Obsidian - Aprils Automatic Timelines

April’s Automatic Timelines turns Obsidian notes into a clean, vertical timeline for tabletop RPG campaigns—pulling event titles, dates, summaries, and optional images directly from each event note’s front matter. The big practical win is that it keeps event data in the vault as plain markdown files, avoiding the “data.json disappearing” anxiety that has surrounded Fantasy Calendar’s storage layer during its rebuild.

Setup starts with installing the Community plugin “April’s automatic timelines,” then configuring which front matter keys hold the timeline’s start date, end date, title, body, and picture. Out of the box, the plugin expects a specific set of keys (like AET event title and AET event body), but the configuration can be adjusted to match a user’s own templates. A key integration point is Fantasy Calendar support: enabling Fantasy Calendar presets lets the timeline read FC-style fields (FC date, FC end, FC display name, FC calendar, and FC category) so both systems stay synchronized.

Event notes are where the timeline magic happens. Each note includes front matter wrapped in triple-dash delimiters, with a render flag (render enabled) that determines whether the note appears on the timeline. The note also declares a timeline name (timelines), and can optionally define multiple timeline names—useful for splitting content into a “master” timeline and smaller year-based timelines. The plugin uses the note’s front matter to decide where it lands on the timeline, and it sorts by the configured date fields rather than the filename.

When rendered, each timeline entry shows an image (the first image in the note), an event title, a short two-line summary drawn from the note content, and a clickable entry that jumps to the underlying note. Overlapping or closely spaced dates cause the timeline’s side markers to break into multiple lines, creating a more readable visualization when events cluster.

A notable advanced feature is configurable date parsing via regex. By default, the plugin assumes a day-month-year format, but the parser can be changed to support “funky” date formats—so campaigns that store dates differently can still generate correct placements. The transcript also flags that this regex-based configuration may change as the plugin’s maintainers simplify it, so checking the readme is recommended.

For users already relying on Fantasy Calendar, the workflow becomes even smoother: Fantasy Calendar can read the same front matter fields from notes, meaning events can be stored once and displayed in both places. The transcript advises keeping events as notes rather than relying on Fantasy Calendar’s UI-created entries, citing reports of issues with the underlying data.json.

Finally, the plugin’s limitations are straightforward: there’s no horizontal timeline option at present, and it won’t work with Obsidian Publish because plugins generally don’t run there. Still, the overall result is a fast, template-driven way to build RPG campaign indexes—potentially even chapter-by-chapter book navigation—using nothing more than structured note front matter and a rendered timeline view.