So, I've recently gotten really into the note-keeping app Obsidian. I've been meaning to move to it for almost a year now, ever since Evernote's services continued to erode to the point where I said goodbye forever, Evernote.
Well, with the purchase of my new Windows 11 pc, I was forced to start afresh with all of my various programs and that left me with the opportunity to actually sit down and start using this thing... and wow, I should have done this ages ago!
Obsidian is largely free - there is a paid sync option for those of us who use it across multiple devices, but otherwise it's free and has an absolutely bonkers number of Community plugins.
I started by taking my existing History of Trothguard post and pulling it into the app. Creating linked pages is insanely easy and intuitive - just wrap any word or phrase in double square brackets, and click it: [[ ]]. So, before I knew it I'd gone through and created stubs for each and every proper noun in my 5,000-year history. Honestly, if I were to try to do this in another note app (or even here on Hive) it would take ages. In Obsidian? It's so seamless and intuitive.
It also has a built-in graph or connection web, which I've found incredibly handy for my Worldbuilding - it's sometimes super useful (and sometimes just plain interesting) to thread through connections. There's this Local View thing, where you see the web of connections related to the note you're on, and then there's the overall graph. For Trothguard's history, for example, I get this:
For the overall view, we get this mess of webs:
And when you gloss over one of the nodes, it'll light up all the various connections that it has.
For someone who likes visual data representations, this is fabulous.
And with the right community plugins, you can get even crazier stuff. There's themes you can download to make Obsidian fit your desired look and style (the default black mode is fine for me), and some really cool stuff like Fantasy/SciFi calendars, DataView which lets you run sql-like queries across your folders, and just... all kinds of stuff. I've taken a screenshot of a few of the suite of plugins I've got:
And for DM'ing, I've been using the "Callouts" core functionality to create accordion-style sections where I can hide details that shouldn't be read by passing eyes at the table.
There are a ton of styles these can come in, and you can nest them as well if you have some use-case for that.
I did that with one of the core characters in my current plot once the PCs had uncovered the 'hidden' information:
For a note-keeping app and knowledge-repository, Obsidian is honestly amazing. I've barely scratched the surface of what I could do with this as I've hurriedly dumped my worldbuilding into it, and I'm finding it so much faster to use and navigate than any other app I've tried. It's not even a competition.
I've still got a lot to enter, but so far it's been going great. I've added a lofi/chill music plugin that just lets me stream background music for while I'm writing and it has become a daily habit to chip away at my mountain of worldbuilding, consolidating it into this single repository.
I know there are options out there to push Obsidian notes to websites, and when I get things all set up I might begin working on a plugin for myself to connect this to Hive, so I can push updates and publish new content directly from Obsidian - which would help me keep both up to date. But that's a dream for the future. For now, I just wanted to point to this little app and show it off a bit. I know it's fairly well-known already, but for a worldbuilding tool, I honestly think it's a lot better than some of the paid services like Worldanvil even. It is incredibly useful, and has been a game-changer for my worldbuilding productivity.
