I go against recommended practice and have different vaults for different things in my life. The academic note vault is separate from the personal vault is separate from the creative projects vault. I have also committed sacrilege by not having many notes linked to each other. I’m trying to migrate a lot of notes from Google Docs and Notion over into Obsidian, so all of the vaults are pretty messy.
I love the LaTeX integration. Lots of math formulas in the academic note vault. I use the callout feature everywhere. I also nest callouts in callouts. I’m frankly treating them as equivalent to toggles in Notion.
I most often go to the personal vault where I have a list of things I’ve 1) seen online before, 2) spent at least an hour trying to refind that thing later and 3) will probably want to find again. This way I don’t lose time trying to find it again. It’s really helpful for me. I also have a list of food brands and how much I liked them, so I can remember which brand of turkey was bad and which was tolerable and which I’d definitely buy again.
I have two vaults: one for general purpose notes, and one for the homebrew D&D campaign I’m running. In the regular Notes vault, there’s very little cross-lining except for one section where I was studying for a certification. In the D&D vault, I use links and tags quite a bit.
Part of my creative projects vault is ideas for a homebrew D&D campaign! What’s yours like? I need to flesh out my world a little and add a few spicy situations before it’s ready for players.
I’m actually really happy with how world building went. I came up with a basic idea: a world where magic and non-humans hadn’t existed for thousands of years, but suddenly magic begins to return–kind of like Shadowrun, but without the cyberpunk. Then I added in a group modeled vaguely on the Overseers from Dishonored to be a force of anti-magic social sentiment.
The next step was a couple of prequel oneshots. Since I’m bad at oneshots, those ended up being 4-5 sessions each. They were set about 30 and then about 15 years before the return of magic, and allowed the players to become familiar with the basic setting and to introduce some places and characters.
The crucial step was then doing a few rounds of Microscope with the players. Using that as a worlbuilding tool after we already built a shaded understanding of the basics of the world allowed us to collaboratively generate a really detailed and interesting history.
Between the oneshots and Microscope, the players are all really invested in the world they’re playing in. I can throw out references to things and they actually catch them and are excited by them, because they’re either things that their oneshot characters did or experienced, or they’re things they created themselves in Microscope.
Needless to say this all made for tons of notes in Obsidian.