shervinsahba / obsidian-icewind

zettelkasten for a dnd-5e icewind dale campaign

dg-publish	dg-hide-in-graph
false	true

icewind.quest

icewind.quest is a hosted Zettelkasten-style notebook. You may find this interesting if you're into obsidian notebooking tricks, Zettelkasten ideas, or - in the case of my content - a Dungeons and Dragons game. This was a quick hobby project, in terms of the notebook setup, but if you can think of any nice improvements, raise an issue.

the results

Click the image to check out the site.

obsidian-icewind

icewind.quest is a hosted Zettelkasten-style notebook using obsidian.md alongside the plugins obsidian-dataview and obsidian-digital-garden, which respectively handle data manipulations and help turn the vault into a website.

If you're familiar with obsidian, the main takeaways are: (1) you can easily evolve your notebook into a website with the obsidian-digital-garden plugin and (2) the scripting in my notebook does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to tracking reoccurring entities - for the case of icewind.quest, this means tracking characters, events, and locations in a Dungeons and Dragon campaign. With a minimal amount of tagging, obsidian-dataview scripts allow for nearly self-generated page content.

the workflow

I'm often pressed for time, so the point of this notebook is to keep it simple. I'll keep the context of a D&D campaign for this dialogue, but you may find inspiration to adopt the flow to another purpose.

1. Make pages for characters and locations from templates.
2. Compose detailed Session notes, logging the events of each day's activities. These Session notes will contain markup links which are then scraped by the dataview plugin and populate the aforementioned pages.

Not everything is automated, but enough content gets linked around that it's very easy to see at a glance what interactions your players have made. You just need to keep quality logs for each Session. For example, for each new character the party encounters:

1. Create a NPC page using the NPC template.
2. Tag the character using a markup link during Session logs.

That's it. The dataview script on the character page will then scrape all Sessions for the linked character, like this example. The same idea is repeated for quests, battles, and locations. Simple!

dungeons and dragons?

My adult friends and I would rather like to be wizards, but all attempts in real life have failed. Dungeons and Dragons is a table top roleplaying game that lets us pretend to be wizards while drinking beer, so it all works out. More seriously, D&D is an interactive story-driven table-top role playing game. I'm running a modified campaign of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, hence the frosty content.