As you may or may not know, I call myself a software engineer. Others call me a software engineer. So, I guess that’s what I am, professionally speaking: a software engineer.

Even though there are some software engineers out there who refuse to touch any PC or do any coding outside their working hours, I’ve never really been like that. Even when I was putting insane amount of hours into a gigantic product which never saw the light (because corporate), back in 2019, I still had the spark in me to write some hobby code, as soon as I got back home.

So, it is sort of natural to let technology flow into my D&D game preparations, and sessions themselves, for the purpose of enhancing the overall experience both for me and my players.

The first thing we’re going to talk about, hopefully in this first post of many others of a series, is Obsidian.

Obsidian belongs, as far as I understand, to a whole category of “note-taking” software. But that would be grossly understating its potential. Obsidian, similar to Notion and others, is actually about building your digital, inter-connected brain, made of text, images and other documents.

The way I found it was because, when building my setting, lot of times I’ll need to change a name I had decided. I’m not good with inventing names, and sometimes, following the flow of an idea, I just write something I made up in that moment. So, almost always, when I go back to read that part, I inevitably cringe at the name I had given beforehand. But that name had spread at that moment; maybe I even wrote another document with that name, to take some notes on the character/place/event.

Let’s say for instance I’m writing about the “Great Pacts of Mount Thoradin”, which ended the war between humans, dwarves and elves in my world. I know who the elven leader is, since she’s millennia years old: Elora The Venerable, of course. But dwarves, and humans even more, have shorter lifespans. So, as a temporary dwarf “king” (dwarves have no single leader: arguing and quarreling between themselves would be too hard), I’m going to write the name Ulfbar. And I’m also going to create a note for Ulfbar: another file, named “Ulfbar”, in which I’ll write maybe a couple of lines to remember why his name is there.

But then, re-reading that part, the name “Ulfbar” really sounds more like the dog with special needs of a dwarven king, not really the king himself. So I’d need to change it, possibly without wasting 15 minutes of my time.

Microsoft Word is ok, but when I tried a couple of ways to have this “table of names” which would be easily editable, it failed. There’s probably a better way, but I gave up.

So I made a bit of research, and found a software named Obsidian. It’s perfect for my needs: it generates Markdown files, which are just plain text files (just like .txt), and when you put names in this two square brackets [[Ulfbar]], it creates a link. You can then use the same link elsewhere, and when you’re ready, also create the Ulfbar page. If you decide Ulfbar is a horrible name, you just need to rename the Ulfbar file within Obsidian: it will automatically update all files mentioning Ulfbar (provided you used the link in those files, and not the plain name). And now Ulfbar will have his dwarven, well-earned name: Poopbar, of course.

Plus, Obsidian is free. The only paid features you may want, are cloud backups and syncs. Since I know pretty well Git (a source control software, mainly used for code), I didn’t really need it: I’m using the Git Obsidian plugin, and syncing all my files to a free Github account.

The downside is, though, I can’t really access my files while on mobile. But I still have to search for a workaround, I’m sure it’s doable with a little hack.

With Obsidian, I can now proudly say I crossed over 1000 files in my homemade setting for D&D, and many times that the number of lines. There are also a lot of empty files, of course, which I just created so that one day I’ll write them (maybe). But the Obsidian search is still blazingly fast, and also opening the software doesn’t take more than a second. Even on my oldish laptop.

There are some things I’d like improved, and probably there are plugins for that. For instance, I don’t always want to use the full name of something or someone in files, especially when I’m repeating it more than once. For instance, Kelton The Red, leader of the Scarlet Phalanx, mercenaries with anarchic tendencies, is better shortened as “Kelton”. There’s the possibility, in Obsidian, to create “aliases” for files. But then, when I edit an alias, other files are not actually updated, because aliases are just suggestions for auto-completion, not indexed as file names are.

But overall, Obsidian: 9/10. No better way to prepare sessions and create your world.

In the next episode, I’ll likely talk about Owlbear Rodeo, or maybe one of my own software creations. We’ll see.

Thanks for reading, and until next time.