The Campaign TiddlyWiki: Tags

Last time I wrote about TiddlyWiki, I focused on overall organization and various tricks and methods for structuring tables of contents and lists of tagged tiddlers. Today I'm going to dive into some actual applications for these techniques.

As a quick review, the last post discussed three custom sidebars for our wiki:

• Wiki - tiddlers related to the internals of TiddlyWiki
• Mechanics - game mechanics and systems
• Campaign - information about our actual game world

Each sidebar has a set of tags associated with it. So let's take a look at them one by one. This is a work in progress, and I may end up adding, subtracting, or moving stuff as I add content. As a reminder, I always use all lower case titles for tag tiddlers, so they're easy to spot while I'm adding content.

Wiki

We'll start with Wiki because it's pretty short, just five tags:

blank - I am lazy and always take advantage of tiddler cloning. Tiddlers marked with this tag are empty versions of commonly used tiddlers. They're all named something-blank, where something is the tag corresponding to the tiddler's category within the wiki. For example, npc-blank is an empty non-player character description. Each blank tiddler is also tagged with its category tag too.

style - This tag marks all the tiddlers that define CSS styles. I haven't done a lot with these yet, so this category is empty, aside from a few test tiddlers. Style tiddlers need a few tweaks to have them integrated into the wiki's styles. They have to be tagged with $:/tags/stylesheet and their tiddler type should be set to text/css. I'll probably do more with these at a later date.

template - I delved into templates a while ago. This tag marks all the template tiddlers (H1, H2, H3, DLIST, PLIST) I've added to my wiki.

test - Sometimes you need to try things out to really understand them. Marking the tiddlers you use makes it easy to find them while you work (and delete them when you're done).

tiddlywiki - There are only two tiddlers here,  A transcluded version of the TiddlyWiki license (for easy reference), and a list of external reference links.

Mechanics

The Mechanics sidebar is even shorter, but it may grow as I do more with this:

rule - I usually have a hard copy of whatever game system I'm running handy, but I'm a fiddler and tweak things all the time. This tag marks tiddlers outlining rules exceptions, additions, and changes.

system - This tiddler captures more complex additions to the rules. For example, the tiddler about gun rules I added to Labyrinth Lord was marked with this tag in my Colony game.

Campaign

Finally, we get to the meat of the wiki, the Campaign. I think it's worth looking at why I chose the tags I did. This is the part that most likely to change for someone else because I built these tags to reflect my campaign design style. This section is also in flux. If I write about it, I'm likely to change/improve things.

You can capture a lot of information about a campaign world with three main categories: people, places, and things. People is a bit too restrictive because the typical RPG also has monsters or robots or supernatural beings involved. I ended up with entity. Place is fine, but location is better. Similarly, things becomes item.

Minor picky note: you may have noticed I used the singular for all tags. In part, this is just me being too detail-oriented (ex-programmer brain at work), but a tag implies that whatever it's tagging is an example of the tag.  The gun rules I mentioned are a system. A tiddler describing a store is describing a location. Again, being consistent adds clarity.

There are some parts of the campaign that don't fit these categories. One could argue that groups are just another form of entity, but I prefer to keep them separate and tag them with organization. In a fantasy game, magic is kind of a big deal and touches on a lot of other categories (magic items and entities are pretty common, for example). I keep magic as a top-level tag, but this is one of the areas that are in flux.

The tags above cover most of the concrete parts of the campaign, but there are other aspects to deal with. The history tag covers what has gone on before but not immediate history (that's coming up). The setting tag keeps track of how things work and is a bit broad. In my Colony game, it included information on the calendar, the divine and demonic structure of the world, the systems surrounding the obelisks and waypoints the characters found, and the weather.

The final top-level tag for the Campaign sidebar is planning. This is the catchall for the turning wheels of the game. It's where I keep lists of active plots and schemes, my notes on what has happened in previous sessions, and summaries of near-future encounters and events. It also ends up tagging notes on earned experience and discoveries made by the characters.

OK, not quite final. For PBEM games, I also keep a separate turn tag, which marks the actual turn content I've written.

All these tags are top-level entries in the Campaign sidebar, and some of them cover a lot of ground. I've mentioned before that vast lists are somewhat clumsy to access in the sidebar, so many of these categories are subdivided. To close things out, here's a breakdown of the top two levels of the Campaign sidebar. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory.

• entity
• bestiary
• npc
• npc-categories
• supernatural
• history
• item
• location
• business
• city
• dungeon
• neighborhood
• outdoor
• magic
• organization
• commercial
• government
• military
• religion
• planning
• setting

You'll notice many tags have subtags and npc has another level of indirection. The npc-categories parallel the organization categories. The bestiary tag should really be something like creature; the current name is a historical relic. I'm least happy with supernatural, which is less ghosts and spirits and more demons and deities. It'll probably change.

So there it is, a general plan for a campaign organizer using TiddlyWiki. I hope this think-aloud project is proving useful to anyone thinking about using a wiki for GM notes.

Edit: Punched the publish button a bit too early, so some bits were missing from the first published version.