creating journal-based maps in foundry vtt - part 2 - hiding things

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Cester

Firstly I did look up "Cester" as a place name suffix and it's derived from the Latin castrum, indicating that the area once had a Roman fort - like Leicester. Similarly "-chester" (Colchester) and "-caster" (Doncaster). I should have known this. I'm not changing it now though because

1. I've already done a load of screenshots;
2. "Nicholascester" sounds absurd;
3. A lot of real world places do have names that have been corrupted from the original derivation, and also there's no reason I need to follow English place name rules. Maybe in this world "Cester" is just a term for a fortified town. It's the fort set up by Nicholas whoever he was. Hell I'm going with this.

Anyway, this post finishes off the idea of adding map pins by talking about ones that are hidden to the players. In many or indeed most cases the players shouldn't be able to see either a pin or a journal entry for something because their characters simply don't know it's there.

Hidden pins and pages

For example I want to put an area to the north called the "Swamp Keep of Raia-Ann", which is currently undiscovered but the players may eventually find clues to. Or they may not. If I just add the page as before they'll immediately see it.

In this case I create a page, then right click on it in the page list to get the "configure ownership" option. Note that this is the same as we did in the previous post only this time we're changing ownership on an individual page, not the whole journal.

This time the ownership for "All Players" should be "None".

Now you can see that there's a blue cross-out eye icon to the right of that page. This means the player can't see it or, importantly, any map pin that is based on it.

I drag the page onto the map as previously and as GM I can see it fine.

Players, however, can't, and won't be able to until such time as the GM changes the permissions to let them - either by re-configuring the ownership as above, or using the "Show Players" option in the same menu, which will also make it pop up on their screens.

Sub-pages

Let's expand the hidden pin setup with an example of using the same journal on multiple maps. While everyone knows about the Forest of Wasps (how would you not know about it) what's less well known is that on the far side is the Grove of the Wasp Queen. I created a new page, made it hidden to players, and put it on the far side of the Forest, editing the marker to be yellow. (You can avoid the markers snapping to the grid by holding SHIFT while dragging.)

An extra thing I did here was change the level of the page, so that it's clear in the journal that this is part of the Forest of Wasps - it indents it in the page list.

One journal, multiple maps

Let's make a map for the Grove of the Wasp Queen. Let's do it quickly though, using Watabou's cave/glade generator¹.

After that I created a couple of example pages for different areas within the grove - these are set to level 3 to indent them under the grove page.

Then I dragged them onto areas on the map. I can then write notes in the pages about what's in those areas, and also right click the pages themselves and "jump to pin" to go straight to them - handy on a larger map like this one.

As before, because I set the pages to no visibility for players, they won't be able to see these.

Secret journals

Finally, from the above screenshot you can see that we have a lot of secret pages, which we must set deliberately, because the main journal is public to players - by default players can see every page in it, and also see the journal itself in their journal tab, and open and read it whenever they please. One can also use a secret journal, which may be better for cases where you want to write a lot of pages which the players will never see.

For instance, I create a dungeon called the Stronghold of the Cursed Lady (with another watabou tool, One Page Dungeon - there is also a Foundry importer module for this called One Page Parser which makes getting these into the game super quick). Then I create a new journal entry with the same name. By default, players do not have permission to view new journals, so it doesn't appear in their journal tab, and none of the pages I add as pins will either.

You can, if you like, reveal individual pages to players, in the opposite way to hiding them - right click the page and change ownership for players to "Observer". Here, I've done that for the "East Ritual Room" page but not for any others - a player can now see just the pin for East Ritual Room, and also open the journal entry for it, so don't put anything secret in any pages you reveal to players.

What the player can't do is then look up the page later when they're off the map or their token can't see the pin, because they don't have permission to view the journal itself. So a private journal is only something to use if you don't mind lack of player reference capability, or you don't intend to ever reveal the pages anyway.

Conclusion

All sorts of style guides tell me that it's important to have a conclusion that goes over what the key points were meant to be. I think this is generally a waste of time but here goes: this and the last post were about a style of setup for Foundry maps and notes that ties journals closely to maps, but was also supposed to be a general introduction to journals in the first place, if like me you'd never really used them much before.

Actually seeing map pins

If there's one thing I'd really like people to take away from all this it's how to create map markers and journals and have your players be able to see them. Some of the time that's down to viewing permissions which I've gone over extensively, but also a lot of the time it's because they need to toggle this irritating setting:

If that's off, they won't see any map pins no matter what their permissions. This was a problem for me a lot as GM until I started using a module which I shall now write about...

Extending with other modules

Pin Cushion

I wrote all this in the context of vanilla Foundry and no extra modules, but if you're interested in using map pins I really recommend installing the Pin Cushion module. This adds a load of useful features to the system, such as:

• Forcing the "toggle notes display" feature to "on" for everyone! no more "I put a marker there" "well I can't see it" "do you have notes toggled on" "where is that setting again"
• You can drag headings from within individual journal pages to make pins of them, which saves creating lots of mostly empty pages.
• Easier to make an invisible pin, which is nice if your map already has the appropriate image on it anyway.

Ownership Viewer

It can be distinctly inobvious who can view a particular journal or page, but the Ownership Viewer module makes it a lot clearer what permissions players have by adding hoverable icons. For instance here you can see that the "Overland Areas" journal has players with "Observer" permission, but "Stronghold of the Cursed Lady" with "None".

And here you can see that pages 0 and 1 have "Inherit" permission (i.e. the same as the overall journal, which is "None" in this case) and "East Ritual Room" has "Observer" permission for players.