Obsidian Templates For Writers
it is once again Posting About Obsidian time, and I figured I'd do something useful and share some of the templates I've been using in the Valloroth Vault!
I like using templates because then all my info gets organised in a consistent way, which makes using it way easier. Some of these do use a bit of css to make parts work, which I'll link with the template and explain how to use at the end of the post.
Also, some of these shamelessly just riff on the structure of the Forgotten Realms wiki pages because i am who i am and i spend way too much time looking up lore for dungeons and dragons.
Included below the cut are templates with examples for the following:
Character profile (wiki style page)
Character profile (for writing with)
Country
Organisation/Group
Chapter outline
Let's go!
Character Page (wiki style)
pastebin / infobox css
This is the main profile I use for characters! Here you can see the markdown, the preview, and a fully filled out example. For minor characters, I cut the sections I don't need, but so far for major characters, I find that filling out all these sections is very helpful.
At the top of the page you can see the metadata I use, which is what I've settled on after a few iterations as 'the things I actually want to be able to see and use'. Feel free to adjust/adapt to whatever is actually useful to you!
The cssclass is some tweaks I have for my personal obsidian css, so I've left the classes out in the template for you to add whatever you'd like yourself, or you can remove it entirely.
The 's' tag is to remind me to tag new character with the series they're in, e.g. Aliyne would be 's/rp' because she's from the Renegade Prince series. The 'character-sheet' tag is so I can filter out character sheets in searches or queries if I need to.
Character Page (for writing with)
pastebin
This is the page I use for tracking a character within a project. I need all the wiki info for character building, but I don't want my plot threads, character arcs, motivations, and other key info lost and buried in there whilst I'm working! This lets me pull out that info into a shorter, easier to read section.
The double :: are for use with the dataview plugin, because that way I can pull them into tables to track with the rest of my book information
Here's an in-use example with Aliyne again. The 'br' tags are to get things to show up on seperate lines whilst still counting as one line for pulling into dataview, so if you're not using dataview you don't have to use those
Country Template
pastebin / infobox css
I use the same basic kind of template for all locations, just removing or adding sections as I need. I don't always fill all of these out, it depends on how important the place is and how much worldbuilding/research I feel like doing!
And here's an in-use example, with Zhirasea (very much still wip). You can see how I use tags for organisation here: location and sublocation, and the status of the note. I never use a 'done' tag because it's never done. When something's ready I just use 'active'.
I have a variant of the template for regions, settlements, and buildings as well, just with less categories in each as needed, and then I log which kind it is under the 'type' field in the metadata.
Organisation / Group Template
pastebin / infobox css
This one's for fictional organisations! Heavily lifted from the FR wiki but you know what? It works.
Here's an in-use example, with my crime syndicate, the Zarahmin! You can see I added a collapsible callout with the 'Zarahmin Code' in it as well, since this particular organisation actually has a code of conduct.
Chapter Outline
pastebin
This is a fun one - my current chapter outline! This is very much a living document, but it's what I've found useful for this project so far. It combines a few different outlining methods (MICE threads, Promise/Progress/Payoff, One Sentence Summary) as well as leaving me space to be flexible.
The template contains questions and explanations for various sections of the outline, to remind me what I'm looking for/need to fill in.
I found this most useful after finishing a first draft with a rough outline. It's very much a thing I recommend doing for a second draft, since otherwise you'll bog yourself down trying to have all the details in place.
Here's an example of filled out meta info for the prologue of Renegade Prince:
(I use the section with 'Arcs' to list plot tags using :: dataview queries so I can pull them into tables, but again, if you're not using dataview, you can ignore that part!)
How to use the CSS Snippets
The infobox snippet is part of the ITS theme if you use it, or you can install it seperately by doing the following:
Go to this link and download the 'Callouts.css' file
In obsidian, go to settings -> apperance -> CSS snippets, and open the folder with the little folder icon
Paste the 'callouts.css' into that folder
Hit the refresh option in obsidian settings, and toggle the new snippet to on
it is now installed! any callout you insert with [!infobox] will now display with the infobox settings. if you want to tweak how it looks, you can poke around in the css file and see what happens
Oh boy that was another long post - I hope this was useful! As always, if you have any questions about the templates, or obsidian, feel free to shoot me a message.
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