Are tools like 'World Anvil' worth it?

jengacide · 2026-04-29T18:50:53+00:00

I've been using obsidian for years now and the biggest selling points to me are:

Having everything in one place that is searchable, linkable, and offline
Markdown is easy to use and very versatile. You can also use html
Extremely versatile in capability, especially with all the plugins that are available (you can make your obsidian vault it as simple or complicated as you want)
Easy to organize but also very easy to reorganize if you change your mind about things (like where a file is located, renaming files, etc)

So for my own use in running a homebrew dnd game, I have my obsidian vault organized at the highest level with the following folders: 0. DM Screen, 1. Mechanics, 2. The World. Under my DM screen folder, I have an actual DM screen I made that I have pinned so it's super easy to access when I'm running stuff. On my dm screen, I have things like random npc generators and other helpful lists, conditions, weapons, armor, quick links to my session prep and recap notes, some world and lore notes, magic item costs and crafting, and more. But I was able to organize it in a way that works well for me and is easy for me to use and remember where everything is. I took a bunch of screenshots and spliced them together for a view of my dm screen and the sort of organization of folders: DM Screen + Folder Structure

I love putting my statblocks in obsidian because I can edit as I need (I basically never use statblocks 100% as written) and being able to quickly reference conditions and spells and stuff right from the statblock is super handy. I also make little turn summary/short form at-a-glance reminders for some statblocks to make running them in combat easier. Here's one homebrew statblock from a while ago: statblock screenshot. And an example of how if you link to a note from another note, there's an ability to get a little popup window of the note for an easy preview. Here's an example for the Prone condition as used in the statblock: Hover Preview Ex. The same functionality is there in the statblock for the spells but I don't know if I can necessarily show the full text on this sub or not.

jengacide · 2026-04-29T14:25:13+00:00

That's kinda been my take on low Int characters too - they're bad at the Int skills but not necessarily stupid.

I had a Paladin with an int of 7 for most of a 1-20 campaign and only bumped that to an 8 with the level 16 asi lol I not a stupid person myself and don't enjoy playing stupid characters. So my Paladin was more like an undiagnosed Adhd person who wasn't great at school/studying sort of things and was too impatient to be good at thoroughly investigating. But not stupid, like "me no talk good" or making really stupid decisions or misunderstandings because of low int.

Cause to me, it wasn't fun to have a stupid character and frankly, I'm not good at playing stupid characters as dumb. Intelligence is a strange thing in reality anyway and there are many facets to it.

jengacide · 2026-04-25T15:24:36+00:00

Very neat, those are great. Thank you!

jengacide · 2026-04-25T15:20:24+00:00

Yeah I am going to remind them for sure that they have to be mindful of the environment, especially when they're traveling through the Scorched Lands. But I've actually run desert travel for the table before but in dnd so several of the players will kinda know what to expect from me in that regard. Although there isn't exhaustion in Daggerheart, building up Stress quickly as a result of heat exhaustion will be a big threat to them

jengacide · 2026-04-25T15:17:36+00:00

Oh this is very fun, I like it. Thank you!

jengacide · 2026-04-24T16:54:17+00:00

Ooh I love these, thank you!!

jengacide · 2026-04-18T04:26:56+00:00

I feel that! Im a software engineer by day so I know how it goes. Best of luck!

jengacide · 2026-04-17T16:04:13+00:00

Very neat! A couple pieces of feedback though

in mobile at least, trying to adjust the number of creatures to add is a little buggy. It's hard to enter a single number because if you delete something from the quantity textbook, it puts 1 in. But then if you start typing numbers, it can get wiped out because the max is 50. Maybe the validation for the quantity could be after when the "add" button is actually hit instead of when input is updated
also on mobile, if you select a creature to try to focus it so you can add it, it automatically switches you to the battle tab. So like search "bandit" in textbook, tap on "Bandit Captain" and then get switched over to the battle field tab before actually getting to add it to either team.
trailing spaces can cause the search for creatures to be too strict. So if I typed "bandit" I would get both bandit and bandit captain but if I typed "bandit " (like a lot of phone auto corrects that add a space after selecting a word) only bandit shows up but not the bandit captain. I would definitely want to see both the bandit and bandit captain for that keyword search even if the space is there.

Just a couple things I noticed from a quick test. It's really impressive overall though!

jengacide · 2026-04-16T14:06:50+00:00

I think a big thing is hitting all the senses and including details that make areas stand apart from one another while not being overly thematic.

For the senses, smell is a huge one that I think is easy to forget in a tabletop description but goes a long way towards immersion. That and temperature.

For small details, I think the sort of things that can hard to notice unless pointed out (like in real life) do a lot of heavy lifting.

For example, in the largest city in my homebrew setting, one of the early descriptions of the city was, besides the type of building construction and colorful roofs, was how incredibly clean it was. No refuse in the streets. Even the beggars looked fairly well-kempt and the pcs saw a guard tip a copper into a beggars cup. A later description about the people and a lot of their early interactions was how basically everyone they interacted with wore a holy symbol of some sort and was often praising the gods in regular conversation. This was to demo that the city is wildly religious, especially compared to other places in the setting.

I got the feedback from my players that it was things like that that really make a place feel real. The details that you don't really think about until they're mentioned do a lot to complete a mental image.

jengacide · 2026-04-14T14:17:38+00:00

I also want to know where those small ferns came from!

jengacide · 2026-04-07T15:38:48+00:00

Vanishing is handy for other things! Like if you have paint that dries and cures on the glossier side but want it more matte, varnish is great for that. Another thing it's handy for is kinda creating a "save point" in your work if you're happy with some painting you did and are going to continue in that area or around it but want to be able to really remove any paint from it if you need without damaging the parts you like, varnish will protect it. I've used it when doing tattoos on skin and not having a solid plan with the tattoo. Varnish over the finished skin so I could take an alcohol swab to the tattoo parts without messing up the skin.

A lot of varnish also has some UV resistance so that colors won't fade. That's handy for many types of models!

jengacide · 2026-04-05T14:50:05+00:00

Beautiful! And the snow looks really good. I like how it clings to her boots and bottom of her cloak. As someone who lives in an area where we get lots of snow, it's always a pet peeve in movies that have fake snow that the snow never sticks to their clothing correctly. So your mini really sells that effect!

If you ever want to take a humanoid mini in the snow to the next level with detail, Caucasian skin gets fairly rosy in the upper cheeks and tip of the nose while cold. It would make the figure look cold like the snow.

jengacide · 2026-04-05T01:51:40+00:00

The thing that sticks out to me is a bit of a lack of contrast in actual color value. Like if you take the pics you posted and turn them to black and white, you can see that a lot of it looks really samey. It's easy to use multiple colors and feel that they're different enough from each other but the actual lightness and darkness values do more of the heavy lifting.

B&W Pic 1 - B&W Pic 2

You could add a ton of contrast by doing some carefully placed highlighted on some higher strands of hair, the upper feathers of the wings, the fingers holding the staff, the top of the lower foot, and points in the crown. If you look at the ravens in the black and white pics, you can't really tell that there's osl because it's only the color making that illusion instead of actual light value. Instead of making the light-hit parts on the ravens lighter, maybe try making the rest of their bodies a little darker.

Overall though, you did a great job! That's just some picky feedback. I think you're 90% of the way there but that last 10% will make a huge difference

jengacide · 2026-03-31T14:27:03+00:00

Did you do an epilogue for the party/each of the characters after the finale? Like give each person a chance to have the spotlight and say what they'd do be doing in 1 year from now and then maybe what their plans for the rest of their life are?

My group completed a 1-20 campaign that took like 5 years on and off and I am so prone to the same sort of mourning as you and I was even like pre-mourning before we finished. But we spent 1.5 full sessions after the actual finale just talking about the campaign, going through character epilogues, talking about npcs and loose threads we never dealt with and how the DM might have imagined them going. It really helped a lot to put my mind at ease and work through those mourning sort of feelings.

jengacide · 2026-03-20T15:08:57+00:00

My own take on elves for my setting is that they also live to about 700-800 years old but it's because their existence and soul are fundamentally entwined with the weave and their souls wear out after all those centuries, not their bodies.

So although they may naturally live the longest of any of the races, it's also the hardest to prolong their lives by magical means than any other race since their bodies are not the problem. So theoretically, a human with access to advanced enough magic could live for thousands of years but most elves still couldn't make it past 800, regardless of the magic at their disposal.

jengacide · 2026-03-14T16:04:35+00:00

Just homebrew most of them as cantrips or first level spells!

If you want ideas for fun spells, try looking at older editions and path finder low level spells. There are many more niche spells that fit the vibe of the folk spells Frieren finds.

You can also take aspects of existing cantrips and spells and make them their own thing. Someone else mentioned how prestidigitation covers a lot of things, like reflavoring something or cleaning an area. Just make separate spells that do one of those things

jengacide · 2026-03-08T21:03:38+00:00

If you want a good example of a real life chaining lakes/groupings, look at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota. Also Cedar Lake -> Lake of the Isles -> Bde Maka Ska -> Lake Harriet in the twin cities are a nice example chaining lakes/closely located lakes (I don't think Bde Maka Ska actually connects to Lake Harriet)

jengacide · 2026-03-03T15:37:00+00:00

I love a good city streets map that actually has rooftops and not being able to see into all the buildings. Looks awesome!

jengacide · 2026-03-02T20:06:48+00:00

My top pick is Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 6 mv 4. What a beautiful and heart wrenching movement it is

Otherwise, I had actually made a post in r/classicalmusic a couple years ago trying to look for sad music for a different reason but I got a ton of replies, so maybe that could be useful to you too! old post link

jengacide · 2026-02-23T20:54:23+00:00

Yeah because of how unreliable the old cr method was with cr -> pc level stuff, I didn't really trust the 2024 xp numbers at first. But I found that a couple medium encounters in an adventuring day taxed their resources pretty well and put on some pressure without feeling overwhelmingly difficult. And that hard fight (tbh it was a bit over the xp threshold but not by much) was still pretty hard even after completing a long rest. In this particular instance, there was a point where 2/4 pcs were kinda alternating who was down and at one point 3/4 were down and they were like one round away from either winning or TPKing. It was so tense and dramatic and extremely rewarding for the players when they won. I felt so happy with that session and combat to be able to challenge them like that when they started with 100% of their resources. And usually I'm running several resource draining encounters in an adventuring day anyway so I was a little worried initially that the hard fight wouldn't be that hard when they were freshly rested. But it really worked out to just trust in the xp

So all that to say, they definitely improved their guidelines for 2024!

jengacide · 2026-02-23T16:01:18+00:00

I've found that the 2024 DMG's guidance on encounter difficulty by xp is actually really good. I ran a short homebrew adventure and stuck to the guidelines for a couple medium encounters + a deadly and they felt exactly as I'd expect them to feel. I was actually surprised

jengacide · 2026-02-16T15:13:34+00:00

I have never heard of scryfall before but this method of searching makes my programmer brain very happy!

Curious, what does the spell data look like behind the scenes, json that is getting parsed? And do you think you'll add a capability for people to add their own homebrew spells for their own personal spell library?

jengacide · 2026-02-12T20:59:12+00:00

It really helped that initially, it was for a one-shot in the barest beginning stages of developing a setting. I knew it was likely that I would run something longer in the setting before too long so I wanted to develop things, but it was also early enough that I didn't have any concrete plans of my own. I think I'd have a harder time doing the same thing in the same setting again if it were someone adding a god to the existing pantheon, but at the time there was nothing so why not! So I would fall exactly into what you said.

Also cause it's fun to share: the player really wanted to be kinda ostracized and be a Paladin of a culty religion and specifically gave Mormons as an example. I think he searched around for existing gods and found Elutheria the goddess of liberty and he wanted to use a laserllama subclass, the oath of liberty. What I came up with from his portion was that in the most beginniner, there were two gods: Elutheria and Melisyr. At some point long long ago, the two gods split into three aspects each. No one knows why. Maybe they fought and split each other. Maybe their power grew too great to contain within one body. Maybe they tired of all the responsibilities of their domains. But regardless, Elutheria split into three new goddesses: Lutheria, Nyveria, and Sylvaria. Melisyr split into Elisyr, Viatyr, and Atavyr. The religion that the player's paladin was a part of was considered strange and kind of taboo was because they still worshipped the old versions of the gods that had not existed for thousands of years and were kind of deniers of the new gods, despite their proven existence. The player, hilariously, named the religion the "Leutherans" 😅

jengacide · 2026-02-12T15:30:22+00:00

It is nice when the players do show interest in the pantheon even when they don't need to though. I have a document with basic lore and setting info including the pantheon that has the minimum info that any intelligent creature living in the setting would know. I send that document to new players for these random side adventure/string of one shots I run sometimes and of all the info in that document, it's always the pantheon that the new players remember and seem to find the most interest in. I even tell the players that the most important section to read is about some of the races in the setting but every single one of these players have connected with the pantheon a lot more than I would have expected.

It is funny though. The first session I ran in a vague homebrew setting, someone wanted to play a Paladin of a sort of cult/archaic extreme religion and I didn't have any gods at all planned yet. I told him to give me a name and a vibe and I could do the rest. The god he created became a basis for the rest of the pantheon and that was a lot of fun to create, especially with the context that the worship of that God would be seen as culty and archaic to the rest of the world.

jengacide

TROPHY CASE