This FREE D&D campaign management app made me a better DM

using this free app for managing my DND campaign has made me a better DM it's helped keep me organized and allowed me to quickly and easily access any information I need during sessions in this video I'm going to show you the program I've been using some incredible free plugins and go through the template I've created which has reduced my prep time and I'm also going to tell you about a new music and sound effects tool that I've been using lately made by the sponsor of this video describe welcome to the table I'm Kelly and we're going to go and find some Dragon glass because the program is obs obsidian oh damn it I I wasn't supposed to reveal that yet I was supposed to keep you waiting around for like 6 minutes while I talked about nothing uh oh well back to the filler stuff back in the fall as I was getting ready to run my current campaign I was looking into trying a new campaign organization tool previously I'd used Google Docs and then most recently Trello in Trello I made a board for each location with cards for different sublocations and NPCs and then I made another board for plots with each card being a different event in the plot this worked pretty well and it allowed me to see a high high level overview of the plot but it was missing one major feature linking there are a number of paid options for campaign management and I was considering trying one of them but just as I was about to sign up Steve emailed me asking for recommendations on this exact topic that prompted me to do some more research which is when I came across obsidian obsidian DMD is a free and open source notetaking app it has an immense amount of features and it can be used for a variety of different things but thanks to its flexibility and a number of plugins developed by community members obsidian can be turned into an excellent campaign management app at its core obsidian is an interface to manage plain text files when you create notes in obsidian you're actually just creating plain text files inside of a folder on your computer Straight Out of the Box obsidian is already a great not taking an organization app but there are a few plugins and changes I'd recommend making to get it fully set up to manage a campaign including a plugin to make interactive maps with pins a plugin that generates names as you write notes integrating a fantasy calendar changing the theme and a plugin that Steve told me about which uses GitHub to create a Wiki from your notes that your players can use once I go through that then I'll show you my actual campaign Vault and how I input and organize my notes the first thing you need to do when you open obsidian is to create a vault this is what obsidian calls your collection of notes once you create the Vault you'll see your folder a note hierarchy in the left pane the default note in the center Pane and a graph view in the right pane the first thing we'll do is install a theme head to settings appearance themes and click manage there are tons of themes in here but I've been using the its theme with the watsy / Beyond color scheme so just scroll down and find its theme then click install and use now to get the alternate color schemes you'll need to install a plug-in called style settings go down to community plugins browse search style settings click install then once it installs click enable now go into its theme settings alternate color schemes and where it says ttrpg select wats c/ Beyond now looks like a 5 book this next plugin allows you to create an interactive map with pins that link directly to your notes on that place I've really enjoyed using this feature in combination with the wau city generator my players have really enjoyed it as well cuz it helps them spatially visualize how everything is laid out go back into settings Community plugins browse then search leaflet this one seems a little intimidating at first because you have to look at some code but you just need to copy and paste it and change a couple values by the way this plug-in is written by Jeremy Valentine they've written a bunch of ttrpg plugins for obsidian including a character sheet plugin a stat block plugin a dice roller and several others and they're all free so if you're using them and liking them consider buying Jeremy a coffee after you install and enable the plugin we need to get the code snippet there's an example code Block in the plug-in settings page but that one gave me issues there's a website called obsidian ttrpg tutorial.com that is exactly what it sounds like they have a ton of really helpful and in-depth tutorials for using obsidian to run and play ttrpgs they also have an example code snippet for leaflet that works really well there are a ton of advanced features like being able to measure distances on your map add a map that's built from multiple images set default position and zoom levels and a ton more but we're just going to create a basic map I've left a link to this page down in the description just go to the template section and click on the Arrow next to encounter map template which is the more basic one copy the block of code go into your note and paste it now just change the ID to something unique and change the image value to the name of your image your image has to be located somewhere in your Vault folder I usually just put it in the same folder as the note that it's going in I also like to change the width to 100% And the height to 500 pixels if you click away and you get an error about a missing ID just click back into the code block and delete the commented lines at the top now you have an interactive map you can right click to place a pin double click to add info to that pin like linking to a note and you can drag them around by clicking and holding next up is one of my favorite plugins because it's allowed me to have one less tab open and anything I can do to have less tabs open is a win it is the fantasy name generator plugin by Luke wh there are only four races to choose from Human elf orc and dwarf so it's definitely not as good as fantasy name generators. comom but the fact that I don't have to leave my notes app is a huge win to install it just head to settings Community plugins browse and search fantasy name generator then to use it just hit command or contrl P to bring up the command palet then type in name and choose one of the options from the dropdown my players often ask how long ago stuff was in game and because our sessions sometimes cover a few hours of in-game time and sometimes they cover a few months it can be really difficult to track in my head for this campaign I wanted to start using a calendar but I knew that unless it was right next to my notes staring me in the face I would forget to actually use it with the calendarium plugin you can create and manage a calendar right from within obsidian calendarium is currently in beta so you need to install a different plugin first before you can install it head to settings Community plugins browse and then search brat then install and enable it then click options to go to the settings page for brat now head to the GitHub page for calendarium which is linked down in the description description click the green code button then copy the URL go back to obsidian click add beta plugin paste the URL and click add plugin now the calendarium plugin will show up under your community plugins in the settings page from in there you can create a new calendar or import one then as you play you can advance the days and enter events in the calendar that sits right next to your notes I'll be honest though I still sometimes forget to advance the calendar the last plugin will'll run through has a paid option directly through obsidian or a free third party option that requires a bit of setup when you're getting ready to join a new campaign as a player there's one part that can either be a huge source of inspiration or feel like dreaded homework the lore document no matter how you feel about them I think receiving a multi-page single space Word document can be intimidating I personally love to read a thick lore document because it gives me inspiration for my characters and it gets me really excited to explore the world however the format can be daunting using obsidian you can publish your notes to a website that your players can read like a Wiki with all the link links intact over the course of the campaign it'll also push the changes to the site as you update your notes this Wiki style format is much easier to read and you can bounce around to different locations or articles as things Peak your interest obsidian DMD has a built-in feature for this called publish it cost $10 per month and you can sign up for it through the website after you make an account and start the subscription you can head back into the obsidian app enable the publish plug-in from the core plugins and then set up your site and decide which folders and notes to publish this is really handy because it allows you to keep keep everything in one Vault but you still get to decide what your players see one thing to note though your community plugins won't work on the website so any interactive maps that you make with leaflet will just show up as code blocks which is too bad because allowing your players to play around on the maps would be really cool there's also a free way to do this using a program called quartz and GitHub it converts your notes into a format that GitHub can understand and handles pushing all the changes to GitHub Pages GitHub offers free hosting of static sites from their repositories so this is a pretty great free option the setup is is quite daunting though because by default quartz pushes your whole Vault so you need to do some extra steps in order to be able to choose which notes and folders get uploaded there's a great video tutorial that I've linked down in the description so if you're interested you can dive into that I opted for the subscription just to try it out and the easy setup made it worth it for me and now it's time to show you my actual campaign notes but first I want to tell you about this really cool new music and sound effects tool made by describe thank you so much to describe for sponsoring this video for those who are unfamiliar describe helps players and dmss by providing a massive library of description text interactive maps and now sound effects and music the description text can be read verbatim or used to spark inspiration reading through their descriptions of spellcasting or spooky ruins instantly gives me a ton of ideas for cool encounters now they've partnered with Michael gy Studios to create a new music and sound effects tool called Opus you can create playlists soundscapes and sound effects boards and then invite your players and stream the audio directly to them there's music and sound effects for different genres including fantasy modern and sci-fi you can create collections of different scenes where you can add different music Ambience or sound effects and add description text as well you can make your own or explore tons of pre-made collections made by describe and by the community there are even some pre-made ones designed for pre-written campaigns like the classic lost minds of fand Delver if you don't want to build out a collection you can also just play music and sound effects and build playlists on the Fly using the Rome feature this allows you to search quickly and add things to your queue if your party goes somewhere unexpected I built myself a collection of ambiences for some common locations that my party is often in and then I've been combining those with the pre-built playlists which are excellent Opus is still in beta which means that it's getting better every day but it's already really awesome David from describe has shared some of their future plans and I'm really excited to start using those features if you want to try it out you can use the coupon code powerword spill at checkout to get an extended 30-day free trial head to the link down in the description to check it out all right let's get into my campaign notes I'm I'm currently running a pre-written campaign but my system would be similar if I were writing my own campaign I don't agree with the common advice I see about campaign Management systems and note-taking systems which is to just pick a system and stick with it people say that if you keep changing your system you never become proficient with it because you're constantly learning something new I'm constantly changing and tweaking my system because I find that every campaign requires something slightly different or I find something to improve on I think the best part of tinkering with any system is that you can customize it for yourself so I hope this can give you some ideas for your own notetaking system I like to think of my world in two states before the players interact with it and after and my notes for each state serve different purposes the biggest difference is that everything in the before state is subject to change because it doesn't actually exist until the players interact with it the thing in between these two states is the session so the information goes from the before World building notes to the session and then from the session back to the world notes as Canon and that's exactly how I organize my notes the information flows to and from a session document in the case of running a pre-written campaign the World building notes are actually just the book the information flows from the book into my session document and then into my world notes I create World notes for anything that my players interact with first I'll go through what my session document looks like and then I'll go through the structure of my world notes my prep consists of making a new session note copying the previous one over and then editing each section the first section is just a list of my player characters with links to each of their pages in the beginning that helps me learn their names and then later it provides me an easy link to go into the note for each character in the note for each character I have some top level quick notes about them a personal Quest section where I'll will put plot points about their personal Quest and a backstory section with anything they've sent me the personal Quest section is the one I use most often to track where they are in that Quest and put down any ideas for what needs to happen next and how I'll tie that in with the main campaign for one of my characters we're doing a memory thing where they lost the last 20 or so years of their memory and they're getting these flashbacks that are slowly filling in the gaps of what happened to do this I have have the story in chronological order as it happened and then in game order as I'm going to feed it to the player I went over this in full detail in the first episode of the power word show on the patreon so if you're interested you can go check that out next is the current threads section where I put all the plot threads the party is currently pursuing I find this section really helpful for two reasons the first is that it's a great way to see if the party has too much going on sometimes you can add too many plot hooks to a campaign and then the party doesn't know which to follow or what to do first laying them out like this can help you track everything and help you think of ways to merge different plots together so that two threads can become one the second is that it provides a clear way to see exactly what I need to set up next and ensures I don't forget about any small side plots that I want to come back to the things the party should know section are for things that the party needs to find out in order to advance the main plot I try to figure out one to three pieces of key information that the party should find out this session in order for them to move forward in the campaign NPCs that might show up is the section where I put links to any NPCs I think will be around this session and then underneath I'll put a brief description and a reminder of what their voice sounds like I'll also add a section for what the NPC needs to do or say to the players like giving them an item or a piece of information because I'm playing this campaign online I also have an important rules section this session document acts as my DM screen so if there are any rules that I think will come up that I want to quickly reference or if I make up some mechanics I'll put them in here right now I have a little downtime mechanic I came up with and I also have a quick reference for a mechanic from the book planned encounters is pretty atory these are the things that I prepare for in the session they aren't just combat encounters but any encounter that I want to happen during the session we don't always get to all of them so some get moved to the next session or erased if they become irrelevant having all the encounters listed out helps me plan balance sessions ideally I try to have a mix of Social and mechanics based encounters next is the recap section where I just move my notes from the summary section into the recap section and rewrite it nicely I'll also put in any notes for things I want to say at the beginning of the session like reminders for my players or or Corrections from last session the last section is the summary I use this section to jot down notes during the session little things to remind me of what happened that I can then turn into more legible notes later on at the end of the session I'll move these notes into the appropriate World notes and flesh them out which brings us to the structure of the world notes the folder structure of my world notes is pretty straightforward but I've spiced it up a little bit by adding an interactive map for each city or town with the leaflet plug in the folder structure is World region then city or town then inside the city or town folder I have notes for each important NPC and location I also have a note inside each folder with the same name as that folder and that note just contains a map of the area with interactive pins for all the notes in that area one of the great things with the obsidian and all the links is that if you move documents around all of your links stay intact so even if you're building your world as you go and changing your folder structures it doesn't matter everything will still link correctly what are you using to manage your campaigns let me know down in the comments I'm planning to do a video in the future comparing a bunch of different campaign manag options but for now I've been very happy with obsidian are you wanting to try writing your own campaign but it seems overwhelming check out this video here for a specific template you can use to easily write your own campaign using your players Back stories I appreciate you

Channel: Power Word Spill

Views: 207,947

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, dnd, dnd 5e, fifth edition, dm tips, dungeon master, d&d campaign, d&d 5e, 5th edition, ttrpg, tabletop gaming, DM, game master, GM, dungeons & dragons, how to play dungeons and dragons, wizards of the coast, how to, rpg, pathfinder, dungeon crawl classics, ose, tabletop roleyplaying, power word spill, level up your d&d night, dnd campaign, campaign management, obsidian md, dm notes, dnd notes, ttrpg campaign management, leaflet, calendarium

Id: DBgWB1NF7hY

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2024