The Campaign TiddlyWiki - Now Available

I've put some polish on my blank campaign organizer TiddlyWiki and I think it's now in a state where sharing it isn't totally embarrassing. It's still a bit rough around the edges, and I'll try to keep the file updated as I make changes and enhancements. You can find the TiddlyWiki file here:

• The GM TiddlyWiki

You can check out the content live on the web or right-click/save as to create a local copy you can edit and use for your own game. The TiddlyWiki includes some introductory material on how to use it but assumes some basic knowledge of what TiddlyWiki is. Of course, the file is set up to match my GMing style so it may not meet your needs, but, at the very least, it demonstrates some of the techniques I've talked about here on the blog.

Enjoy!

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.

Organizing an RPG Campaign with TiddlyWiki

This is rambly because I touch on several different topics related to TiddlyWiki (TW5). As I mentioned in my last post about using this software, I'm doing a sort of in-house review of how I've used it in the past to keep track of game-related notes. The first thing I want to touch on today is the good and bad of using TiddlyWiki.

• It's simple to record textual information and apply basic formatting like headers or bullets. If you can remember a half-dozen bits of markup,  you can probably create an easy-to-read wiki.
• It's less easy to apply more complex formatting, like tables. While there's markup to support advanced HTML and apply CSS, unless you have some understanding of these subjects, it's a little time-consuming.
• TiddlyWiki is great at linking up disparate bits of information, and tags are awesome tools for structuring your data. In fact, I'm going to talk a little bit more about tag organization in a bit.
• Updating information at the gaming table can be challenging. Switching between view and edit mode for individual tiddlers, especially if you use transclusion, can be a big distraction.

So, where does that leave me in my thinking? First, all background material for my campaigns is going into TiddlyWiki. For me, it's the ideal repository for historic, governmental, NPC, religion, regional, and city data, as well as other general documents. I'll also use it for rules notes and system information that I need to keep handy. When it comes to specific encounter and session planning, things get a little fuzzier. I've done sessions where literally everything is stored in TiddlyWiki, and it just doesn't work in all cases. Scrolling back and forth to find specific information on a creature for an encounter or notes on a room in a dungeon is more of a distraction than a boon. I think the breakdown for me is something like this:

• The session outline/summary goes into TiddlyWiki.
• Locale descriptions get wikied.
• Encounter details and stat blocks get committed to paper.

Managing an encounter or combat is so much simpler when you can scribble down hit point updates, changes to the environment, or conditions without worrying about which tiddler you need to edit and how stuff needs to be formatted. If data does need to be updated in TiddlyWiki, I think a journal summary of the changes (which can double as a session log), is the way to go.

Now that I have a general idea what I want to store, I can think a bit about how to do it more effectively. I've been toying with my blank campaign wiki a bit over the last few days. Specifically, I've been tweaking tags and sidebars. Tags are labels you can apply to any tiddler, and they can also be tiddlers themselves. Sidebars are navigation panels to the right side of the story area (where open tiddlers are displayed). By default, TiddlyWiki has four sidebars:

• Open displays a list of tiddlers that are currently open.
• Recent shows a historic list of tiddler activity.
• The Tools panel gives you access to a bunch of TiddlyWiki functionality.
• The More sidebar lists specific tiddler categories: tags, missing, recent, orphans, etc.

The real power here is you can add custom sidebars, and I'm going to use them to add three tables of contents to my notes. Based on past games and the thinking above, the data I store falls into three broad categories: Campaign notes about the game world, System documents for house rules and mechanics, and Wiki parts like templates and blank sample tiddlers. So, step one is to create three tiddlers called Campaign, System, and Wiki, and tag each one with $:/tags/SideBar, which automatically turns them into sidebars. I'm also going to use system fields in each to put them in the order I want. The list-before field tells TiddlyWiki to show the current tiddler before the one listed in the field; list-after means list it after (duh). The image to the left shows my new custom sidebar layout with my three tiddlers front and center. One side note: I also tag each of these tiddlers with contents, which is not the same as the Contents tiddler. I'll talk about this in a bit.

So, what goes into these three tiddlers? As you might guess, a table of contents (TOC) of everything tagged with campaign, system, or wiki. Creating an expandable TOC is simple:

     {{||H3}}
     <div class="tc-table-of-contents">
         <<toc-selective-expandable "campaign" "sort[title]">>
     </div>

     {{contents}}

This bit of markup has a template that shows a header, uses a built-in macro to create the campaign TOC, sorted by title, and, finally, transcludes the contents tiddler (which, if you remember, tags all three of the sidebar tiddlers).

Confused yet? The reason for this bit of trickery is to avoid tagging a sidebar with any tag that might show up in its TOC. That creates a recursive loop that causes Bad Things (TM) to happen. Using this method, I can quickly access the sidebar tiddlers. The Contents tiddler I mentioned earlier contains TOC listings for the campaign, system, and wiki tags and serves as the default TiddlyWiki homepage.

The final step in all this is creating tiddlers for the top level tags in each category. If you look at the sidebar image above, you can see some of the tags I've created, and how the toc-selective-expandable macro works. Briefly, each entry, bestiary, for example, is a tiddler tagged with campaign that contains a {{||DLIST}} template. Anything tagged with bestiary is automatically categorized under the appropriate tag, as you can see in the expanded npc entry, which shows Agent Blue both as an NPC, and as a gvtnpc, my shorthand for government NPC.

Now, this is not *exactly* the behavior I want. If I have 200 NPCs, the underlying tags are going to get lost in the shuffle. I may end up adding a layer here and only tag NPC tiddlers with the appropriate sub-tag.

OK, so this is longer than I expected, but I hope it's shown you some of the power of TiddlyWiki (or offered some useful advise if you're already a convert).

TiddlyWiki - Templates

I recently finished running two campaigns: Daruna, which ended in an epic battle that brought things to a satisfying conclusion, and the Colony, which was... less good. As part of my post-campaign shutdown process, I take a look at the TiddlyWiki for each campaign to see if I can improve my GM notes and recordkeeping. As usual,  I find some new features and tricks that I roll back into my customized empty GM wiki. Today, I'm going to talk a bit about templates for TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWiki - Lists and Fields

I've written a few posts about using TiddlyWiki 5 (TW5) to manage campaign notes.  Recently, I've been playing around with lists and tags in hopes of better organizing some categories of information, specifically, NPCs.

A quick summary of the TW5 features I'll talk about today for those who are unfamiliar:

• TW5 is a single-file wiki you can keep on your computer.
• It stores chunks of information, called tiddlers, you can link together.
• A markup language makes it simple to format (most) content.
• You can tag tiddlers with labels that are also tiddlers.

TiddlyWiki 5 - How Does This Work?

A few years ago, I wrote a two part tutorial on using TiddlyWiki (part 1 and part 2). Time marches on, and there's a new version of TiddlyWiki available in beta form, TiddlyWiki 5. I decided it was time to check it out, because it's pretty and modern and has a huge amount of functionality out of box. This post is an ongoing collection of summary notes about my experiences switching over to TW5 from classic. It'll be updated as I work through various features.

Tiddlywiki - Stat Blocks

I've been toying around with stat blocks in Tiddlywiki, trying to come up with a better way to lay them out without creating too many tiddly-related headaches with formatting and such. I'm still not sure I've gotten it right, but here are three work in progress versions of the Akinak, primordial minions of Anamika. These are screenshots taken from Firefox, so they're pretty much what I see at the table.

Tiddlywiki - Minor Issue

I generally wax positive about Tiddlywiki as a GM tool for campaign notes, but the session I just ran uncovered out a couple flaws with using it. Neither is a deal-breaker, and both have potential solutions.

Tiddlywiki - Nifty Trick

I'm a fan of Tiddlywiki for GM notes, something I've mentioned of before. I'm currently doing some work for my next Daruna game, and in the process of creating a couple stat blocks for some standard fighter types, discovered this little trick.

Well That Was Unfortunate

The long silence here was not by choice. My main computer imploded shortly before the holidays, so I had the joyful experience of shifting all my stuff from my old sort-of-working-but-only-if-you're-lucky system to a new box. Lessons learned:

• An external hard drive for backups is an excellent investment.
• Five copies of your music library is probably too many.
• Keeping your data organized is a good thing.

I took the move as an opportunity to consolidate a bunch of duplicate data and eliminate a bunch of stuff I really don't need.

Gaming related: I was planning on switching from Firefox to Chrome until I discovered using TiddlyWiki with Chrome requires the TiddlySaver Java module. Not sure if that's going to be a pain or not. We'll see.

Now... back to work!

TiddlyWiki - A Minor Tip

I use TiddlyWiki for pretty much all my campaign notes these days. The combination of hyper-linking and a single self-contained file (minus images), makes it a very useful tool for my style of GMing. I went so far as to write a couple of brief tutorials on using it in my old RPG Dumping Ground blog:

• TiddlyWiki Tutorial - Part I
• TiddlyWiki Tutorial - Part II

One of the things I mention in part two of the tutorials is transclusion, a feature that allows you to insert a tiddler within a tiddler. Today's tip is an extension of that feature.