Tag Archives: Campaign Building

My Journey To Obsidian – RPG Vault Structure

Post 1Post 2Post 4 (Worldbuilding, Campaign & Session Prep) – Post 5 (Running Games)

This is post #3

This was to be the last of three posts, but it would be very long to do in one post, so I broke out the last half about worldbuilding with Obsidian for next time.

An RPG Vault should support Worldbuilding plus Planning and Preparation of Sessions and Adventures, and creation, editing, and finding the information input into Obsidian when it is needed.

My Campaign Vault

Coordination of Information

This is your method for storing your information and retrieving it when you need it. Are you a visual person who needs to see the information or can you just do a search? Or do you need a bit of both?

Will you use a folder structure plus tags, or only rely on tags?

Will you use a Kanban board, a homepage, or both?

Having a top level page or MoC (Map of Content) for your entire vault whether it is all of your RPG information, only your GM information, or only one world, one ends up with a lot of information in just a few sessions of play. Planning a method to organize it for growth and ease of use is beneficial. Also being flexible enough to modify your system as you learn what works best for you.

In my experience, I didn’t know what organizational method would work best for me until I jumped in and used it. Running things in the old days with pen, paper, and notebooks is different from using a computer. Obsidian is so flexible, that I’ve gone through multiple iterations to find what works best for me.

What I have settled on for me is a combination of folders and tags. I use both Kanban Boards and a Landing Page, AKA Home Page. The following headings are the types of things for which I have folders, and possibly tags.

My Home Page is a “master” MoC. It points to the Kanban Boards I use. I have one Kanban for my GM screen for use with play and another Kangan for Session Planning. Each folder has it’s own MoC that I link to from my Home Page, and/or one or both of my Kanban Boards.

My Campaign Home Page
In my Session Planning board I have the following lists:
  • Long Term
  • To Do
  • In Progress
  • Ready For Session
  • Past Session Planning.
My Planning Kanban (Slowly consolidating)

For my GM Screen I collect information that is most useful and needed at my fingertips. This includes such things as various random generators for NPC names, ship names, and random encounters. I have a page that is the Party Record that has each PC and which player they belong to in a table to see all their state, saving throws, and other quickly needed information at a glance. I have lists for combat, quick reference, NPCs, and magic items.

My GM Screen (Also Slowly Consolidating)

I have templates that help me create Session notes, NPCs, Places, Magic Items, Spells, Monsters, etc. I have found that I need more automation so I don’t have to do as much manual edits. I have a MoC of all Places, all Spells, all Magic Items, and all Sessions. After 129 sessions on Roll20 I have a HUGE number of files for my current campaign. It is an open-ended sandbox game, so while there was an initial big plot I set in motion, the party dealt with it, and now they’re going about doing their own thing and finding new challenges.

I created each of these MoCs manually so they are more difficult to update the longer they get. Switching this over to use Dataview queries will make updating these lists automatic.

I Use the Following Plugins with Obsidian:

  • Advanced Tables: I use a lot of tables, and its addition of the to my vault was a big help.
  • Admonition: I also like callouts and like how this plugin enhances them.
  • Advanced Tables: Improves working with Markdown tables.
  • Dataview: and the scripts from Nicole van der Hoeven help with automation and creating MoCs.
  • New Tab Page: For the tab functionality and Home Page.
  • Kanban: Allows setting up multiple Kanban boards. I use one for a GM screen and another for Campaign and Session planning.
  • Leaflet: For maps and map pins, although I haven’t done much with it.
  • QuickAdd: For automation when combined with Dataview and Templater.
  • Timelines: For making timelines.
  • Pandoc: For exporting to different file formats. I need to connect it to LaTex to get more power out of it.
  • Recent Files: is great for finding the most recent files I worked with. Especially before I implemented a Home Page or before I get it linked to at least one of my MoCs.
  • JSON/CSV Importer: To import information from CSV files or spreadsheets.
  • Buttons: Make buttons to run scripts.
  • Fantasy Calendar: Create a custom calendar or use an existing one. Add links to documents like session notes.

I am a fan of using header levels. Header levels let you collapse the text at that header level. With multiple headers of the same level I can collapse certain sections of my session notes. I do this when running games with the recap of last session, housekeeping, and last session’s XP so I can focus on the bits important for what’s going on in the moment. This will be covered in more detail in my final article.

As I do more with Obsidian and refine how I can get the most out of it for both preparation, planning, and running games I improve optimization for my use case. Using Obsidian at work gives ideas for improving how I use it for gaming and other personal projects and vice versa.

My Journey To Obsidian – World Building

In this series: Post 1Post 2Post 3 – Post 5 [In Process]

Check out my Worldbuilding Cheatsheet on Cheatography.

For worldbuilding, it should support both Top-Down and Bottom-Up worldbuilding. This does not need any specific structure or scripting, since out of the box, Obsidian lets you choose how you want to organize, whether by only files and tags, or with folders, or a combination.

It is possible for one Obsidian Vault to accommodate all of the following, but it’s practicality will depend on what types of information is shared between genres and rule systems.

Another practical example is Nicole van der Hoeven’s player notes and gm notes templates and javascript files. For me, it is less confusing to have a separate vault for GM duties and keep player efforts separate. If there were information to share between vaults, I would just copy the *.md files or copy & paste the data.

Josh Plunkett’s YouTube is dedicated to showing different ways to use Obsidian for RPGs.

Genre Specific

Any effort at worldbuilding should be planned to complement the genre selected, such as science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, intrigue, horror, apocalyptic, etc.

Many genres have sub-genres, and some genres are a combination of two genres, for example science fiction can have a horror element like Alien, and fantasy can be high or low in regards to magic.

Science Fiction might be wide open to explore multiple galaxies, solar systems, planets, times, dimensions, etc.

Fantasy could have similar variety, but the majority focus is usually on one world, and often only one continent on that world.

Genre is independent of system and one could run any genre with any ruleset, but most games were designed with a specific genre in mind.

Rule Specific

Once a GM has chosen the rules for the game/campaign they want to run it will determine how they organize things. While a player will have the choice of rule from the GM, unless the GM seeks player input or the player exercises their own agency to choose which ruleset(s) they wish to play.

Rules handle the situations one expects in play at the table. Exploration rules for a game with an exploration component, creatures in the bestiary, character generation, magic or mental powers, equipment, etc.

Rules have as much variety as genres. No ruleset covers everything, but those that try have multiple rulebooks and tend toward complexity. Some rulesets encourage GM rulings where there is no rule. Story type RPGs may have minimal rules and focus on the roleplaying amongst friends.

The rules one chooses will be guided by one’s preferences and the experience they seek with those at the table. Often the choice of rules is in favor of the game that was our first experience playing RPGs. It sets in our mind what an RPG is and for many, anything that falls outside that box isn’t desired. Others will play any game any time and have no preference for rules and just want to game with their friends.

What Do I Need To Prepare?

This all depends on your selected worldbuilding model, top-down or bottom-up, or a combination of the two.

Top-down worldbuilding in a fantasy campaign would decide what is the top element and drill down from there. For example, the world or planet and go down from there.

This also brings up how much of that world do you create? Do you deal with the origins and creation myth and the rise and fall of deities and civilizations? Or do you plan the world in media res with a moment in time and refer back to the past as it comes up in play?

Whichever end of the scale, or the middle, that you start with, what you end up with will be largely the same information.

World

What makes up your world?

How and when was it formed?

What sets your world apart?

How is is special?

Continents

Is there one big continent, like Pangea with scattered islands on the periphery, or multiple continents separated by varying distances from the others?

Or is your world a collection of scattered archipelagoes?

The way you choose to organize this leads to many variations you may not have considered.

Regions

How many regions will there be across a continent or archipelago?

Nations

How many nations are there currently?

How many nations have fallen into the past? This is usually the source of dungeons and tombs for exploration.

How many nations are in a region?

Settlements

These can be villages, towns, or cities.

Adventure Locations

These can be found in many varied places:

  • Tombs
  • Ruins
  • Dungeons
  • Caves & Caverns
  • Mines
  • Forests
  • Swamps
  • Wilderness
  • Etc.

Bestiary

What kinds of people and creatures populate your world?

Which are specific to certain regions, environments, or locations, and which are ubiquitous?

Will you only use creatures from official rules, or will you modify existing creatures, or make up your own?

Religion/Deities

What role will religion play in your world? Will places of worship be rare or common? Will there be any named deities, only one, or multiple pantheons with each nation or ancestry having its own?

NPCs

Who are the people the players’ characters will interact with? Townsfolk, merchants, minions of the chief evildoer, the chief evildoer, etc.?

Lore/History

How much detail will your world involve? If you decide to start with the top, how much is really needed to begin play? If you write a book will that vast amount of information be relevant to actual play at the table?

It is my experience that while worldbuilding in all its details is fun as a GM, all the time spent coming up with elaborate descriptions of the overall setting is not necessarily supportive of time around the table.

This can include calendars. What time keeping system is used in your world? Do all use the same calendar, or does each nation and ancestry have their own way of tracking time? This alone can be quite complex, especially if the year is different from our own, or your world has more or less moons than Earth.

Magic

High magic, low magic, or something in between?

Spells

Will you have any custom, AKA homebrew spells?

How will your player characters learn of them?

Will this be in a handout from the beginning, or only learned of through discovery in lost and forgotten tomes or hidden ancient scrolls?

Items

Similarly, will you have homebrew magic items. How will knowledge of them find its way to your players?

Information Tracking

How will the actions of the players be organized for keeping track of things?

What does one need to track?

In my experience, tracking what occurs in each session from the places visited, NPCs met, monsters dealt with, treasure gained, time tracking, and so forth are the points that are connected by the roleplay at the table. This interaction makes the game world come alive.

If the GM allows the players to change the world by either saving it or letting it burn, it has more verisimilitude.

Sessions

A folder for Sessions and a Template to create “buckets” to place session related information, plus link to other parts.

Dates

Some means of tracking your calendar and placing date specific entries that are tied to your calendar.

Will you track only the real world calendar and what happened each game day, or will you track the in-game dates, or both?

The Fantasy Calendar plugin can help with that.

Will you plan out certain events that will happen unless the party interacts with the time and place involved? Tracking when such things happen in the game world lets you know when to bring it up during play.

Places

Tracking where the players have been and plan to go helps the GM keep track of the situation between sessions.

Some places, like an adventure location, may have something of interest, be it a landmark, hidden entrance, special treasure, hints to other places, etc.

Weather

How will you generate each day’s weather for your game?

Sometimes the players will stay in one location for many days and you need several days worth of weather. Will you generate each day as it happens in game, or generate it ahead of time so minimize delays at the table?

Events

These can be weather, harvests, festivals, accidents, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, eclipses, comets, meteors, prophecies, etc.

This is another use of a calendar and the effects of those events are better planned in advance.

Putting It All Together

Once you have decided how you will approach each aspect of worldbuilding, you can build the structure to support it in your Obsidian vault.

Even if you use folders to subdivide things, a clear understanding of the tags you will use will help you find things without having to spend a lot of time.

Templates can be made for each relevant type of note you need, such as for Monsters, Spells, Gear, Magic Items, etc. Each template can be set with the tags relevant to that type of information.

To consolidate a large amount of notes into an index or MOC (Map Of Content) you can do it manually, or use the Dataview plugin. I prefer the Dataview plugin as it saves so much time getting information in one place.

The system you devise in Obsidian will lend itself to continued worldbuilding, session planning, notetaking about the session, and even running a game.

In the next article I explain how I use Obsidian to run games.

My Journey To Obsidian – Beginnings

In this series: Post 1Post 3Post 4 [currently in process] – Post 4 [currently in process]

This is the second of three five articles of my experience with Obsidian. I wrote this a couple of weeks after I started with Obsidian in December, 2021. The program has changed a LOT in almost a year. It went from beta to version 1.3 currently.

Since I wrote this a year ago you will see things I mention here that are no longer the same or no longer an issue. I have indicated these things in square brackets [ ]. What I want to draw your attention to is how easily I moved my existing data in text format into Obsidian*. This is the great power of such a tool that relies on plain text files. It is both easy to work with and easy to maintain your data.

* I had to get data out of other Apps to get it into text format to then put it into Obsidian.

Obsidian For RPG Campaign & Session Prep

Original Date Written: 2021/12/11

I switched to Obsidian about two weeks ago.

I love the idea of reducing all the different places I store information digitally.

Having multiple “silos” that don’t talk to each other and are not easily accessible to me if the service goes away, such as the end of a free version, or the total end of the service. The only limitation is now power and a working device.

Having it in a format I can read on any device is important. Markdown files are just plain text files that any text editor, like Notepad can edit.

If you are careful, you can even edit the files outside of Obsidian.
You can re-arrange folders and add or delete new files.

DO NOT do this while Obsidian is open, as that might cause a problem like data corruption.

Obsidian reads the data in the folder with the vault and will “re-build” it’s understanding of their relationships, such as links.

This is helpful if you just want to drop in a bunch of text files with the Markdown extension of *.md or image files or PDF files.

So instead of copying each note from Evernote and pasting into a new Obsidian Note, get Evernote exported to Markdown files and just copy them to the Obsidian Vault.

For Evernote export each folder one at a time – ugh! to its format, then import that format into Joplin. Joplin can then export each folder to Markdown files. Use the Markdown with Frontmatter option. [Fontmatter is important to help organize and search for information.]

Obsidian lets you right-click or drag and drop to move files between folders. If you do this in Obsidian, it will update it’s internal database and links, and append 1 to duplicate files.

Within the OS if you move a file, it won’t let you keep two files with the same name, and it won’t preserve any links in the file.

Obsidian has a merge feature, so if you have files with similar content, and perhaps one has a 1 at the end, you can merge. Right-Click the one you want at the bottom of the other note. Be careful, as there is no undoing that. Make a backup before starting and go back to that backup if you make a mistake.

If you have a lot of such files, I suggest using git or other versioning software to make large numbers of updates easily reversible without undoing the ones you want to keep.

Obsidian will not display files that are not PDFs or images or text files with the extension .md. It will let you know a folder isn’t empty if you try to delete it. Right-Click and then Left-Click “Show in System Explorer” and it will open a window with the contents of that folder.

EXIT Obsidian before doing anything with these files outside of Obsidian. You can then evaluate if you want to keep the files or not. If the files are text files and you want the information in Obsidian, just change their extension to .md. If you use Windows and have the default setting that hides extensions, go to the View menu of the Explorer Window and check “File Name Extensions.” Just in case, check “Hidden Items” to verify that you don’t have any files hidden from view.

– Once you have renamed, moved, or deleted files from this folder, re-start Obsidian. Then you can move the files that now show to empty the folder, then you can delete it within Obsidian without issue.

NOTE: When I did this, Obsidian did not open with the files I had open when I exited. I had a text file I changed to .md and I had an HTML file because I was testing a Pandoc conversion from .md to HTML. I don’t know if Obsidian’s internal database picked up those files and modifying them caused this, or what.

– This is when I found that the PIN option can have a keyboard shortcut set. The fewer mouse clicks for me the better!

A Checklist of My Initial Takeaways:

  • [ ] Go easy on the Folders in Obsidian. Less is more.
    • [ ] Obsidian only needs 3 folder: (You can call them whatever you want.)
    • [ ] Notes (The Root folder) – Any other folders would go here, but that just adds complexity, so give it some thought before adding them.
      – In my experience, adding a folder for all the information I have from Evernote lets me review each item and clean up its tags and formatting to match my other files.
      – Another option would be make a new Vault just for Markdown files imported from other software and use Obsidian to clean up that data before copying it to your main Obsidian Vault.
    • [ ] Attachments – Images, PDFs, etc.
    • [ ] Templates
    • [ ] Obsidian is designed to connect information through Tags and Links, and this eliminates the need for folders as organization, since you have multiple ways to find what you want.
    • [ ] I recommend only using folders for topics that have very little overlap with everything else.
      • Such As:
        • Separate Campaigns
          • Separate Games/Rules
          • Separate Projects
      • Some things may be so totally different that it is better to separate them into its own Vault. A good example would be for personal information, so that is separate from game/hobby, work, or other very specialized information.
        • How to link to an Obsidian Vault with a shortcut. It took me a bit to find the correct link and realize what process they meant to create the shortcut, as they did not use the same verbiage as on menus. [NOTE: You can also easily open and switch between vaults in Obsidian with the “Open another Vault” button in the lower left corner. It is the top of the three buttons. It allows switching between vaults and creating new vaults.]
        • Use the method of your OS for creating shortcuts.
          1. In MS-Windows it is Right_Click then Left-Click Create Shortcut.
          2. Type in the link to your Vault with the Obsidian filetype URL: obsidian://vault/VaultName
            1. The Vault name is the name of the Directory (Folder) that contains the .obsidian Directory (Folder).
          3. Give the shortcut a meaningful name, such as the name of the Vault.

Below are screenshots of the process in order:

You will end up with a shortcut like this:

If you Right-Click then Left-Click Properties, it will look like this:

  • [ ] Files and Folders sort alphabetically just like on your computer. Punctuation and Numbers come before letters. You can use this to force the folders for attachments and templates to the bottom so that they are out of sight, unless you need to look at them.
  • [ ] Customizable Keyboard Commands. Nearly everything has the ability to have a Key Combination.
    • [ ] Templates – Have to add it
    • [ ] Toggle Pin – Have to add it. (Keeps file open when open more files.)
  • [ ] Review Tags in the tag pane to eliminate invalid tags, such as if you use # as an abbreviation for Number. I had a tag S because I had #S, so I had to prefix with \ so that it was \#S so that in preview it looks like #S. This then removed the bogus tag from my tag list.
    • [ ] Group Tags. For example, RPGs, Campaign, Play, GM, Notes could all be tied to RPGs, so instead of separate tags, created separate RPG sub-tags (IF it works for you.):
      • [ ] #RPGs/Campaign #RPGs/Play #RPGs/GM #RPGs/Notes
        • [ ] This separates RPG Notes from general Notes. For personal notes in the same vault, you may want a more specific tag like:
          • [ ] #Notes/Personal #Notes/Finances #Notes/Car #Notes/House
      • [ ] Look out for similar or identical Acronyms. For example OBS is used for both OBS Studio and One Book Shelf, I can’t just use OBS as a tag, because in 6 months I won’t know which tag has the information I need.
      • [ ] I suggest a tag for each note indicating it’s source, such as:
        – Sticky Note (Physical or the M$ App)
        – Evernote or similar program
        – Text File
        – Index Card
        – Notebook
        – Loose Papers
        – etc.
        This will aid you in organizing and future proofing (AKA frustration proofing) your information.
  • [ ] Templates. There is no limit to how many you can have. I recommend naming them so that the one you use most is at the top. If you only have one template, the keyboard shortcut you set up will just load it. It is only when you have multiple templates that you have to pick one.
  • [ ] List of plugins and how they might apply
    – Better Word Count – Displays word count of the focused Note in the lower right of the Obsidian screen.
    – Calendar – This can be placed wherever works for you.
    – Periodic Notes – Same author as Calendar – Create notes for each day, week, month, and year. It is best to have a folder for these notes to keep separated from all others.
    – Kanban – Good for projects, can use to make a GM screen NOTE: if you pin a Kanban to keep open, then the links don’t work. Use the back button (is there a KB shortcut?)
    – Recent Files – If you want to go back to a file but don’t know its exact name.
    – Sliding Panes – If you want to squeeze in multiple open notes. NOTE: With Version 1.0 of Obsidian the general features of this plugin were added to Obsidian, so the plugin no longer works.
  • [ ] CTRL+E for toggling between edit and preview. Be careful as if you hit CTRL+W in error, it will close the pane with the focus. This is because Obsidian uses browser code for a base, and CTRL+W closes a tab, or closes the browser if there is only one tab open.
    • [ ] You can either change the toggle for going between edit and preview, or change the key combo for closing panes, or just don’t make mistakes 😉
  • [ ] Resizing and placing bits where you want them. Each pane can be dragged to place above, below or beside another. The possibilities are endless.
  • [ ] Linking panes for a two-pane view with one for edit and the other for live preview. Emulates WYSIWYG editors.
  • [ ] BACKUP plan!!! You need a plan to backup your notes and your settings, just in case.
    • [ ] Saving or syncing to DropBox or Google or M$ OneDrive is NOT a backup if it is your live data.
    • [ ] Regularly zip up the Vault directory and save it off, perhaps once a month and twice a year. Some use Git to hold it, then they have versioning.
      • [ ] You want a back up plan that isn’t hosed when the free service goes away, or the limit to free space shrinks, etc.
  • [ ] Phone app. I haven’t gotten my vault working for sharing with the app. {This is still on my list to figure out.]
    • [ ] I don’t really look up info on my phone when I used Joplin, I had it for Just in case.
    • [ ] I just use Google Keep for short notes that I can add later to my Obsidian Vault, then delete the note.
  • [ ] If you are a Realmworks user looking for how to preserve all your hard work, and still be able to use it, there is an export tool, and a series of YT videos by Josh Plunket for Realmworks users migrating to Obsidian.
    – The sound on a his early videos has some sort of background noise or artifact. He has lots of interesting information, even for those who don’t use Realmworks.
    – He also started a FB group for using Obsidian for RPG campaigns. It is focused on Realmworks users, but also has lots of questions and answers that you might find useful. [The focus has shifter from Realmworks to getting the most out of Obsidian for use in TTRPGs.]

Spellcheck Isn’t The Same As A Year Ago

[Spelling was crude back then, but now it works as you would expect. Obsidian now uses the Chrome spellcheck and additions to the dictionary are stored in the file “Custom Dictionary.txt.”

On a Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/Custom Dictionary.txt

On Windows: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\obsidian\Custom Dictionary.txt

I deleted all of my original notes from this article on the spellcheck feature as it no longer matters what the issues were. It works very well and as I expect it should.]

A quick note about text files.

I added this to help remove confusion about what a plain text file is. If you don’t need to know the difference for other reasons, you may not know this.

A plain text file is what I mean by text file. This is a file that one can open in Notepad or other TEXT editor and it is displayed normally. The extension of a file does not make it a text file, but the file FORMAT. This means that files with extensions such as CSV, HTML, CSS, MD, etc. can all be opened in a text editor and one can make sense of them.

RTF ( Rich Text Format) files are NOT plain text. The term RICH gives it away. Instead of wrapping text in symbols like two asterisks either side of a word it uses program code that the special format of the file and an editor like MS-Word or Libre Office or MS-Wordpad can read. Open an RTF file in Notepad and you will see characters that aren’t what you want.

Word Processors are NOT text editors. Yes, they can edit text files and save them in plain text format, but one usually doesn’t do that. Save a text file as a Word Document and then open it in Notepad and you’ll see all these funky control characters.

My Journey To Obsidian – Midpoint

In this series: Post 2Post 3Post 4 – Post 5 (Article In Process)

I started using Obsidian about a year ago. At first, I was interested in moving my data from other programs into a text format so they would be less likely to be lost to a vendor’s idea of what is “best” for my data.

I soon discovered it was a great tool for organizing and planning TTRPG campaigns and sessions.

This is the first of three articles about My Journey with Obsidian.

Past Tools

NoteTab Pro – This is a programmable tabbed text editor that works with text formats. It has it’s own scripting language called Clipcode, each “macro” is called a Clip. Clips are gathered in Clip Libraries. There are in an outline format that mirrors the outline format of its Outline file format. Outline files are text files with the *.OTL extension and header lines of code that indicate the start of each topic in the Outline. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s showing it’s age. I got started with it in the late 90’s. It really only highlights HTML, which makes it difficult for things to stand out.

I first used NoteTab to deal with text files at work and implemented it into my personal projects. I was so involved with beta testing that I got my name listed in the help file.

Evernote – I’ve used it since the free version had a lot of options, maybe even before it became a paid service. I kept general notes, things I thought of while away from my computer, my shopping list, etc.

Cherry Tree – A proprietary text outliner. I had different outlines for different things, like my AD&D campaign, and personal stuff.

Campaignwiki.org – I use it for my online campaign notes for my players. It is free, easy to get the data out, and my players can add to it. It supports Markdown. I have more than one campaign in it.

Joplin – I had found it a couple years ago and really liked it, but it was not as easy to use as I’d like. I put a lot of time into it. I mirrored my Campaignwiki in it, but the syntax was a bit different and it wasn’t as easy to add notes. It was dead simple to synchronize with the phone app and it is free.

OneNote – I’ve used it off and on for personal stuff, but don’t like that my information is stuck in it and copy and paste seems to be the only way to get it out. At my day job we’re a Microsoft Partner so it’s MS-Office and OneNote. I don’t like that the program is tied to the cloud and you have to login to OneDrive for it to work. It has limited utility offline.

Obsidian – I stumbled into Obsidian about a year ago in November, 2021. I dove right in and decided I liked it enough that I was soon looking to make a switch. I was motivated by a combination of frustration with Evernote and looking for a way to get my notes out. Joplin was another frustration, plus information in Cherry Tree, and elsewhere motivated me to simplify.

First I found that I could easily get information out of Cherry Tree and Joplin and get it into Obsidian. Exporting from Campaignwiki was also very simple to get working in Obsidian. Evernote was the big headache. I finally found a tool that let me import an Evernote export into Joplin.

Now I had my Evernote, Cherry Tree, and Joplin information in Obsidian, along with a copy of my Campaignwiki campaigns. No longer needing the other programs I uninstalled Evernote from my PC, cell, and deleted my account. I also uninstalls Joplin from my PC and cell, and also uninstalled Cherry Tree.

I still use NoteTab at home and work, but am slowly moving my data over to Obsidian. I keep working to build a set of Clips in NoteTab to help get my data into a format I’m happy with into Obsidian to minimize further editing. The ease of programming Clips to do what I want has made it difficult to move to something else. While Obsidian can’t do all the things NoteTab can do, Obsidian can display data close to that way plus even more. The various Obsidian plugins add so many options.

The one thing I have yet to crack is a way to get my OneNote out in a bulk method. I haven’t looked in the past year to see if perhaps there is a tool, but I hope to find one when I am ready to get that information.

My Obsidian Experience

On discovering Obsidian it was in reference to the Zettelkasten concept. It’s an idea I liked and the tool is awesome!

I had my information for my AD&D campaign organized into folders and made use of tags. I discovered the Kanban plugin and used it for my GM screen and my Campaign & Session Planning. I used the Stacked Tabs plugin and Pinned notes along with the Recent Files template to keep track of information. Someone I know online mentioned they used Obsidian for RPGs and did a couple videos on it. I thought to do some, but then I stumbled upon Josh Plunkett’s Obsidian videos. I took a bit of what he mentioned in his early videos, but soon was doing my own thing.

The way I was using things was NOT optimal. When I ran my Roll20 games on Sunday, I had Discord on my second monitor (we use voice and chat only, no video), Roll20 in my browser, NoteTab open with a list of weather, my AD&D PDFs open, and Obsidian open and frantically jumping around trying to find information that I knew was in there.

Over the summer I was on hiatus for my Sunday game as I travelled around the Western United States. I did keep playing in a Wednesday night Roll20 game and I used Obsidian to take notes. As a player I have a similar setup, Discord on my second screen, and Roll20 and Obsidian on my main screen. It was much less hectic, but still sometimes things got lost. During the Summer, I had my laptop with a single screen and I made it work.

I was plugging away with the usual workflow when suddenly one day, “BAM!” the Obsidian 1.0 update appeared and broke my workflow. I tended to have a LOT of tabs open in my GM vault and with so many, I couldn’t get them to display so I could read them.

I was NOT happy. I ended up closing all my tabs and getting a new workflow figured out, after ranting about it on the Obsidian TTRPG discord and the Obsidian Forums. I slowly started figuring out how to get a new workflow back. I re-watched a few of Josh Plunkett’s older videos and many of his newer ones. I also came across Nicole van der Hoeven’s videos and between the two of them and the Plugins they demonstrated and Nicole’s cool scripts she showed, I soon had a much improved RPG workflow.

I’m Glad That Obsidian 1.0 broke My Workflow

I still use Kanban boards or a GM screen and campaign and session planning, but I’ve added the homepage option of the Default New Tab Plugin. There are a long list of plugins that I use.

My Plugins:

  • Kanban
  • Default New Tab Plugin
  • Recent Files
  • Advanced Tables
  • Leaflet
  • Admonition
  • JSON/CSV Importer
  • Templater
  • Dataview
  • Quickadd
  • Buttons

There are also the plugins for TTRPG Statblocks, monsters, and the dice roller. At the moment, I’m not using them for more than seeing what they do.

The biggest new additions are Templater, Dataview, and the JSON/CSV Importer. I was able to get the information from the PDF of the AD&D Monster Manual into a CSV that I was able to import into my Obsidian RPG vault. I also figured out how to do the same with the Cleric Spells from the Players Handbook after I had already gotten all (All levels for Cleric, Druid, Magic-User, and Illusionist) of them in by hand.

I did use NoteTab to make a clip to format the text of each spell I copied and then copy it to Obsidian. The problem is, I didn't make some tags that I should have as I went, so I couldn't do some of the things I knew I could do with Dataview. So I'm still using NoteTab, but more for its ability to manipulate text than to store information.

My Takeaways Using Obsidian

  1. Organization is key. This is true for TTRPGs as well as personal and work projects. PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) is all about capturing information and being able to find it when you want it. Understanding the ability to use folders which other applications have ingrained in us and can be used just fine in Obsidian, but the true power comes with having a good understanding of tags and how they can help you find your information later. A poor implementation of tags shows its weakness when you can’t do fancy manipulations with the Dataview plugin.
    1. Frontmatter matters. Having a solid plan and structure to the frontmatter of our files includes a consistent use of tags. Having those things in place makes finding and manipulating the information into useful formats so much easier. This gives Dataview even more power with a well thought out structure for tags and frontmatter.
  2. Limit the number of vaults. Too many vaults become cumbersome and every time there is a plugin update you have to update all the plugins. Granted, you don’t have to do it right away, but to avoid things breaking you need to remember to update themes and plugins if you haven’t used a particular vault for awhile. The key is to split out information so different you wouldn’t want it mixed, such as your work and your campaign if you used one computer for work and personal. For personal, multiple campaigns in one vault may not make sense, or be confusing. Also personal projects like a personal journal or a hobby like genealogy may not be conducive to good work. A demo vault to try things out is a good idea to avoid breaking things in your active vaults.
    1. Related to this is don’t try to put too many projects in to vaults until you know what you need out of Obsidian to make it do what you want. Part of this is exporting the data from old tools with helpful tags to minimize additional editing once you have it in Obsidian.
    2. I have information in multiple vaults that makes sense to only have in one vault. This leads to know being able to find something as I can’t recall which vault it is in.
  3. Don’t be afraid to start over. After seeing the possibilities after revising my Obsidian workflow and organization, I am also inspired by watching videos of how others are handling things in their own TTRPG, work, and personal vaults. I am working on an article to help me clarify my thoughts on RPG Vault Structure. So far, it is just me writing out my thoughts, roughly organized. It looks at how the vault structure chosen should work whether one does Top-Down or Bottom-Up worldbuilding. It’ from the perspective of if I made a new campaign, what vault structure would I want or need based on my years of playing RPGs and my experience and new learnings with Obsidian. I hope to share this along with the final version of my Worldbuilding Cheatsheet on Cheatography.
  4. Find a good text editor that can help you with editing the files in your vault(s) if you need to make mass edits. I can do this with NoteTab, but it requires a few more steps do do a mass search and replace on all the files in a directory.
    1. I’ve worked with Vim and Gvim over the years, but their power is also several more steps to access.
    2. I downloaded Atom from Github last year, and finally put it through its paces recently. It can open an entire directory of text files as a “project” and do a search across all files and find something with amazing speed. Similarly one can do a replace across many files.
      This suggests mass editing tags and other parts of frontmatter.
  5. Automation prevents typos and other data storage blunders. Nicole van der Hoeven has demonstrated the power of the Dataview plugin combined with a few javascripts to autoupdate filenames and headers and get notes into the appropriate folder with Templater and Quickadd.
  6. There are so many options with Obsidian, it is best to start small and figure out what you can do with Obsidian. Learn Markdown if you don’t know it, figure out Obsidian options and watch YouTube videos to see what others are doing. Build a demo vault to play with so you don’t mess with any of your data.
  7. Backup. As always it doesn’t matter what your system is, if you don’t have a way to recover when your computer or hard drive fails, you will have much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
  8. Syncing data between my computer and phone is one thing I haven’t cracked for Obsidian. I haven’t tried again since I did about a year ago. I’m also considering syncing one or more of by vaults with Github. I can keep GM notes in a private vault, but how to separate GM from Player visible notes?
  9. It is easy to get data in and out of Obsidian. Getting data into Obsidian is as easy as copying text files into a folder and renaming the .txt extension to .md. It is recommended that you have some frontmatter to track what system/program the data came from, and other helpful front matter and tags for ease of use going forward.
    Similarly, one can copy or even delete files from an Obsidian vault (folder). However, one should not do that when Obsidian is running on the vault you are moving or deleting files through the OS rather than with Obsidian features.
Definitions:
AD&D - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
D&D - Dungeons & Dragons
Frontmatter - Text at the beginning of a Markdown file that is used to define certain parameters of the file. It is places between a row of three dashes before and after.
RPG - Role Playing Game
TTRPG - Table Top Role Playing Game (To distinguish from computer RPGs, even though pen & paper, AKA Table Top RPGs came first.)
CSV - Comma Separated Value file
JSON - JavaScript Object Notation a data format in text files.

NOTE: I wrote this blogpost in Obsidian and it took very little editing to get it onto my website.

Some links in this post contain Affiliate Links.

Levels For Terrain

Edward Kann posted a map of an area in his Blueholme game he started with his sons. (Check out his G+ profile, he has some serious talent for maps and adventure design.) He has mapped the contents of a 20 mile hex using graph paper for the scale of 1 square per mile. One can debate the changing of scale for accuracy between hexes and squares ad nauseum. Forget that noise. The cool thing is the map key has a section for a TERRAIN KEY with LEVELS for each type of terrain.

Edward Kann's map of the contents of a 20 mile hex at 1 mile per square.
Edward Kann’s map of the contents of a 20 mile hex at 1 mile per square.

My Plan For This.

I like this idea for levels for terrain. I’ll modify that for my own use with a keep, town, or city within so many miles. Say a keep with a 20 mile radius zone of control would negate bad/evil/monstrous encounters. (This is basically the West Marches approach.)

However, wild animals would always be a possibility. Sick or wounded animals would be more likely to attack. Males of most species in mating season would be more likely to attack. Mothers protecting young would be more likely to attack. So lack of monsters does not mean “no danger.”

The deep forest being 3rd level is cool. I’ll add a dark wood more focused on the bad things in the forest. That is, a dark wood would have an encounter table focused on the bad/evil creatures found in forests.

For my purposes, I want a variation for the farms/structures. Have a special set of tables to determine if it is a farm or other structures, their condition – ruins, burnt out/smoldering, etc. And finally if occupied by farmers or otherwise the “correct” occupants or “something else.” Something else could be a hungry monster, goblin raiding party, house or barn fire, etc.  A large animal in mating season being belligerent, whether a wild animal or the bull got loose.

This is what I love about the OSR and sharing RPG ideas for any game online. All the different people with their unique take on how they do things spark ideas for how I can use and modify their ideas for my own use.

Quick NPC Ideas

If you need an NPC quickly here are a couple of ideas.

Do you need a classed NPC?

Use one of your own old characters from back in the day. This works best if you have played a character of the type you need. However, you can easily transfer names and traits onto any class.

You can also steal a classed NPC from another GM’s world. You may not know their stats, but you know how to present them.

Do you need a generic NPC?

Steal one from one of your GM’s campaigns. Tavern owner, shoop keeper, etc.

Do you need a trait for a monster?

Take examples of how the past GMs you have played with expressed their orcs, ogres, giants, etc.

The beauty of taking characters from one game to another is also that it doesn’t have to be rule specific or genre specific. For example, a greedy merchant can be a robber baron, Wall Street investment banker, space corporation executive, etc. The main thing you are after is the portrayal of the character, the class, race, and abilities are secondary.

Pay Attention

The key to acquiring new NPC concepts is to pay attention to the repertoire of other GMs. Playing in other games whether in person, online, or at conventions, is a great way to get exposed to NPC “templates.”  The more memorable the portrayal, the easier to recall. However, not all memorable NPC’s are over the top, larger than life personas. Many are regular people, and can be bland or generic. Reviewing lists of character traits in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide is a good way to be on the right wavelength to pull out a believable persona.

Friends, family, wait staff, work colleagues, basically anyone you have ever interacted with can have something to offer to help build NPCs.

Movies, TV, books, magazines, etc. all have characters who have traits that are memorable. All of them are fair game to help you make the next town’s tavern owner different from the last. Street urchins can have traits and manners of speaking like the characters from The Little Rascals (I prefer the originals from the B&W shorts).

Build Templates

If you struggle with on the spot development of NPCs, build templates that emphasize a major trait but flavored with minor traits. For example, a greedy merchant template could take the used car salesman trope and flavor it base on your own experience buying used cars. Some talk fast, some dress gaudily, others dress sharply, some dress slovenly. Greed can take different forms. One is honest so does not lie to gain the sale, while others have no scruples other than whatever it takes to get the sale.

You can also sit with the DMG and roll on the tables to build random NPCs. They can just be collections of traits on index cards, and you just grab the next one when it is needed. You can also script them in a spreadsheet, power shell, bash, or programs like Inspiration Pad Pro. Then you can generate hundreds and pull one out when you need it, or even on the fly at the table.

Conclusion

Find a way that works best for you. Build a mental catalog as you go on a long walk or drive, or mow the lawn. Create a card catalog or lists on the computer. Whether you speak in different voices, or just describe their mannerisms and tone, you should always be able to come up with a new NPC’s characteristics on the fly.

How Much World Building?

I stumbled on a conversation over on Twitter about World Building between @SlyFlourish, @NewbieDM, @Chgowiz, @Bartoneus, @DnDJester, and others. It ranged between no world building/it’s a waste of time all the way to being an integral part of the game.

In the course of writing this article, I reached two conclusions:

  • Every GM is a world builder. It is all a matter of degree of prior effort plus what happens during character building and in play.
    • Every NPC, town, dungeon, etc. involves some level of world building.
    • Even if you use a published setting and published modules, you still weave a story to connect them together.
      • If you ever modify what is in the published setting or module, you are world building.
  • Every player is a world builder, as they bring their perspective into the mix to help shape the world through their character(s).
    • Even if all the player does is roll for abilities, starting gold, and pick a name, race, class, and buy equipment, that is world building. That character did not exist until that point in time. Details of that character help shape the world.

I think in the case of this Twitter conversation, the discussion hinged about the unspoken definition of terms. This is the crux of all discussions/disagreements/viewpoints.  What does each perspectives’ adherents mean by world building. I can’t speak for them, but I give my take in the next two paragraphs.

The no world building viewpoint focused on using that time and effort prepping for the next adventure. They strongly advocate published settings and leaving the players free to do what they want. To me the most valid point is avoiding putting effort into things the players will never see. One has a limited time resource, and so must focus on what must be done for the next session.

The world building is my thing view focused on how it is the DM’s part of play, and that it is a creative and fun outlet for some DMs. I am closer to this point of view, but agree that one must not get lost in the details. For me, world building helps me internalize things and be better able to go with the flow.

As with all things in life, there must be balance and one must seek what works for them. For me, I prefer to build my own world, so that I know it. I struggle with published settings, as they are so intricate, and I get lost in trying to learn them. It is a fun exercise, but it does not move me closer to actual session prep. I have the same issue with modules. I have to spend so much time getting familiar with them, that I could have used less time making my own thing that I already know.

For both modules and published settings, I’m of the “use the parts I like” DM. This holds true of all I read and watch.

This world building/no world building discussion ties into me recently taking my game world to Roll20. Our first session was Sunday. I had a blast exploring a new area of my game world. The players enjoyed it too. Through contact with the players, my game world changed from my original vision. Some of this was expected, yet some specifics were surprising.

I first conceived of my game world way back in college and did a map, and my brother (The artist and my favorite DM.) said, “No, here let me draw you a map.” I still have the map, and I colored it in. Here’s an article where I discuss it. This is not the area of the Roll20 game.

I put all kinds of time into great details on kingdoms and struggling over names for rulers, etc. In the end, I only ran one group for one session in college. I didn’t use it again until 2008 when my sons said they wanted to play. I had been reading stuff online about the OSR and realized I would never use most of what I had, so I focused on a narrow area. I built a town and seeded some adventure sites, monster lairs, etc. We began a sandbox game that morphed to fit what the players did.

Oriental Adventures event charts helped me to plan out a timeline for a year with minimal effort. I seeded those dates in the time line, and let the player’s actions determine how best to implement them. I spent way too much time on weather. I have an old DOS program I found online, and it took forever to get the text file formatted to fit the format I wanted. Not good. For my new area, I am using +Chgowiz’s weather chart. [EDIT: Sadly G+ is gone and I missed adding this link to the Internet Archive.] Simple and effective to realistic weather. It was easy to script and do months at a time.

I have become an advocate of just enough world building to have a place for things to happen. I’ve written about the new area in my world here. The campaign category links to more articles,I made a map and tied this region into my existing world. I took ideas and built the basics of a town, a reason for the players to be there, and set the site for adventures. Then I invited others in and watched it come to life.

It is AD&D with my own preferences from back in the day, or picked up over the years. I have a setting document to help get players into the setting. I’ll touch on my house rules in another post. One thing about my setting is no set pantheon based on this idea I blogged about. We got into an extended theological discussion for what it meant for clerics and certain types of alignment defined characters. Part of my recent thinking, is that alignment does not need to be that complicated, and the law/chaos of OD&D makes more sense. That is also something for another post.

My point is, that having this discussion to get the player’s in the right frame of mind both helped them look at alignment in a different way, and helped me clarify what I had in mind. I prefer initial groups of players to be a good/heroic type party. But by our discussion of less reliance on alignment, the players were led to explore what it means to be chaotic or evil. I now have a party of “evil” characters. They are still out for adventure, but the nature of my internal presuppositions about how things would start and pan out, took a major turn.

This is by no means a bad thing. I was a little surprised, but players ALWAYS do things the DM does not expect. I reasoned that my rule of thumb for a starting group best fits for those who are new to RPGs. Two players are in the Wednesday night AD&D game that is over three years old and 158+ sessions. One player has been in that game about 2 years, and about 140 sessions. The other player over a year and about 60 sessions. This means that I know how they play and I trust them as players.

World building happened in concert with the players in at least two ways. First, their backstories indicated where they were from on my map and added events and NPCs. That alone did some work I didn’t have to do. It also gives me an opportunity to answer some questions. Such as, who is the mysterious old sage and his elf associate, the never seen again father of the half-elf character? Where were they going? What happened to them? Etc.

Second, their interactions with the NPC’s when their characters first stepped onto the “stage” of the game built the world. Their choices and actions did a few things. As all players do, they asked for names of nearly everybody. On the spot world building. I pre-generated several hundred names using the free Inspiration Pad Pro, by NBOS. For any NPC I had not assigned a name, I just had to look at my list.  The way they decided to approach “problems*” determined how the NPCs responded. The world further evolved as I had to determine how NPCs reacted and what it meant for the setting.

I would argue that there is always some degree of world building, even if a one-shot. Each person at the table develops a mental image of what the world is. They take the DM’s descriptions and paint their own picture of the world. Whether it is written down or kept in the back of your mind, it is world building. Whether you have a mental framework for what your world looks like, or use a published setting, world building still happens as the actions of the characters via the players make it come to life.

The key to world building, I think, is that the DM has to be willing to let what the players have their characters do change it. The DM can have a well thought out campaign guide/Bible/notebook, but it only comes alive when the clock starts ticking and the players step into it. Every interaction builds something. The world becomes more “real” with each interaction with an NPC, and each location explored.

The DM can generate a random monster lair with a treasure and a map to anther dungeon/lair/treasure. Until the characters find the monster’s lair and then find the map, the map doesn’t really exist. It is more of a potential. Each NPC, monster, town, dungeon, or anything you place in your world, does not exist until your player’s find it. For this reason, I like the advice I read somewhere online a few years ago, don’t save your best stuff for later, use it now!

That is, if you have a really cool idea, don’t save it for the players to never get to. In other words, if you have an idea that requires tenth level characters to make it work, start with higher level characters. If, as the DM, you really want the players to mix it up with a high-level wizard, and stand a chance to live, you have to have higher level characters.

I have a perfect example with my AD&D world. I put a lot of time into it over the course of years. I have an idea for a big bad working in the background. I have introduced hints of a big bad, that is really a henchman to the big bad. The players, my sons & co., haven’t played for over two years. I may never get to play out the idea because I started with players new to RPGs. The idea doesn’t fit my new campaign area, so that may never come to pass.

I have a few locations seeded in the new area, and ideas for more. However, I will only detail them when the course of play demands it.

World building by one’s self is fun, but it amazing the way it comes alive when you invite players in and let them have a hand in filling in something you only have a vague idea about.

*In this context a problem is a challenge, goal, obstacle, or similar. For example, a merchant with the caravan they escorted into town was willing to pay for various information on the current situation. The merchant was willing to pay for information that would help him know what he might sell on his next trip. Saving time by paying a small sum for others to do the legwork, and the merchant spend more time on selling the goods brought this time.

Check this World Building Community on G+. [EDIT: Sadly G+ is gone and I missed adding this link to the Internet Archive.]

The Map Is Not The World

I posted a review about two different published books of hex paper the other day. I shared the post on the RPG Blog Alliance Community, and had this comment: “But then those hexes put an artificial constraint on mapping. First map, then grid.”
I started a reply, and it just got longer and longer, so I decided it made more sense to make a post out of it.
I’ve had the title for this post for several weeks, and was gong to write about it anyway, this just seems to fit.
Each DM must do what works best for them, when it comes to mapping. If making a map and then adding hexes, squares, or whatever it is you use, works for you, great!

There are two kinds of maps – those for the player and those for the DM.

As DM I need the hexes as I plot where things are to gauge accurate distances, etc. I already have maps, the one drawn by my brother, the artist, after he saw my original map 25+ years ago, and was like, “Just, no….:. He drew it on hex paper. He chose not to see the hexes when he drew it.

The other(s) are a collection of maps I put together from zooming in, and I changed my interpretation of the original map. I goofed and need to get one consolidated map to fix stuff I was just dealing with mentally during play. That only works with the player’s in my in-person game. For my start up of an online version of the game with the same starting point as the original players, I need to fix it.

For players, I can draw it however I want, and scale and accuracy don’t matter. (Unless it’s a science fiction or modern setting where technology and accurate maps are easily available.) The players just need an idea of how things relate to each other.

For games, there are two styles of maps, accurate and properly scaled and artful maps. Some have the talent to do both at the same time on the same piece of paper/computer interface.

I don’t want to do the map in Hexographer, for example, and then give it to players, they can guess where the hexes are, and learn things before they encounter them.

My chicken scratches on hex paper is so that I know at a glance what is where. It is a tool for use in play. For hex crawl style play, this is needed. I have always played the hex crawl style, we just didn’t call it that back then. We just called it play.
The player’s won’t see this map.

My player’s will only have maps that are available to the people of my world. They also have to be able to find the maps, and try to get a peek, or beg, borrow, or steal them. I am thinking of maps in the style of ancient and medieval maps.

Maps of large scale with close to the accuracy of modern maps did not happen until accurate clocks allowed tracking and plotting position. If you have seen maps that exaggerate how big Florida is, you will get my point. It changed size drastically as more accurate measurement of time and distance occurred.

Such maps give one an impression of the world that can have interesting repercussions if you follow them literally.

Even modern maps, such as flat projections of the entire planet skew the size of Greenland, and other places, to a ridiculous degree. One has to use a very creative representation on a flat surface to get size, coastline, and distances accurate. The best way to represent a planet is with a globe. Even then, the kind with relief that indicates mountains and valleys does not have an accurate representation. I have heard people say, and read it somewhere, that if the Earth were the size of a bowling ball it would be smoother than a bowling ball. Also a bowling ball scaled up to the size of Earth would have ridiculously high mountains and deep valleys.

No matter how we try to map, we don’t have a way, that I know of, to allow a person to see a representation of the whole planet, that is accurate in all aspects and allows one to see the entire surface as with a flat map.

Unless our fantasy world is flat, we can’t make an accurate map.

We have two choices, spend a lot of time doing the math and adjustments necessary to account for distances as one moves North or South, or just fudge it.

I tend to be a detail oriented guy, but the level of calculation needed to do that and make it perfect takes a lot of time that I could be putting into more maps or other game preparation.

Even a science fiction or modern setting for an RPG with accurate map making technology and easily available copies, it is easier to hand wave certain things. If a planet hopping science fiction RPG, I won’t map every inch of a globe, if there is a known location the players are seeking. If they do a different planet for each adventure, I’m not mapping a planet and placing all the cities and towns, and then not using them again. I may not make a map to share with the players, but just have a description of the atmosphere, continents, climate zones, and tech level. If I couldn’t find an online generator, I would build a script(s) to quickly spit this out for me, or just roll like a madman, like it was back in the day.

Some people can spit out maps a lot quicker than I can. For me, it is a challenge to make them not all look alike, especially dungeons. I explain some sameness as a cultural thing of the builders. Does anyone design a dungeon and then add the grid? I don’t know of anyone back in the day who did it that way. We all grabbed the graph paper we could find, whether 4 or 5 hexes to the inch. My group favored 5 squares to the inch. I use both sizes now. My aging eyes have  a preference for the slightly larger 4 squares to the inch.

No matter what form of map we use to represent a solar system, planet, continent, country, city, village, dungeon, tomb, etc. It is not an accurate representation. Using the grid of squares or hexes to make an accurate plot, it only a two dimensional representation, height it missing. With no grid and whether hand drawn and scanned and further manipulated or drawn directly to computer via mouse or stylus and tablet, and made into a thing of beauty, neither is an accurate representation. Each only gives some of the information that is further conveyed by our descriptions of what our players see.

With theater of the mind, we can use a few apt descriptions and make those of us with less than fantastic map skills allow each player to construct the world in their own mind.

If we could generate directly from the mind what each of us “sees” for a certain world, I suspect that there would be very few parts of them match up exactly.

There is also another aspect to mapping. Use at the table for one’s own group, and publishing a product, be it a module, or a setting. For just a playable item, I can easily do it myself. For a map in a published product, I would either spend the time to get really good at making maps, or I would hire someone to do it.

The audience for the map tells a lot about the requirements for the map. I can have a few scribbles on paper, and I can run a game. If I want to take that idea and attempt to market it, I have to put a LOT more into it.

For me to take my world, or one of the adventures of my players, and make a publishable product out of it that stands a chance of selling, will take a lot of development to make happen. The few notes one can use to DM with quickly grows if one starts writing out what must be known to let someone else DM the same scenario. Even all that extra work to let others into my world, in  whole, or in part, cannot begin to capture the way I see it in my mind. There was an infamous Kickstarter for a megadungeon that, from what I have read online, illustrates this point. What works for the creator to run his creation, is often insufficient for another to pick up and do the same.

Review – DayTrippers Planet Generator

DayTrippers Planet Generator, is a section pulled from the DayTrippers GM Guide.  DayTrippers is an RPG game by Tod Foley of As If Productions. I had not heard of this game, but this is one piece that many complain is not in the White Star framework. It is a nice piece to have if you don’t have another ruleset to borrow from, or don’t wish to create your own tables. It is a system agnostic method for generating star systems from the size and type of star, to the number and size of planets.

This six page document is 4 pages of tables for system generation and half a page of converting character abilities, skills, and difficulty levels to other systems. The first page being the cover and last half page being split between more information on Day Trippers and blank space.

It is reminiscent of what I recall from other science fiction games back in the day, most likely Traveller, but perhaps also Star Frontiers. At 50 cents, it is hard to say no to this.

If you need something to get your juices flowing with ideas so that every system is not the same, this can do the trick. If you don’t want to invest in a complete rules system just for these tables, it is a great value.

2015 A to Z Challenge Reflections.

I planned to write a follow up on my A to Z experience this year, and a survey that arrive just before midnight alerted me to a Reflections Post, that needed to be done by May 8th. I am doing catch up on articles and clearing a backlog of things to review, on this rainy, thunderstorm laden weekend.

This was the second year that I participated in the A to Z Blogging Challenge to write a post every day, except Sundays, in April. As with last year, 26 blog posts is not difficult for me. I had most of them done and scheduled before April. Also, like last year, I only had time to keep up with the blogs in the (GA) category. This year, I read most of the posts.

For me, the hardest part of the challenge is a theme that I feel good about. This year, I wrote about different aspects of planning a city, whether it is a living city or an abandoned/lost city. Once I had a topic, I came up with 26 topics. I then scheduled each topic for the appropriate day and wrote on the topics that interested me.

I had most of my topics written with at least a few paragraphs or notes of things to be sure to mention. I dug in and wrote several posts in a marathon session, so that I only had to let them sit to do cleanup before they posted. A few topics seemed a bit harder to write, and I got a bit repetitive when some topics had overlap.

I did not come up with as many tables and generators as I had hoped. I did get some ideas for building them. Once those ideas have sat for awhile, I will gather them and see about making a more coherent PDF to share.

My goal of a system to randomly generate parts of a city did not materialize. I think because of the all the dice table in Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad #1, that +Adam Muszkiewicz showed me. It touched on most of what I was after. I don’t really need all the details I think I do, I just WANT them.

Since I scheduled each post, I had no problem posting on the correct day.

I am currently on the fence as to whether or not I will participate next year. I like that I used it to help me clarify and flesh out ideas for my own use. If I participate again, I will have to use it to do something helpful to my own needs and desires as a GM; whether it be a module, series of new creatures, a collection of maps, or NPC’s, it will have to be something that serves a dual purpose.

This year, there were twelve blogs with the (GA) tag for games. Of those, one was geared towards game books and not directly RPG related, that I could tell. Perhaps it was just not my thing.

Nemo’s Lounge gave up doing custom NPCs with a drawing after 16 posts. Both the drawings and NPC’s were great!

Wampus Country was doing a town a day and got up to E when it stopped. He had some interesting ideas, that I enjoyed while it lasted.

Others missed a beat here and there, but most of us managed all 26 postings for the month.

Tower of the Archmage had a great series of vignettes of a party of adventurers. He often included a map. He hiked the Appalachian trail and was gone for the whole challenge, so he wrote and scheduled all of his postings before he left. This series would make a neat short story and/or a module/dungeon.

Tim Brannon at The Other Side did vampires, as he promised he would last year, after doing witches. Who knew there were so many vampires in different cultures. He began with A for Aswang, which I not too long before learned about from watching Grimm. When White Star came out, he even did an A to Z special with a Space Vampire, modeled on the one from the 80’s Buck Rogers TV Show.

Mark Craddock of Cross Plains reviewed his favorite things about D&D.

Keith Davies of In My Campaign built several mythologies/pantheons and had a system to help him build them.

Sea of Stars had a series of NPC;s.

Spes Magna Games did a series on the “Boogie Knights Of the Round Table”. I have not seen the movie, Boogie Nights, but I got the reference. What if King Arthur and his knights where in the age of disco? He kept it going until the last few days, but did all 26 posts.

Another Caffeinated Day did a series of NPC’s,

The Dwarven Stronghold did NPC’s and magic items.

If you need NPC’s, items, maps, images, vampires, or city planning suggestions, there is a lot of good stuff collected in these posts, check them out.