The Vineheart Realm — vault conventions
An Obsidian vault for a homebrew D&D setting (5e + 2024 baseline, homebrew on top).
Published to GitHub Pages via Quartz from the v4 branch, so anything not tagged
private OR has DM in front is public.
Where these conventions come from
Everything below is drawn from Kraken’s own notes, not from the AI-written passes in the vault. Those passes introduced things that were not house style (a Core concept / Friction callout template on the Peoples notes, an emoji status legend in the Gazetteer, “New to canon” flags, British spellings, and invented single-use tags), and all of them have been rolled back. Do not reintroduce them by imitating a note that still carries one.
More of the vault is AI-written than a first pass suggests. Confirmed so far:
fb98047(Peoples, Gazetteer, Items, Shieldhaven),9ae06f0(the index rewrite), andc13a0dc(the DM screen). The commit messages are a decent tell —feat:/chore:prefixes and words like “comprehensive”, “Establish”, “Enhance” cluster on the AI commits, while Kraken’s own read like “Spelling cleaning.” and “Update Character Creation.md”. Verify before inferring style from any note.
Voice
Plain voice. Kraken commissioned this direction explicitly (commit 9ae06f0,
“rewrite descriptions in plain voice”), and it’s the target for all prose.
- Short declarative sentences. Concrete over evocative.
- Contractions are sparse, roughly one per 900 words, and they cluster where the tone turns funny (“maintaining they’re DEFINITELY still feuding”). Rules and history stay in the fuller register. Don’t sprinkle them in for warmth.
- Second person for anything a player or DM has to do.
- Say what it means at the table, not what it feels like in the abstract. “When one fails, the whole continent finds out.”
- Dry humor lands at the end of a paragraph, never mid-sentence, never signposted. “…and endless amusement for the locals.” “(this was one guy, once, 150 years ago)” Both from Fallowfield, which is Kraken’s own writing.
- No epic-trailer prose. No “In a world where”, no “testament to”, no stacked adjectives, no ancient-evil-stirs framing.
- Comma splices are the house rhythm, not errors. Leave them. Same for
&in headers and terse lists (prose sentences use “and”). - Bullets can be fragments and can start lowercase. That’s fine in rules notes.
American English throughout. color, favor, honor, rumor, traveling, realize, defense, gray. Not colour, favour, travelling, realise.
Do not imitate typos or the possessive it's. Match the voice, not the slips, fix the slips.
Emphasis and numbers
- Bold proper nouns and mechanics on first mention: House Arca, Poorly Rested.
- Italics for a single stressed word: they don’t have a word for that.
- Dice bolded, odds in parens: roll a 1d20 (against the DM’s 1d10), “(8.45% Chance)“.
- Metric follows imperial: “500 lbs (about 227 kg)“.
Frontmatter
---
title: The village of Mistlin
tags:
- Arcanum
- Villages
- Mistlin
---title:is the display name and is usually longer than the filename (“Kingdom of Arcanum”, “The Wound of Divine arrogance”). Quote it if it has a colon.- Tags: two-space indent, one per line. Topic tags are CamelCase with no spaces
(
VineheartRealm,DivineWar,SecretsOfVillainy). Functional tags are lowercase (index,private,project). VineheartRealmis the general world tag; add the specific ones after it.- Reuse the existing tag vocabulary, don’t invent. Utility notes take
Tools, reference notesDetails, session notesNotes, rulesRules. A tag that ends up used in exactly one note is almost always filler — check what comparable notes already use before adding one. Entity tags (Shieldhaven,Mistlin) are the exception: those name a place other notes point at.
Structure
- Deep header nesting is normal, down to
######. Multiple#H1s as top-level sections is an accepted pattern (Fallowfield, Shieldhaven). - Empty headers are scaffolding, not omissions. Leaving a skeleton of headers for a place that isn’t written yet is intentional. Don’t fill them with filler and don’t delete them.
- Location notes open with
## Mapand an image embed. - Reuse blocks by transclusion rather than copying:
![[Godwound Containment#tide-sealing|Tide Sealing]]. - Faction and kingdom notes carry the reputation ladder, -2 to +4, with tier names specific to that faction.
Links
- Wikilinks throughout, aliased so the sentence reads naturally:
[[The Godwounded|The Wounded]]. - Link into headers when that’s the real target:
[[Peoples#the-core-races|Core Races]]. - Books link by page:
[[DnD 5e Players Handbook (BnW OCR).pdf#page=8|5e]].
Player-facing vs DM-facing
The published site filters on the DM filename prefix. That prefix is what
actually keeps a note off the site, not the tag.
Every note with secrets is split in two:
- The public note holds what players can read, and links across with
[[DM Items#bag-of-holding|DM Extras]]. - The DM note is a separate file prefixed
DM, taggedprivate, and mirrors the public note’s headers so the pair stays in sync.
The DM prefix and the private tag follow each other. A note has both or
neither — never one alone.
GM is not an old spelling of DM . Renaming a note from DM to GM is how
a finished campaign gets released to the players, so a GM note is deliberately
public and must not carry the private tag. GM GitMF Notes was published this
way when Goblins in the Misty Falls wrapped.
Never put a secret, a twist, or a stat block in a note that isn’t prefixed DM .
Adventure hooks are the exception, and depth decides. A one-line seed
(“Miners vanished after opening a Godwound-tainted seam”) stays on the public
location note; eight of them do, across the islands and poles. A developed hooks
block that gives away plot belongs in the DM note, which is why Shieldhaven’s
moved. In between, Special Sites shows the third option: keep the hook public
but label it, > [!Note] GM Note: **Adventure Hook:**.
DM and GM mark visibility, in labels as well as filenames. Game-master
material sitting on a public note is labelled GM (> [!Note] GM Note:,
# GM Screen); on a DM -prefixed note it is labelled DM. Two things keep
DM regardless: links to real DM -prefixed files (DM Items,
DM Custom Rules), since that is their actual filename, and the person running
the game (“DM adjudicates”, “player 1d20 vs DM 1d10”), since that is a role and
not a visibility marker.
Callouts
> [!Note] is the default (title case). Give it a custom title. > [!Warning]
for cautions. Callouts carry genuine asides and conditions, mostly in the rules
notes — they are not a structural template. Ordinary sections use plain ##
headers, and recurring section names across sibling notes (## Reputation,
## Map, ## Friction) are the normal way to keep a set consistent.
Never put scaffolding on a player-facing note — no “new to canon”, no “adjust freely”, no notes about what a pass invented or left undone. Untagged notes publish to players.
Open questions and provisional names do belong in the vault, just in the
private DM note, where the DM is the audience and the Gazetteer’s
what’s-written-and-what-isn’t tracking already lives. See
Names still open for the shape.
Tables and diagrams
- Encounter tables are
| Roll (d20) | Encounter |, ten rows, paired ranges 1-2 through 19-20. - Status is written in words, not emoji: Developed, Stub, Empty, Unwritten.
- Timelines are mermaid with “.