Why not Logseq?

Idea is nice but IMO lacks the Chinese whispers effect. The fact that someone has heard about you before meeting you does not mean they heard the good part. Or the truth, even.
In the current form it could even be a roll against levels gained or cities visited

character was always fucking up

That reminded me. In BitD a lot rides on presentation. Try to not make failed/complicated rolls about the characters failing but the circumstances not being in their favor, instead

They didn't break the lockpick - they noticed a nasty trap in the lock just in time to not get stung, the lock will need more work
They didn't get hit when grappling with a guard - they hear footsteps approaching (trauma in general is the least interesting choice, unless you feel it's time for it to appear in the story) They didn't make noise when sneaking by - there was a loose plank in the floor they had no way of noticing

From my experience, when you most often aim at coming up with new external problems (like those footsteps), characters will start to bounce off them, instead of just progressing through the story. It might feel like you can't ever really challenge them but on the other side of the table something can always come up and they have to constantly think on their feet, which simulates the feel of a heist.

Unless placed so it builds tension, "you missed" most often just breaks the flow of the plot. It's a temporary setback that doesn't build anything. "You got him clean but it's the funny/irritating/popular/w/e guy among the guards. Everyone knows him. I'm marking first piece on alarm clock because sooner or later they will notice he's not around tonight" - that builds tension and the world even if during this heist it will be the last piece marked on that clock

I'll put writing a post about that on my to-do list :)

Logseq for notes and "Lazy GM" checklist, GIMP for carving out maps from the ones I have, Tiled to populate them. Tarot (I mean the cards, not some software) for populating initial background connections when I'm completely stuck

EDIT: I know that this will be unpopular here but I also use Mistral to convert my dry three sentences into radio speaker text with the right angle or mail exchanges my players "might" find on the host while hacking

Windows finally has persistent workspace order? Last time I was forced to try Windows out, there was no way to consistently switch to a workspace without looking at it to figure out which one it is

It's open source, no need to sell ;)

Some video that will probably be more digestible

What's underneath

I'm not sure from what POV you are coming, so first of all: Logseq allows you to write notes in markdown format (I don't know how canvas' work but it also should be some open standard. SVG maybe?). It is versatile while still being readable in pure text format. It also means that those are mostly pure files, so you can back them up however you want, you can move them to another markdown editor, another notes management program, etc.

Tags and references

Now, let's say that after an adventure you want to have some news for your players. I would go about it this way:

• create a note containing only the text of the news
  • tag it (file property) with news, radio #1, maybe a reference to the parent adventure? Depends how you will want to view it in the future
• in the adventure put header [[post mortem]], so it also is a reference to post mortem note (does not need to exist ATM)
  • underneath put header [[news]], so news tag/page (Logseq does not really differentiate between tags and links) will also get a reference to this adventure.
    • udnerneath embed our note with a TODO/DONE, so you can mark if you passed it to them already

That way, after a bunch of adventures

1. you can open post mortem page and see all references from all the adventures
2. you can open news page and see a list of all pages tagged with news
   • you can also put in some query to group them, but we'll get back to that later
3. you can open radio #1 and see all the news they said
   • and add some general notes about it, directly in that file. With links to background notes
4. you can open an adventure and read the whole write-up from the conception to post mortem (if you organized it that way. I could see someone splitting those up again into separate notes)
5. you can open a news note and see in which adventure it's referenced
   • if you used some tags/links in the note itself, you can also, in the note for big bad, see in which notes they were referenced

Summary notes and tag structure

Let's say you have a bunch of adventures, some tagged as adventure some as adventure/done. Logseq will recognize the latter as a part of a structure, same as if those were directories. But since everything is a note, you can have a adventure note that is like a summary for all the adventures (you will get a list of all references out of the box). Or a note act 1/adventures with only the adventures in that act (and background tags structure shared between them). With queries, you can in any note get a list of for example all notes that are act 1, and not tagged with adventure/done. So you still can have hierarchies where it makes sense, but you are not locked out of some name for a note because there is a directory with that name (like Obsidian does and why I decided to phase out of it). BTW, you can also embed only one point from another page. So you can take a reference to a point in the plan for an adventure from the past, embed it in another note, and if you decide to add some info to it, editing it in the embedding note will also affect all the other occurrences of that point

TL;DR

So in general it's very versatile, very tag-based, while not locking you out of directory-like structures and based on pure-text files (you can embed images) that are readable by other tools too

What was the thing that you didn't like in Obsidian? I use Logseq (like Obsidian but Open Source and purer tag-based), both have canvas type of notes if you want to "enter text wherever"

Mostly stuff that is not fantasy and not a spaceship

I don't suppose I see all that is happening in modern+ RPG branch (niche?). But I do support a few creators on Patreon, I follow a few creators on DTRPG, I follow a bunch of blogs. And I see all walks of AIGen

• things without AIGen that look well good for the creators that they are able to do the content AND a cover image/presentation
• things without AIGen that look poor but the content is good I would not hold it against the creators to try improve the looks with AIGen. I know that this is the point we don't agree on, I just wanted to point this out
• things with AIGen that have good contents clearly the creators like from the previous point but after taking that decision
• things with AIGen that IMO are crap yeah, this is a waste of everything

That's why I'm more in "let downvotes tell the story" camp. Because in the end it's not the use of AIGen that makes a thing bad. It's the decision of the creator that "this is good enough". And without covering the bad stuff too, we are just sweeping it under the rug

I have an example where I'm sure the dry presentation does a disservice to the content. For someone who does not care about AI vs no-AI, it will look less professional than the titles next to it. But I don't want to turn this into a vivisection of a particular example

I think https://piefed.zip/post/511096#comment_1614098 also addresses this point

No. For one I don't believe it will replace artists. What I expect is that we will never be able to hold wotc, hasbro, etc to this standard. Which means they'll have an even higher advantage against one-person creators
The artists working for big ones will be using AIGen to speed up their work. Same as using search engines to find info and references
Creators for which the AIGenned cover is enough, won't commission a real artist anyway
I'm afraid that such rule here ( meaning we are social network, not the shop) would skew the scale towards the big ones - they'll be getting more coverage, even here