Obsidian NPC tracker

“Wait — who was the blacksmith's sister?”

You invented her in session 6. You gave her a name. She had an opinion about the mayor. Now the party has tracked her down, five people are waiting, and you are scrolling a document hoping the name appears before the silence gets funny.

NPCs are the hardest thing to track because they multiply faster than anything else in a campaign and they arrive unplanned. You do not decide to add an NPC — a player asks the bartender's name and now you have one.

So the tracker has to be cheap to write to (three lines, mid-session, no ceremony) and instant to read from (one keystroke, sorted, filtered). Here are the three setups that do that, in order of effort.

Three ways to track NPCs

They stack. Method 2 is method 1 plus frontmatter; method 3 is method 2 plus queries. Nothing you write early gets thrown away.

1Basic: one note per NPC

The whole method: every NPC gets a note in 02-Characters, named exactly as players say the name — Garruk Stonefist, not Garruk (blacksmith). Three lines is a complete note:

# Mara Vell

Half-elf fence in [[Oakhaven]], works out of the back of the pawn shop.
Wary, fast talker, owes [[The Quiet Hand]] a favour she resents.
First met in [[S06 - Recap]].

That is already more than most campaigns have. Because every mention is a link, Mara's note shows a backlink list at the bottom — every session and quest she appears in, maintained for free.

Where it breaks: around thirty NPCs. Search still finds a name you remember; it cannot answer "who is in Oakhaven that the party has met and is still alive". For that, the notes need fields.

2Properties and tags: make them filterable

Add a frontmatter block. Obsidian shows these as properties and — the part that matters — Dataview can query them later.

---
type: npc
race: Half-elf
role: Fence
location: Oakhaven
faction: The Quiet Hand
status: alive
met: true
campaign: The Missing Caravan
tags: npc
---

Six fields, fifteen seconds. The rules that keep it working:

• Identical field names on every NPC. location everywhere — not place on some notes. A mismatched name is an invisible NPC.
• Values match note titles. location: Oakhaven when the note is called Oakhaven, so you can group and link on it.
• status is worth it. alive / dead / missing. You will forget who died, and the party will not.
• met: true is the sleeper field. It separates "NPCs that exist" from "NPCs the party can plausibly recognise" — which is the one distinction that gets embarrassing at the table.

With this in place, the sidebar search already does real work: tag:#npc "Oakhaven", or in the properties view, filter by faction.

3The NPC dashboard with Dataview

Install it once: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → "Dataview" → Install → Enable. Then make a note called NPC Tracker in 07-DM-Tools and paste the blocks you want. They re-run every time you open the note, so the tables are never out of date.

Every NPC, sorted by where they are

```dataview
TABLE race, role, location, faction, status
FROM "02-Characters"
WHERE type = "npc"
SORT location ASC, file.name ASC
```

Only the ones the party has actually met

```dataview
TABLE role, location, faction
FROM "02-Characters"
WHERE type = "npc" AND met = true AND status = "alive"
SORT file.name ASC
```

Grouped by faction — who works for whom

```dataview
TABLE rows.file.link AS "Members", rows.role AS "Roles"
FROM "02-Characters"
WHERE type = "npc" AND faction
GROUP BY faction
SORT faction ASC
```

The one that pays for itself: NPCs on a location note

Paste this into Oakhaven's note. Now the town note lists its own residents, and you never maintain that list — it builds itself as you write NPCs.

## Who is here
```dataview
TABLE role, faction, status
FROM "02-Characters"
WHERE type = "npc" AND location = this.file.name
SORT file.name ASC
```

this.file.name means the same block works unchanged on every location note. Put it in your location template once and every town you ever create has a resident list.

Loose ends: NPCs you created and never used again

```dataview
TABLE location, role, file.mtime AS "Last touched"
FROM "02-Characters"
WHERE type = "npc" AND status = "alive"
SORT file.mtime ASC
LIMIT 10
```

The ten NPCs you have not thought about in the longest time. Half of next session's plot is in that table — a forgotten NPC with an unresolved motive is a plot hook you already wrote.

Everyone who appears in a specific quest or session

```dataview
LIST
FROM [[The Missing Caravan]]
WHERE type = "npc"
```

FROM [[Note]] means "notes that link to this one", so this finds every NPC whose note mentions the quest. Drop it on the quest note itself with FROM [[]] — the empty link means "this note".

A headcount for the top of the dashboard

```dataview
TABLE length(rows) AS "Count"
FROM "02-Characters"
WHERE type = "npc"
GROUP BY status
```

Three rows — alive, dead, missing — and a number next to each. If you have Dataview's JavaScript queries enabled, the same figure inline reads $= dv.pages('"02-Characters"').where(p => p.status == "alive").length, which is handy in a sentence but needs that setting turned on.

Keeping it fed without it becoming a chore

The tracker is only as good as the ten minutes after each session. The routine that works: during play, scribble names into your session note — no fields, no formatting. Afterwards, each new name becomes a note, gets its six fields, and gets linked from the recap. Three minutes for three new NPCs.

If that sounds like discipline you do not have, automate the typing instead: a Templater template means a new NPC is "new note → name → hotkey → fill three fields". The full campaign setup guide has that template, and the rest of the structure these queries assume.

Questions DMs actually ask