Orkpiraten

Obsidian as static site generator for my roleplaying game

For a while now, I’ve been tinkering with my own roleplaying game, Raiders of Arismyth. One of the things I realised early on was that I need a good way lookup rules and other information quickly. Find the proper tables, skill descriptions and so on, and to be able to disseminate it to my players.

I briefly tried elventy, Hugo and similar frameworks, but found out that I’m not enough of a developer to actually enjoy doing that. But then, I’ve been using Obsidian for a while now to do random notetaking and to organize my campaign notes. Turns out, with the right plugins and other setup, this is pretty good!

So, what am I using, and how?

To start with, I’ve installed Obsidian, obviously. I’m storing the vault on my NAS, so I can access it via SMP share and webdav, regardless of where I am. I’m using the following plugins:

• Core plugins
  (These are mostly enabled by default anyway)
  • Backlinks
  • Command palette
  • File Recovery (just in case)
  • Note composer
  • Files
  • Graph view
  • Page preview
  • Quick switcher
  • Templates
• Community plugins
  • Dataview
    This enables queries to quickly add lists or tables composed from other notes, a godsend when it comes to compiling skill lists and such. The „News“ section pseudo-blog is also compiled with this.
  • Dataview Serializer
    Dataview doesn’t always play nice when exporting the whole vault to a website — the serializer plugin sorts that out by writing the result of the Dataview directly into the note.
  • Style Settings with the ITS Theme by SIRvb
    purely aesthetical, it makes the whole notebook look vaguely like a D&D book (I’m using WOTC/Beyond as TTRPG theme)
  • Virtual Linker / Glossary
    I find this super useful: I have a glossary folder, and whenever the plugin finds a glossary note title in any of the other notes, that becomes a link. And inside of Obsidian itself, the link even gets a hover-preview.
  • Webpage HTML Export
    This is what makes the site creation magic. The plugin grabs all notes and folders and files I tell it to grab, wraps them in some javascript and presto, you get something that can be uploaded to a webserver and provides a nice static site.

Whenever I want to update the site, I use the Command palette to trigger „Generate HTML Export using previous settings“. Obsidian itself doesn’t upload the result, for that I use a WinSCP shortcut on my desktop. It is not the most streamlined or automated process, but easy enough. The downside is that I really need to have an installed Obsidian on a desktop device — I cannot edit the Vault from the web, nor can I trigger the website update that way.

On the upside, I don’t need to worry overly about the website being hacked through unsafe PHP scripts, so there’s that. :)

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