Continuing some of the thinking from my last post about Notetaking for Business, I had mentioned that I use Obsidian for all of my note taking needs. I make pretty extensive notes for my Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting that I play most weeks with a group of friends.

The notes I take for my game are pretty straight forward, but there are a lot of them. I do use some Obsidian-specific plugin features to enable my game to run smoothly, but this is more of an add-on than an essential component of my notes themselves.

In the PARA system that I employ, D&D campaign information goes in the Projects folder. I have a D&D Adventures folder as a project, and inside that is my Port Haven campaign setting folder, which has all of the information about Port Haven. There are no notes pertaining to our weekly D&D games that isn’t inside this folder.

Port Haven is my personal invention as a campaign setting. The game mostly takes place in Port Haven, which is a port city in my fantasy-themed world. There are other areas that the players can explore. In the campaign currently, the players are actually in a different location, the desert city of Sirocco’s Reach. These discrete places are all documented under the Locations folder.

There are some things that interrelate between the major folders in the Port Haven setting. For example, there are Locations where People can be found. The NPCs that the players meet in Port Haven are documented in more detail within the People folder, usually one person per file. I like to produce photos of the people with Midjournet to have a face to put to a name, and I’ll include those images with the profile in the People folder. Sometimes there are groups of people to document, and I’ll create a folder inside of People for that. For example, “City Officials” is a sub-folder of People that contains all of the city officials of Port Haven (the mayor, council members, head of the mage’s guild, etc).

I have a Factions folder at the top level that I haven’t quite nailed down the use of yet in its cross-over nature with People. Typically this is for factions of bad guys. There are the Viceroys, who are a mob-like organization with deep magical power in Port Haven. There are also the Celestials, who are the city gods of Port Haven. And even in this folder you can find “Netherwave Crew”, which - much to my players’ dismay - keeps having new NPCs added to it as the lich captain of this ship of undead keeps having to replace his lieutenants due to pesky player interaction. In any case, you can see that this folder is slightly different in nature even though I don’t have an exact description of its content.

My Hooks folder is full of different hooks that the players could explore. I start out with some basic ideas, just a couple of sentences in a single file, and then ultimately expand those hooks into their own pages with more details, like descriptions of places, links to people, monster stat blocks, and general game beats that I don’t want to forget when I get around to running that hook. I like this section a lot because it fills up with new stuff that the players have encountered along the way. It also holds a lot of the detail from any specific adventure evening, since sometimes the players will go off-script (what???) and I’ll write down the magic items that they might find when they investigate something unexpected. I should probably do a better job at this, maybe by tagging these files a certain way so that this stuff can be found later more easily. Gotta think about that.

Monsters and Combat Logs are the last two folders in Port Haven. I use the TTRPG Initiative Plugin and Fantasy Statblocks Plugin for Obsidian to track initiative at the table. I use an iPad mini at the table, which I find the perfect size for reviewing my notes and running the game, as well as providing quick access to digital and online reference material. I use the DNDBeyond app to download the books and search for spells, rules, and whatnot. I think there should be a better way to do this from right inside Obsidian, but I haven’t quite landed on something I like yet. Right now, I have a Plugin that lets me create shortcut links that I can use like [[spell:magic missile]] and it will link out to a resource with that spell. This is not ideal, IMO.

Combat Logs are generated at the table when using the initiative tracker. I don’t generally keep track of player hit points; that’s on them. I do keep their AC handy, and of course I track all of the stats for the monsters. There have been a few occasions when reviewing the logs has been handy. I wish there was an easy way to add new events to the log, which would be useful for that kind of review.

I think that’s the entirety of my tabletop use of notes for my D&D adventure. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy (haha) but there is definitely a lot of content in there from over the last couple of years (yikes) of playing this campaign, and so that by itself is probably worth calling out. This system has been working reasonably well for me for notes for/from the game, and I’ve evolved it to a point that has been pretty streamlined for me.

In casual use, this is a pretty good example of what else I use Obsidian for. I should probably cover my general use case outside of work and games. There are other folders in the Projects folder, and we haven’t much touched References or Archives in personal detail. Maybe next post, and then I can write up some ideas about how I could make my note-taking better.