01 - Initial Setup

The Ironsworn/Starforged family of games all have some significant worldbuilding involved, and that can take up a lot of the time before your character starts your adventure.

For this reason, the books remind you that Prep is Play. That is, you're playing the game as soon as you engage with it, when you're starting to create the game world, when you're thinking of ideas and, in our case, when you're setting up Iron Vault and learning how to use it!

We hope you'll bring the Prep is Play spirit to seeing what Iron Vault can do and how it can help enrich your experience playing these wonderful games!

Being a plugin, Iron Vault requires that you first install Obsidian.md, a free note-taking tool that will help you organize your campaign in just about any way you'd like!

To begin, you'll want to install Obsidian on your preferred platform/device.

Once that's done, you can create a vault for your campaign!

If you'd like, you can read through the rest of the Obsidian Getting Started Guide, but you should be able to get started with just those first two steps.

Once you've created your vault, you'll be greeted by a screen that looks a bit like this:

You can go ahead and close the graph tab, then right click (or long tap) on the "Welcome" note and delete it.

The easiest way to install Iron Vault is to install it directly from the Community Plugins registry in Obsidian itself. Open Settings, then navigate to Community Plugins:

Then click "Browse" and search for "Iron Vault":

Finally, click "Install", and make sure to click "Enable" once the install is complete!

You should see an onboarding screen similar to this one:

Don't worry about it too much for now-- we'll address it in the next chapter.

Now we have an empty vault and the plugin installed, we're ready for adventure! Let's get started with 02 - Your First Campaign.