Fifth Edition Vault

Fifth Edition Vault is a community extension. It is not made, endorsed or supported by Atlas VTT or Atlas Online. Get support here.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8324a97e-545c-4f63-bbf2-92d500a11b08

An Obsidian plugin for the System Reference Document 5.2.1. It writes the SRD into your vault as linked notes, lets you browse them as catalogs and build characters from them, and rolls those characters into an Atlas VTT scene. Fifth edition compatible.

The rules notes are inside the plugin. You install them into your vault with one click, in the folders you choose. The plugin never contacts a server.

This is an early release for testing. Please report what you find.

Installing

You need Obsidian 1.11.4 or later on a computer (Windows, macOS or Linux). The plugin doesn't run on phones or tablets. To check your version, open Settings → General; if it's older, click Check for updates.

Fifth Edition Vault isn't in Obsidian's Community plugins browser yet. Until it is, install it with BRAT or from a GitHub release.

With BRAT (recommended)

BRAT installs plugins from GitHub and keeps them up to date.

1. In Obsidian, open Settings (the gear at the bottom left) and choose Community plugins. From Obsidian 1.15, Settings opens in a window of its own.
2. If you see Exit Restricted mode, click it. (Before Obsidian 1.15 the button was called Turn on community plugins.)
3. Click Browse, search for BRAT (by TfTHacker), then click Install and Enable. The plugin browser opens in a window of its own too; close it when you're done.
4. Open the command palette (Ctrl + P, or Cmd + P on a Mac), type BRAT add, and run BRAT: Plugins: Add a beta plugin for testing (with or without version).
5. Paste gabrielegarulli/fifth-edition-vault and click outside the box. The border turns green when BRAT has found it. Under Select a version, pick the newest version, leave Enable after installing the plugin ticked, and click Add plugin. (Add plugin stays greyed out until a version is picked.)
6. BRAT shows a notice when the plugin is installed. If Fifth Edition Vault isn't switched on in Settings → Community plugins, switch it on.

BRAT checks for new releases when Obsidian starts.

From a GitHub release

1. Open the latest release and download three files: main.js, manifest.json and styles.css.
2. In your vault folder, open the hidden .obsidian folder, then plugins (make it if it isn't there), and make a folder called exactly fifth-edition-vault.
   • Your computer hides names that start with a dot. Windows 11: File Explorer → View → Show → Hidden items. macOS: in Finder, press Cmd + Shift + . Linux: Ctrl + H in most file managers.
3. Put the three files in it. You should end up with .obsidian/plugins/fifth-edition-vault/main.js, with manifest.json and styles.css beside it.
4. In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins. If you see Exit Restricted mode (before Obsidian 1.15: Turn on community plugins), click it. Then click the circular-arrow icon to reload the list, and switch Fifth Edition Vault on.

To update, download the three files of the new release and replace the old ones, then restart Obsidian. Your settings are kept: they live in a data.json file beside them that a release never includes.

From Community plugins

Once the plugin is listed, search for Fifth Edition Vault in Settings → Community plugins → Browse, then install and enable it. This README will say so when it is.

First run: install the rules notes

Click the die icon in the ribbon on the left (hovering over it shows Open Fifth Edition Vault), or run Open Fifth Edition Vault from the command palette.

A new vault has no rules notes yet, so Home offers to install them. Click Install SRD 5.2.1 rules notes. It writes 1,441 notes and 12 Bases views into a folder called SRD 5.2.1, and every catalog fills. Nothing is downloaded: the notes are inside the plugin.

The same button is in Settings → Fifth Edition Vault → SRD 5.2.1 rules notes as Install / Update notes. Run it again after updating the plugin to get corrected notes.

Your edits are kept. Every note the plugin writes carries an export_hash property, a fingerprint of its text. When you install again, a note whose text you have changed is left exactly as it is, and so is any note of your own at the same path. Only notes you haven't touched are updated. Nothing is ever deleted.

Choosing where the notes go

Every kind of note can live where you like. Open Settings → Fifth Edition Vault → Note folders:

• Rules folder: the folder that holds all the rules, one folder per kind. Blank means SRD 5.2.1.
• Campaigns folder and Sessions folder: where campaign and session notes are read from and created.
• One folder at a time: give a single kind its own path, such as Compendium/Spells for spells. A folder set here is the only place that kind of note is read from.

Set the folders before installing the notes, and they are written straight there; each Bases view lists its own folder. Changing a folder later doesn't move any notes: move them yourself in Obsidian, which keeps the links working.

What it reads and writes

The catalogs are built from your notes, so the plugin lists the files in your vault and reads the properties of its Markdown notes through Obsidian's own index. It opens a note's text only when you open that entry, and it sends nothing anywhere: there's no network access at all.

It writes only when you ask it to:

• the rules notes and their Bases views, into the folders under Note folders, when you install or update them;
• a character's note, when you create, edit or level up a character;
• campaign and session notes, when you create them or play from them (the activity log, an encounter);
• its own settings, in .obsidian/plugins/fifth-edition-vault/data.json.

It never deletes a note.

Rolling dice in Atlas VTT

Rolls go through the Atlas VTT plugin when it is installed. It isn't included here, and nothing else is needed to read the catalogs or build a character.

Atlas VTT is a separate project with its own licence. This plugin contains none of its code and only calls it inside Obsidian. If a roll goes wrong, please report it here, not to Atlas VTT.

If something goes wrong

• The plugin isn't in the list, or there's no die icon. Check the folder is exactly .obsidian/plugins/fifth-edition-vault/ with main.js directly inside it. Then reload the list or restart Obsidian.
• "Failed to load plugin". Your Obsidian is older than 1.11.4. Update it.
• The catalogs are empty. The notes aren't installed, or aren't where the settings say. Check Settings → Fifth Edition Vault → Note folders, then run Install / Update notes.
• Anything else: open an issue and say what you did and what you saw. A screenshot helps.

Used an earlier download of this repository as a vault? That had the notes already in it, in the same SRD 5.2.1 folder the plugin installs into, so nothing needs to move. Running Install / Update notes brings unedited notes up to date and leaves edited ones alone.

What's in it

The notes, in the rules folder:

Each folder has a Bases view beside it (Spells.base, Bestiary.base, …) that lists only that folder's notes.

The notes are generated, not hand-written. Where the SRD renames an entry, the SRD's name is used (Arcane Hand, Handy Haversack, Instant Fortress).

The plugin never contacts a server. Everything it shows comes from the notes in your vault.

How close to the SRD it is

The text was generated from a third-party dataset, keeping only entries it marks as SRD 5.2, and then corrected against the SRD 5.2.1 PDF. On 2026-11-05 every sentence in the notes was compared with that PDF:

• About 94% of the 5,923 prose sentences match the SRD at 90% or better, and 97% of the stat block text does.
• The rest are mainly lines this project generates ("You gain a feature from your Fighter Subclass"), one note per variant of a single SRD table entry, or small rewordings.
• A few short sentences state an SRD rule in other words, mostly on ammunition and holy symbols.

So this is not a word-for-word copy of the SRD. If you need the exact text, use the SRD itself. If you find a passage that isn't in the SRD, please open an issue and it will be removed.

The tactical and referee guidance on condition pages is this project's own writing.

Building it yourself

npm ci
npx tsc --noEmit
npm run lint
npm run build       # → dist/main.js, dist/styles.css, dist/manifest.json
npm test
npm run preflight   # what Obsidian's plugin directory checks

The build packs the notes in SRD 5.2.1/ into dist/main.js. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how this repository is made.

Licenses

• The plugin is under the MIT License.
• The notes in SRD 5.2.1/, and the copies the plugin writes into your vault, are under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, as the SRD is. See third-party notices for the attribution and for the software the plugin bundles.

Attribution

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 ("SRD 5.2.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

The SRD's text has been changed here: it is split into one note per entry, formatted as Markdown with links and properties, and some entries are divided into variants.

This project is unofficial. It is not made, endorsed or supported by Wizards of the Coast, Atlas VTT or Atlas Online.

Atlas VTT and Atlas Online are product names of Fabian Urbanek. They appear here only to say what this plugin works with.