Working with Templates - Obsidian
I’ve started working on a hobby project for D&D a long time ago.
This project is a Obsidian Fantasy World Manager, what I am already using for some of my own games.
But obviously it still is far from done but at the moment my main focus is on creating all templates that could be used/could help DMs to better manage their games.
Now you might ask, why not use WorldAnvil, Roll20 or other Software.
This is because I have several issues with all the things I found till now, I am using Roll20 for online games tho. I have tried WorldAnvil to plan and manage my worlds, without any success tho, so I wanted to try something myself.
This is where I had to decide between Logseq and Obsidian, but my decision was made easy, as Obsidian uses a folder structure, where I can place files together easily and fast without any problems, whereas Logseq uses a prefix syntax to group files.
Preparations
- The first thing we’ll have to do is installing Obsidian, for which you can find the link here.
- After installing we will create a new Vault, which is a term Obsidian uses for their projects with which you will work
- Or fork my repo so you already have a base structure
Setting up Templates
Now that the Vault is set up we need to open the options (bottom left) and go into the Templates tab.
It is important that the string we type into this textfield is the same as the folder we use to store our templates for usage afterwards.
When this is set up and we’ve created our first template, we can easily insert it into a new file in this vault by typing Strg-P or simply typing a \, depending on the settings.
Creating and using templates
I myself am a fan of planning everything and having a lot of stuff ready and prepared, so after some time I found Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator which is a impressiv tool and does almost everything you can wish for, worldbuilding-wise, automatically.
Using this generator together with templates and some AI-prompts works (atleast for me) smoothly.
Creating templates
At the moment I have only created templates for locations, like Cities, Villages, Towns, etc. and for those I wanted to create a look similar to Wikipedia.
Using a Markdown table and simple attributes I have a quick overview of the population, in which province this city is and many other quick informations.
I am stil working on templates for things like Items, NPCs and in general world lore. But the main goal and idea behind this is
to use the graph after setting everything up and have a quick and good overview of the world
you have created as a DM.
Another thing I really want to change is the styling, as good as Markdown looks,
I would love to have something like a timeline view to track the session notes
or even the story of the world.
Future goals