How to create a political map

[Acenoid]

Hi there!

How did you implement a political structure of the various regions of a country?

Here is an example:
http://www.wiki-aventurica.de/wiki/Baronie_Pandlaril

you can see that "weiden" holds a few bigger areas, that comprise of many more smaller areas, which again divide into a few cities.

Probably the political map is not so important, so I wondering if it would be best to have only a single topic describing this part... Otherwise it feels more complete with this information.

[pyremius]

One method would be to use Containing Topics to nest Topics in the following order.

Region: Political > Region: Political > (etc.) > Community > Region: Urban > Location/Merchant

[MNBlockHead]

I do the same as pyremius. Normally, I would have jumped in and added the political regions first, but I wanted to be comfortable with the tool and make sure I knew which topics I should be/wanted to be using. That said, the early you set this up, the better, so you can take advantage of autolinking.

I've only begun using the tool and am still in the early stages of my campaign design, but so far, I have created topics for the Kingdoms/Empires. For the kingdom that the players will start in, I've divided it into Amker (kinda like a county/shire), and then I've put the major cities in the appropriate Amker. Amkers are also divided into Wapentake, but I'm holding off on these for now as they are somewhat population-size dependent (are a region responsible for supplying 100 men and four rowed row boats, similar to "Hundredths" in Britain). I may be creating Wapentake boundries a bit on the fly. Within, towns, I typically just create locations for major buildings and merchants. For some locations I do a lot of this work up front manually. Either from scratch or from third-party adventure modules and maps. For others, esp. if my players take too much advantage of my open world style and I need to create something on the fly, I use CC3 to automate the generation of maps of entire villages and random-encounter lists (modified by common sense and the story) to determine what a building is and who and what it contains. Realmworks makes it easy to jot these down on a smart map so, should the players return, there is some continuity (though, there are times, like random villager hut 1,263, where I just don't bother. I figure stuff happens and if a different peasant family happens to be there when they return, that's not at all unusual.

However, it is easy to put move things into topics, so don't worry about fleshing out all levels of your organization. Kingdoms and major cities might be sufficient for most DMs to get started.

So, to get back to the original point. My structure is:

Federation->Kingdom/Empire->Major Regional Division (province/state/Amker)->Local Division (county/shire/municipality/hundredths/wappentake)->Settlement (city/town/village)->Building

Kingdoms and regions outside the Empire (there are only a few), may be similar, but I plan on having fun with some very different political structures (or lack there of), such as tribes in the Northern wastelands. The Frost Giants of Jutenheim, the Tue Manu'a Empire (which is spread across a large number of islands), the beast peoples loosely ruled by the Yaksha Kingdom, the Druidic hermit island kindgom of Nechtanland, etc.

For example:

1. The Federation of Eight Realms (a federation of Human and dwarven kingdoms that rose out of a Great War against the elves more than 400 years ago—the elves have been pushed out of the known world and gnomes and halflings area are protectorates of the dwarven kingdoms).
1.1 The Kingdom of Menskriki
1.1.1 Vestfjord Amker (some Amker are traditional Northman "counties"/provinces)
1.1.1.1 Almfjord Wapentake
1.1.1.1.1 The City of Almfjord (smaller cities may be part of a larger Wapentake, larger cities may be their own Wapentake, and very large cities may be divided into multiple Wapentake, though to keep organization simpler, I've decided not to split cities into multiple Wapentake and instead assume that, the number of men a Wapentake would be required to muster is dependent upon its population. I'm also assuming that this allowed for easier administration of conquered areas where Amker and Wapentake could roughly match prior Kingdom/Province/Shire/Municipality boundaries.
1.1.2 Dakija Amker (other Amkers are roughly the same size a conquered and absorbed shires or even a small conquered kingdom may have become a single large Amker)
1.1.3 ... (Menskriki is divided into 24 Amker, each ruled by a Jarl, who is subservient to the High King, who also sits at the head of the Federation).

1.2 The Rasane Empire
1.3 Kutgubland
1.4 Khakunun Khaganate
1.5 Oguz Empire
1.6 Khazudbhunad
1.7 Huazhao Empire
1.8 Felbulan

I have not fleshed out the major regions for each of the eight realms, focusing mostly on Menskriki for now.