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ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Obsidian (not to be confused with Obsidian Portal) is a freemium knowledge base utility that some people have adopted for campaign management:
Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
https://obsidian.md/

Joshua Plunkett, previously a well-known Realm Works advocate, has even set up a Patreon for this purpose:
I'm a passionate member of the online TTRPG community delivering 'How To' videos that help new users get up and running with various tools. My focus is digital tools, primarily 'Campaign Management' software.
https://www.patreon.com/JPlunkett

I'm not familiar with this tool, but there already are some references to it on this forum. There may be some lessons to be learned here, like what kind of templates have been created for managing TTRPG campaigns.
 
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JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Cool app, looking at the screenshots!

@JochenL I like the side nav. We've chatted about similar before. The tree / hierchical notes reference in side bar is always a fave of mine.

I also like the # section below in the side bar. Great for tag nav.
 
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ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
I am just testing out this software, and it does not seem to excel at quick note taking like CL does, but it works very nicely as a locally stored reference database. I'd say it's definitely worth studying when thinking about issues like the user interface and accessing archived data.

In preferences, you can set the default mode to be either editing or browsing, which is a nice touch IMHO.
 

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
I like that concept of browse vs. edit!

We've been thinking of prep and GMing as two different modes. Perhaps they map to edit vs. browse a bit.
 

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Designers at the day job use XD. @JochenL do you have a team Adobe subscription? I cancelled mine because I wasn't getting enough use out of it.
 

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
You should look at Adobe Rush after working with OBS. Put in zing when desired.
 

knoppi

Well-known member
Platinum WoA
Gold WoA
Wizard of Story
Borderland Explorer
Hey, I use obsidian quite a lot in my preparations. I have two lists of YAML files with PCs and NPCs, a Python script is creating markdown documents out of this structured information. And the result is imported in Obsidian.

With that I can query connections between NPCs, see who participated in the same sessions (it's a West Marches Style campaign with varying groups). It has its limits but the graph-display is quite nice. And it led to some improvements. In the screenshot you can see how islands are forming. Green dots are NPCs, blue ones the players. Unfortunately, I cannot visualize the kind of relationship. The pentagon cluster at the left for instace is a group of aliens. Jordan killed two of them, Nyree healed the third one and questioned him.

Screenshot_20211208_123812.png
 

ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
I have been further toying with Obsidian and there are some quite amazing plugins available, some of them specifically for TTRPG use (things like a dice roller, an initiative tracker, a customizable fantasy calendar, and functionality for outputting random list entries from notes in the database.

Also, the main software and the plugins are open source projects, which makes them even more interesting.
 

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer

Sklore_jp

Member
Hey there ,

I'm Josh P #waves.

So much has happened since Dec21 in the Obsidian.md space. I saw a good tool back then but these days I consider Obsidian to be leaps and bounds ahead of everything else on the market.

It provides everything the average user needs to manage a lot of information in many different ways. The ttrpg plugins are fantastic and turn it from a Campaign Manager into a full blown dm tool. I run all combat from Obsidian . The dataview and database folder plugins though... they are insanely powerful.

The only thing I think that needs to change is it needs more ttrpg developers. There's too many people trying to make their own perfect tool. I dream of a world where we leave the tool development to the full time dev team and focus the community developers on making more ttrpg plugins. Imagine the possibilities!

If anyone hasn't see this tool being uses as a DM Tool yet check then you should CHECK THIS OUT because its incredibly powerful and yell out if you have any questions.

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