4. Ode to Obsidian, the notetaking wonder

 

Fig. 1 The graph view of every single note I have in Obsidian

Oh Obsidian, how I love thee. The image above (Fig. 1) is a graphical display of what I have poured into it. Each node is a note. Each line a connection to another note. It is, in a nutshell, a writing app that allows you to link your notes together. I have used it to connect all my NPCs, campaign status documents (Thank you Justin Alexander), locations, items, creatures, player characters, and lightbulb ideas together in a way that is incredibly chaotic but immediately accessible and searchable. I think there are platforms out there that are built for just the purpose of managing a campaign but I don't think they are as freeform and I haven't tried them. With Obsidian, you can link a note about a particular creature to the day in your life you found it, the TTRPG book you found it in, and the movie that gave you the inspiration for its new abilities all in one go. Opening one of these notes will reveal its connection to the other notes along with any additional connections you have made. You can see an example of this in the figure below, where the bottom of the campaign document I made shows that it  is connected to some day notes, the book note it was mentioned in (we need to talk about Break!! at some point), a Hex map of content, and a friend note (Fig 2.). 

Fig 2. A few of the notes that a connected to the current open  note which is highlighted in yellow. Each header indicates a separate note, and below each header is the snapshot in which the open note is mentioned. You can also connections to some other notes, which are the names in double brackets. The context for the links is something you turn on in the backlinks core plugin.

What is special about the linking system is that it helps with notes being written down and disappearing into the void. The more links you make with a note, the more likely it is to resurface. You might forget that you made a NPC that lives in a particular town and has access to a specific service, until you pull up that location or service note as the player characters arrive there 10 sessions after the NPC was created. I find that stuff like this happens all the time, as long as you are in the habit of checking your links at the bottom when you open a note, or taking a glance at the local graph (Fig 3).

Fig 3. The local graph only shows connections to  the open note vs the mess in fig. 1. You can find it by right clicking on the tab at the top for that note

There are some other notable advantages which I believe make it special. You can open any note in your vault (your collection of notes) within seconds using the quick switcher which you can tie to a hotkey. You can do a global search through the contents of all of your notes to find whatever it is you are looking for which is also very fast, even when you have hundreds of notes. Also the notes are stored offline locally on your computer as text files, making them more futureproof than something stored on the web or in a unique format that may lose support. Being able to use the program offline is also very nice when that situation comes up (Internet goes out etc.). There are many options out there for syncing your notes between devices, which I won't get into here. 

One of my absolutely favorite things is how customizable it is. There are a lot things you can tweak to your liking in stock obsidian like appearance and hotkeys, but the magic happens when you use the community plugins. If the program isn't doing something you would like it to, there is more often than not a plugin which has the fix or the feature you are looking for, and you can install them directly from the app (Fig. 4) . There are some that are TTRPG specific too, but I don't really use those as they are more 5e focused. My favorite plugins have added kanban boards (Kanban), functional drawings that you can link to specific notes (Excalidraw, which is great for maps), tables that automatically add entries if they contain certain information (Data view), and customizable templates that can auto populate information that you enter frequently (Templates, which is native, or Templater).

Fig 4. A few of the many community plugins available for Obsidian

It is little intimidating when you first start it up. There is no structure because it doesn't exist yet. You get to shape it into exactly how you think. I recommend starting with something like post-session notes, where you can start to link information regarding NPCs, player characters, locales and whatever comes to mind as you write. All you have to do is put double brackets around the thing you want to link and it becomes a new note the next time you click on it (Fig 5.). As soon as you put the double brackets down the next time you want to mention that thing, it will be a note you can select from list (Fig. 6). Not that bad right? From there you can start to figure out how you want to organize things, if at all. I used to shove things in a lot of folders and now I mostly just use the quick switcher and search tools to pull out what I need. The links will lead me to other things of interest by themselves.

Fig 5. Here I am making links to things that will become notes. They stay dark when they are not a 

note yet, and will be bright like in Fig. 6 when their note has been created, like when you click on it

Fig. 6. As soon as I type in the double brackets, I will get options for notes I can insert in that location.

Also if you ever edit the title of a note you have open, it will update the name across all your links!

Those gifs are little distracting aren't they? I'm glad they seem to work at least...Anyway, I didn't really intend for this to be part tutorial, but I wanted to make sure that anyone reading this would be armed with a couple of tools to look at if they were to open the application. I used to use applications like OneNote and Notion, which are great, but Obsidian has really become something like a second brain for me. I don't just stuff TTRPG notes in there because it is a powerful tool to remember pretty much any little tidbit of information and have it resurface to your delight later. I like that using it is an iterative process where you can always find something to adjust and improve over time, which scratches that tinkering itch. I do want to say that I  don't think there is a right or wrong way to use obsidian. I think it is a strength of the platform that it can be whatever you need it to be, like the Room of Requirement in Harry potter but for writing.