Maps Over Time

This is what sets MythTapestry maps apart. Your map isn’t a snapshot of now — it’s a window you can slide along your world’s whole history. Push the timeline back and the map shows where everyone stood then: before the war, before the crown changed hands, before the city fell. Every placement you date tells the map when it happened, so it already knows how to rewind.

Scrubbing through time

Every map carries a timeline along the bottom. Drag it and the whole map answers: characters appear and vanish as they arrive and leave, factions shift, the world reassembles itself around the moment you’ve landed on.

The map’s timeline is the same world clock the rest of MythTapestry obeys — the Viewing as of selector you’ll know from entities and relationships. Slide the map and you’re moving that clock; open a character’s page and it shows the same moment.

Tip

The more of your placements carry dates, the richer time-travel becomes. A character placed “as of Year 512” knows when to appear; one placed with no date is simply always present. If the map looks empty in the past, it usually means the placements haven’t been dated yet — not that anything’s wrong.

The land itself changes too. Dated regions appear and disappear as you scrub, so a border that moved over your world’s history redraws at the right year. And because places nest, the map follows when a place belonged to which parent: if a district was part of one city until the conquest and another after, a character living there the whole time is shown in the correct city for the moment you’re viewing — even though you never moved them. Their marker simply jumps when the hierarchy above them changed.

Playing it back

Rather than drag by hand, press Play and let the map advance on its own — a slow reveal of your world in motion. Choose a speed from 0.5× up to 10× to crawl through a tense week or sweep across centuries, and Pause whenever something catches your eye. It’s the quickest way to see the shape of a campaign or the sprawl of an age.

Moving a character between places

When someone relocates — a general marches, a merchant emigrates, a prisoner is dragged to the capital — you record it as a dated move, and the map handles the before and after.

1. In edit mode, choose Place Entity (P) and click the character.
2. Click the place they’re moving to.
3. Set the date the move takes effect under As of.

MythTapestry closes out their old placement and opens the new one in a single step, so an instant move never leaves them double-booked in two places at once — the old place hands off to the new on exactly that date. Scrub across it and watch the marker jump from the old place to the new. Made a mistake? Ctrl+Z puts it back. (Want the trip itself to take time instead of happening in a blink? That’s a journey, next.)

Journeys: showing the trip itself

A plain move is instant — one day they’re in Rome, the next in Ostia. But long trips take time, and an empty stretch where a character has left one place but not arrived at the next used to leave them nowhere. Now that gap becomes the story: a journey.

The move dialog has one optional field — Departed — beneath the arrival date:

You set…	The map shows…
Only the arrival date (As of)	An instant move — they blink from one place to the next
A Departed date as well	A journey — they’re shown in transit between the two places for the whole span from departure to arrival

Give a character a departure of Year 512, Day 100 and an arrival of Day 120, and for those twenty days their marker rides along the route between the two places — a soft “in transit” ghost that slides from origin toward destination as you scrub, labelled so you know it’s an estimate of where they’d be, not a recorded spot.

Following the road

If the two places both sit on the same trade route, the journey follows the road — a traveller from Rome to Brundisium curves down the Appian Way rather than cutting straight across the hills, moving at a steady pace along the real path. No shared route? They take the direct line between the two points. Either way, you did nothing extra: dating the departure was enough.

Note

While a character is mid-journey, anything they’re carrying travels with them out of sight — an item can’t sit at a fixed place while its owner is on the road. It reappears when they arrive. Stored belongings stay put throughout. See carried and stored things.

Building history from the map

Because moves and journeys are just dated relationships, everything you do on the map flows back into the rest of your world — and you can build history from the map, too. Scrub to Year 300, place a founder in the young capital, and you’ve recorded where they were then without touching the present day. It’s the same “edit while viewing the past” power described in Viewing Your World in Time, now with a map under your hands.

Next steps

• People & Things on the Map — how carried items behave as their owners move.
• Trade Routes — give your journeys roads to follow.
• Viewing Your World in Time — the world clock the map shares.