Kingdoms

Kingdoms is the game's other campaign: instead of one doomed pilgrimage to the Mountain, you defend a region's inns against an escalating invasion, on a timeline that does not care about your feelings.

Setup

The Kingdoms menu and its creation wizard read like any other screen - options, text entry for the save's name included - and existing saves list with their details for loading: name, day, difficulty, map, and the enemy gang. Right from a save reaches its Delete button; Shift+Enter on the save itself opens the same delete confirmation.

The Overworld Map

The overworld is a map of inns and the roads between them, and the mod gives it a grid cursor: arrows walk the map cell by cell, each landing reading what is there - an inn and its state, a threat, your coach. The cell's panels (the inn's details, the timeline, an approaching siege) read through the usual panel navigation, and passing the day is a button like any other.

Every cell also says how many days of coach travel away it is, counted the way the game moves you: one day per straight hop to the next inn or camp, one day per underground trip between network inns you have visited. Set that against a siege's countdown and you know whether you can make it. A cell the coach cannot reach at all says nothing, and the count is on today's map - a fallen inn or a newly revealed boss tomorrow changes it.

Points of interest save you the walk: comma and period jump the cursor through one category of cells at a time (inns, camps, sieges, stationed heroes, treasure, regions, cursed and quest regions, the boss, underground access), the brackets switch category and say how many it holds, and backslash narrows every category to what you can reach from the stagecoach right now.

The hero row lists your party and every stationed hero with where they are. Enter on a stationed hero starts the game's hero-travel mode: the cursor lands on their inn, every inn in their range reads as a destination with the route's length in regions (one is safe, two tire the hero), and with the reachable filter on, the points-of-interest keys walk just those. Enter on a destination books the trip, which completes when the day passes; Escape cancels the mode. Either way you land back on the hero's row.

Travel itself is still the road; see The Road. Everything said there about steering applies, including the part where the interesting decisions happen in menus.

Kingdom Inns

Kingdom inns are the campaign's real surface: garrison heroes to defend them, stock their storage, buy their upgrades, and manage who is stationed where.

• The rest strip works as at any inn, with one addition: Enter on an occupied slot opens the hero swap screen, where you can pull the party member out, station them here, or trade them for a hero already at this inn. The stationed-effects readout up top says what a hero gains by staying behind.
• The stationed-heroes row by the inn title lists who already lives here; Enter opens their sheet.
• Storage moves items between your bag and the inn's chest with the same grab-and-place keys as everywhere else.
• The relationships matrix reads as a grid: pick two heroes, hear how they feel about each other, regret learning it.

The Timeline

Days pass, threats grow, and sieges arrive on schedule. The timeline and siege panels on the map read their entries in order, so you can plan exactly which inn you will fail to save first.