Tutorial 06 Realms and provinces

Part of the tutorial: page 6 of 12

▶ Watch this page: part 6 of the tutorial video (about 1 min), with narration and subtitles.

Tutorial 6: Realms and provinces

Make the generated realms your own, merging, renaming and recolouring them, and paint a region of your own in a set of its own.

Start from: 05-populating-the-world.json, the map as it is at the end of Tutorial 05 Populating the world. Download it, then open Maps on the rail and click Import JSON; the map is listed under its name, and Load opens it. Or carry on with your own map from Tutorial 05 Populating the world.

The Regions tool shows the map's areas: kingdoms and their duchies, but also climate bands, trade zones or a campaign's explored land. Regions are painted onto the map's cells, so neighbouring regions always share their border exactly. They are organised in layer sets (one way of dividing the map), each holding layers (Realms, then Duchies below them, then Counties), each holding its regions.

The run on page 5 made a set called Political. Anything you change in it is kept when you generate again.

Steps

1. Click Regions on the rail. The Sets list holds two sets: Regions, the empty set every new map starts with, and Political, the run's. Click Political: its Realms list shows the seventeen realms, and choosing a realm shows its duchies in the list below, and a duchy its counties.

   

   The Political set: Realms, then Duchies and Counties below.

2. The large island east of the continent is split between two realms, Newcestedia in the north and Chisted in the south. Click Newcestedia in the Realms list, then its Focus view button: the map zooms to it, and it opens in the inspector.

   

   Newcestedia, chosen and open in the inspector.

3. Unite the island: open the ⋮ menu on Chisted's row and choose Merge into. In the dialogue, choose Newcestedia.

   

   Merging Chisted into Newcestedia.

4. Click Confirm. Chisted's land goes to Newcestedia, and its duchies and counties now belong to Newcestedia, keeping their own land.

5. In the inspector, change Name to Islemark and press Enter, then set the Fill Colour to #3f8f7a, a sea green. A region you rename, repaint or restyle counts as edited: generating again keeps it, with its whole realm. (To keep a region you have not changed, click the lock on its row.)

   

   Islemark, the island's one realm, in its new colour.

6. Regions are not only for realms. Click Reset view, then click the Regions set in the Sets list and open its ⋮ menu: choose Rename, type Lands and press Enter. Its layer, Layer 1, is ready to paint. Click Edit layer on the layer's heading and set Territorial waters to 0, so its regions own land only.

   

   The Lands set, with its layer open in the inspector.

7. Click + Region in Lands at the foot of Layer 1's list, type The Red Hills and press Enter: the new region is the one being painted. Choose Paint on the bar, set Size to 60 px, and paint over the desert in the east of the continent; zoom in to see it closely. While you paint, only the layer you are painting is drawn, so the realms do not get in the way.

   

   The Red Hills painted over the eastern desert.

   Fill on the bar gives a whole connected area to the region in one click, and Erase takes cells away. On a layer below another, a region paints only inside its parent region.

8. Choose Select on the bar to stop painting, close the inspector, and save the map.

What you should see

The large eastern island is one realm, Islemark, in sea green, with its duchies and counties as they were. A Lands set holds one region, the Red Hills, over the eastern desert.

To compare your map with the tutorial's, or to start the next page from exactly this map, download 06-realms-and-provinces.json and import it in Maps with Import JSON.

In Foundry

Everything on this page is the same in Foundry. When the map is exported to a scene, each region the map names gets a page in the scene's journal (see Export).

On your own map

Use the generated realms as a starting point: merge, rename and repaint them until the map tells your story, and lock the ones you like before you generate again. A set of your own can divide the map any way you need: climate bands, trade zones, a campaign's explored land. + Layer below adds a layer under the last one, so you can lay out provinces inside your regions. See Regions for the layer and set settings, borders, nesting and mass edit.

Next: Tutorial 07 Roads and sea lanes

Related: Regions, Generate, Styles and icons