How I Built a Worldbuilding System in Notion for D&D

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What Are You Talking About?

Okay, there's a good chance depending on how you came upon this post that you haven't heard of one of two things in the title. Notion or worldbuilding. I'll do my best to link to lots of resources for both throughout. If you haven't heard of either, I don't know how you got here, but feel free to join us.

What’s Notion?

If you've never heard of Notion, the easiest way to describe it would be a versatile digital workspace that combines note-taking, task management, databases, and wikis into one flexible platform. To be honest that answer is a bit of a cop out. These are just examples of what Notion can be used for, but you can create an awful more with it.

As Notion and productivity expert, August Bradley put it:

It's a software development platform usable by anyone, regardless of coding skills. It's a platform that lets you build your own personalized software tools. It is the democratization of software development, which is truly extraordinary.

Okay, maybe that delved a little deeper that we needed to for an introduction:

Think of it like a digital notebook that can be anything you need it to be. You can treat it as a blank word document and just start writing. You can also build a complex project management system on top of it. You can have both. As you get more comfortable, you can gradually explore its more powerful features like databases, templates and automations.

I have a lot of other posts that explore using Notion to implement different systems and the power of joining them all together. If you're interested; Building a Personal Knowledge Management System is a good place to start because it uses the same premise and structure as my worldbuilding system. For a broader look at building interconnected systems in Notion, the System Blueprint is also a great resource.

What’s worldbuilding?

It's probably exactly what you think it is, but if it's an unfamiliar term; worldbuilding is the creative process of constructing an imaginary world or universe with its own unique characteristics, rules, and internal logic. It typically involves developing everything from geography and climate, cultures and political systems all the way to histories and languages. It's pretty commonly uses for fantasy and science fiction writing, video game development and TTRPGS (Table Top Role Playing Games). The latter is primarily what I use it for. The end goal is to create a rich, consistent, and immersive setting that can serve as a foundation for stories and adventures within that universe.

Should I use Notion for Worldbuilding?

If you've got this far down without clicking away, then maybe. Notion’s free plan is pretty generous, with only a couple of features, like AI and advanced automations, behind a paywall. It also syncs across your devices.

Are there other alternatives?

Absolutely. Notion's a blank canvas, it's not geared towards any one purpose, especially not fantasy worldbuilding. There's a lot of tools out there dedicated to that come with rich functionality built specifically for worldbuilding and TTRPGs. A lot of them seem really useful. They also generally come at a cost, and often a recurring cost.

Ultimately, I chose Notion because it was free (though I am a paid user now, for the automations mostly). I was already very familiar with the tool, knew it's capabilities and knew I could make a pretty powerful system that would serve my needs. That's my bias, as well as the fact that I have a template of this system available for purchase. (There's a free encounter manager too).

However, if I was starting completely from scratch, and had no experience with Notion I would have given some very serious consideration to another free tool; Obsidian .

Without going into a whole comparison. Obsidian is also a note taking tool, that starts you out with a blank canvas. Where Notion is more structures around databases, Obsidian has a folder structure and a very cool looking graph view that works around backlinks. It also has a lot of community plugins, many of which are made for TTRPGs specifically. It also works primarily offline with some limited publishing/sharing options Notion is at the opposite end. Everything is online with some (new) offline functionality.

Okay, so how do you use Notion for worldbuilding?

So I began building the system as someone playing in a D&D campaign. I built a database for Notes, Characters, Locations, Factions, Threads (quests/missions/mysteries to follow) and game sessions.

I'll explain how this system has evolved over time starting from a very simple to more involved system.

In the beginning, I took longform notes within my game session page and used page mentions to reference characters, locations etc. from different databases. This created a backlink between the game session page and the character page.

I improved on this by adding my notes to a notes database and creating relations between a note and the relevant characters, factions etc. This way whenever I clicked on the character's page I would see a linked view with all the notes I had taken on that character across every session.

To make this much easier to manage, I built an automation that mapped the page mentions in the note to a relation property on the database. This meant I never had to break my flow of writing, and I could let the automation handle the relationship.

I went into more detail on how I built this automation in my post here: Building a Notion Mentions > Relation Automation.

As a Game Master (GM) I've added additional databases to track Campaigns, Adventures quest hooks and clues. For some context, I'm a brand new GM. I've run a one-shot in the campaign I'm a current player in and loved it. I'm now worldbuilding for a new campaign in a new setting. I also built some databases for Encounters and Stat Blocks to track combat encounters, which I've packaged up as the D&D Encounter Manager. This has turned it a pretty powerful tool, it can track initiative, show you all the stat block info you need and gives you useful reminders like condition effects. It relies heavily on Notion AI to do some of the heavy lifting but it can but it can be used without AI, though the process is more manual. I wrote about the full build process for the Encounter Manager in more detail here: Building a Custom D&D Encounter Manager in Notion.

How I use Notion as a GM is mostly the same. It's the same system and functionality. Except I'm now using the character, location etc. pages to create more wiki style articles as well as session specific notes. This gives me a little more control over what I could share with the players. I could let them see the main 'article' content without showing them my session notes.

That's how it works, and it's been working great for building out a world and connecting its different elements. The template, the Worldbuilding Kit 1.0.0, is available to download below as well as a link to access the D&D Encounter Manager.

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