FVTT R-Maps

This is a tool to help you make r-maps, a.k.a. relationship maps, Anacapa charts, conspiracy maps, in your Foundry VTT game.

Place tokens, draw lines between them, and have those lines automatically update as you move the tokens around.

How-to

1. Install and enable fvtt-r-maps
   • Optionally, advanced-drawing-tools and tokenmagic.
2. Make a scene for your r-map.
   • I like to use a cork-board background.
3. Add tokens for your actors that you want to connect on the map.
   • I like to put these tokens in little polaroid-picture frames and rotate them randomly a few degrees left or right. It adds to the aesthetic.
4. Give the players ownership permissions on any actors that they will need to move, or draw lines out from.
   • For some tables, this may be only their characters. For others, maybe this is everyone having ownership over everyone. Make the right call for your group and play needs!
   • However, I will caution that you are likely to get the most ease-of-use out of making every token owned by every player. Perhaps you then lock things down later if you need, perhaps not, but at the time of drawing lines and moving things around, communism is the watchword!
5. To draw a line, drag from one token you control to any other.
   • Optionally, once your lines are all set, the GM or any players with drawing permissions can add labels to them, or restyle them, or use advanced-drawing-tools to add some intermediate points in them and curve them.

About R-Maps

• Paul's R-Map Method

TODO

• permissions stuff is weird? Users are having perms errors in the console, but it all seems to be working anyway. Not a comforting situation.

  ETA: What was happening: the user updated their token, triggering Token._onUpdate both locally, and on the GM's side. The local call failed with permissions problems, the GM call succeeded and then propagated the change to the player's view.

• write unit tests. Quench?

• add CI.

• add git-tag based CD release process.

• make a demonstration animated gif.

• make a tutorial video.

These might be handled by Advanced Drawing Tools:

• colour and style. (wouldn't it be great if the style were red yarn?)

• support adding intermediate control points and getting bezier-y?

  Advanced Drawing Tools can do this one as-is, with caveats mentioned below.

Nice-to-have:

• add labels on edges that follow the arc.

• add endcap arrows.

  (This will require edges not ending at the token center, but actually calculating edge collision.)

• Add additional data to edges that let you set up programmatic filters

  ("show all edges from this node", "show all edges labeled 'family'", etc.)

• make this all happen on a dedicated RMapLayer, with edge selection and drawing tools on the same submenu.

• package polaroid token frame and corkboard background with the module, pending finding some with proper licensing.

Mods to synergize with

• https://github.com/dev7355608/advanced-drawing-tools

  • You can add nodes and add Smoothing Factor to get nice arcs, but as soon as you move any connected token, the line will snap back to being straight.
  • Since the lines are just lines, you can't apply fill to them. So no yarn styling yet.
  • No text-that-follows-line-arc yet.

• https://github.com/Feu-Secret/Tokenmagic

  • Just having this enabled on your game will get some reasonable defaults on your edges.

• https://foundryvtt.com/packages/vtta-tokenizer

  • This is great for making tokens with a frame, such as the polaroid picture frame I used the demos.

• https://foundryvtt.com/packages/move-that-for-you

  • Careful about this one; it is more likely to lead to trouble than just giving players ownership over tokens will.
  • Enable MT4U on tokens.
  • Then the GM can mark all tokens on the r-map sheet as moveable.
  • But the players should be careful not to draw lines from tokens they don't own, because that'll still fail, and leave the board in an ugly state.