Top Tools for Exporting D&D Campaigns to GML Game Masters (GMs) investing countless hours into world-building often want to preserve their campaigns. Exporting Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) campaigns to Game Markup Language (GML) allows you to archive adventures in a highly structured, machine-readable format. This open standard makes your maps, non-player characters (NPCs), and encounter data portable across various software platforms and custom databases.
Here are the top tools available for converting and exporting your D&D campaign data into GML. 1. World Anvil (with API Exporters)
World Anvil is a premier world-building platform for tabletop RPGs. While it natively organizes your lore into articles, timelines, and interactive maps, its robust developer API allows users to extract this data cleanly. By utilizing community-made scripts or custom API integrations, GMs can parse World Anvil’s JSON outputs and convert them directly into GML node networks. This is ideal for visualizing the complex relationships between your campaign’s factions, historical events, and geographical locations. 2. Fantasy Grounds Unity (FGU) Data Extractors
Fantasy Grounds Unity stores campaign data—including items, story entries, and NPC sheets—in structured XML files within its local directories. Because GML and XML share hierarchical similarities, specialized parsing tools and Python scripts developed by the tabletop community can easily translate FGU campaign folders into GML graphs. This method ensures that your tactical encounter data and mechanical statistics remain intact during the export process. 3. Obsidian.md (with Graph Analysis Plugins)
Obsidian has become a favorite notebook tool for GMs due to its markdown-based system and local file storage. By using plugins like Dataview and Graph Analysis, you can treat your campaign notes as a web of interconnected data. Several open-source community scripts allow Obsidian users to export their entire vault’s interactive graph view directly into GML format. This perfectly captures how your locations, NPCs, and plot hooks link together. 4. Foundry Virtual Tabletop (FVTT) Export Modules
Foundry VTT relies on a modern JavaScript and database architecture, making it incredibly flexible for data extraction. The developer community has built specific export modules designed to packages scenes, actors, and journal entries. By leveraging these modules alongside data transformation tools, you can convert Foundry’s native compendiums into GML files, allowing you to map out your campaign’s dungeons and narrative structures in external software. 5. Custom Python Parser Scripts
For GMs who use a mix of digital tools, a custom Python script using libraries like NetworkX or BeautifulSoup is often the most powerful solution. You can feed exported JSON, XML, or Markdown text files from almost any Virtual Tabletop (VTT) into a script that organizes the information. The script can then automatically format the data into a standard .gml file, giving you total control over how your characters, items, and map nodes are categorized. To help me tailor this article further, let me know:
What Virtual Tabletop (VTT) or digital notebook do you currently use for your campaign?
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