An Obsidian or Notion alternative for D&D campaigns you actually record

The numbers, with sources

What each is actually good at

Obsidian is local-first Markdown. Your campaign is a folder of text files on your own disk, it works offline, and it is free — including for commercial use, which changed and is worth knowing if you assumed otherwise. The plugin ecosystem is large and several plugins are aimed squarely at tabletop games. Nothing here is a compromise.

Notion is the opposite trade: cloud, real-time multiplayer, and a database model that makes a linked NPC table genuinely pleasant to build. If your table shares notes and edits them together during a session, Notion does something Obsidian does not — Obsidian has no real-time collaborative editing, and every collaborator needs their own Sync subscription to share a vault at all.

Where both stop

Neither converts a recording into notes. Obsidian will record audio into a note and leave it there as an audio file. Notion has AI meeting notes, but they are on the Business plan and designed for a meeting, not for four hours of six people talking over dice with invented proper nouns throughout.

So the workflow ends the same way in both: you still sit down afterwards and type up what happened. The tool is a nicer place to put the notes, not a way to not write them.

There is also a practical snag with Notion’s free plan if you were thinking of storing session audio in it — uploads are capped at 5 MB per file, and a session recording is orders of magnitude larger than that.

The name problem, specifically

If you do wire up your own transcription in front of Obsidian — Whisper locally, say — the thing you will hit is fantasy proper nouns. A general transcription model has never seen your NPC names and will render them differently every session, so the same character ends up under several spellings and the notes stop being searchable.

That is the specific gap DM Scribe closes: the transcription is primed with your own campaign’s glossary, characters and recorded nicknames before it starts, so the names come back consistent. It is also why a general-purpose transcription tool bolted onto a general-purpose notes app tends to disappoint on exactly this workflow.

Keeping them is a legitimate plan

If your prep lives in Obsidian or Notion and you like it there, you do not have to move it. Transcripts and recaps export as plain text, and on the Guild Master plan you can go the other way — bring transcripts you already have and let the AI chain build the campaign structure from them without spending transcription hours.