookmark link at the top of each NPC. When the NPC doc passes forty entries, that is your signal to move.

5Kanka — TTRPG-shaped out of the box

Strengths. Built for this hobby: characters, locations, organisations, quests, journals, calendars and family trees are first-class entity types, with a free tier that runs a real campaign. Open source, with an export and a self-hosting option if you care about that.

Weaknesses. Online only, and the interface is dense — a lot of fields and tabs before you have written a sentence. Free-tier limits on things like uploads will eventually make themselves known.

Five-minute setup. Create the campaign, then create only the entities that appeared at your last session. Do not fill the calendar or the family trees yet. Kanka rewards restraint; it is very easy to spend an evening filling fields nobody will ever read.

6World Anvil free tier — if worldbuilding is the hobby

Strengths. The prompts are its secret weapon — they pull detail out of you that a blank page never would — and the player-facing wiki, with per-article secrets, is excellent. The free tier is real and usable.

Weaknesses. The free tier carries ads and limits, the interface is busy, and it is built around writing a world rather than running Thursday's session. Online only.

Full breakdown against the paid options: Obsidian vs LegendKeeper vs World Anvil.

So which one?

• Long campaign, you at the table with a laptop → Obsidian.
• Your players want to read the lore → Notion, or Kanka if you want TTRPG structure for free.
• You prep with a stylus on a tablet → OneNote.
• You start in twenty minutes → Google Docs, and migrate later. Genuinely fine.

Questions DMs actually ask