creating journal-based maps in foundry vtt - part 1 - basic setup

I was recently playing around with Foundry journals, which I'd not used a lot if at all previously despite having been running games in Foundry for a year or so now, and realised that I'd been doing it all wrong, or at least not using a very powerful tool for campaign organisation. I'd been adding pins to maps just to indicate where something was, and ignoring it when it asked me if I wanted to create a journal note because why would I do that?

Now I think that starting from the journal - or at least creating a journal at the same time as setting up a map - is what's going to make everything easiest. Instead of creating a map then adding notes, create the notes then add them to the map.

This is part one of a tutorial going from first principles as to what I mean. This is supposed to be absolutely starting from nothing, so if anything is even the slightest confusing, please leave a comment and I'll fix it.

Setting up the sandbox map

I'm using the terrain generation procedure from the excellent Sandbox Generator to create a small local map with Hex Kit as an example of a simple initial sandbox.

Let's import that into Foundry now. Set up a new scene and use the exported map as a background. This is a bit of a pain to do tbqh and you need to mess with the grid configuration tool, changing the dimensions incrementally until it looks right, but you only have to do this once.

For this example we'll also turn token vision off so that the players can see the whole scene.

That looks ok to me. So now we have a scene with the basic map in Foundry.

Now we create a journal for that map. This is a document that's going to hold information on the map for players and the GM. It can be accessed at any time when logged in to see any notes or other important information about things on the map.

Go to the "Journals" tab and click "Create Journal Entry". I'm calling it "Overland Areas".

Once you've done this, if you want players to be able to see the items on the map and also read the journal entries for them, which they probably should be able to, it's important to set the permissions on the journal, as it defaults to just the GM being able to see it. Right-click on the "Overland Areas" journal, click "Configure Ownership"...

...then set "All Players" to "Observer". Note that this means that any pages you add will be visible to everyone by default, but we can hide individual pages, which we will do later.

Creating the first landmark

Sandbox Generator has a lot of detailed procedures for populating individual hexes, but I'm not going to run through all of them for this example because it's about Foundry not Sandbox Generator. One thing it does say though is:

For a traditional campaign (first going into a dungeon, then exploring the wilderness at higher levels), the first hex always contains a village and the second one a dungeon.

That makes sense, let's do that and put it in the journal. The starting village, rolling on the appropriate tables, is called "Nicholas Cester" for some reason. Open the journal, click "New Page" on the bottom left of the window, and create a page called "Nicholas Cester". That will then appear as a new page on the left hand side.

Now drag that heading from the index onto the map. Let's change the icon from the default of "Book" to the one for "Village", then click save.

Now the map looks like this:

Nicholas Cester doesn't have any details yet, so from the journal page, I edit the journal entry by selecting the page, hovering over the title to show the edit icon...

...then typing in some text, making sure to click the "Save Changes" button when I'm done.

What's so great about this?

Double-clicking on the map marker as either a player or GM will now bring up that journal entry. As GM you can add the history of the place, important characters, facilities, an explanation of why it has this name and what "Cester" means at all, and so on.

Furthermore, players can see the journal in their journal tab, open it, and if they right click either the journal or a page that represents an area, they get the option to "jump to pin", which will move the map immediately to any marker you've dragged. (Admittedly this is a really small map right now so that part is not so useful, but it's a lot more handy on larger maps.)

More areas

You can do the exact same thing for any number of areas, creating pages then dragging them onto the map. I have set up the Forest of Wasps for instance, with general knowledge of what that is:

In part 2...

In the next part I will set up an entirely separate map for a dungeon, also powering it from the journal, but this time with hidden GM-only pages for room keys.

here is part 2 »