Maps Overview

Most map tools ask you to draw a picture and then, separately, keep a list of who lives where. The two drift apart the moment your story moves. MythTapestry maps work the other way around: a map is a view of what you’ve already recorded. Pin a city, and every character your notes place in that city appears there. Move a character in Book 3, and the map shows the move — on its own, at the right moment in time.

You bring the picture (upload your own map image); MythTapestry supplies the living layer on top of it.

What a map is made of

A single map depicts one place — your whole world, a single kingdom, a city, even one building — using an image you upload as its backdrop. On top of that image sit five kinds of things, each on its own layer you can switch on and off:

Layer	Shortcut	What it shows
Locations	1	Places you’ve pinned on the image — cities, landmarks, rooms
Regions	2	Shaded areas you’ve drawn — a district, a kingdom’s borders, a danger zone
Entities	3	Characters, factions, and anything else your relationships place here
Routes	4	Trade routes and roads drawn as curves between places
Possessions	5	Carried and stored items, shown wherever their owner is

In the Layers panel on the right, entities get a finer breakdown: they can appear on a map for several reasons — someone lives in a place, an army guards it, an event happened at it — and you can show or hide each kind separately, with a live count beside each one.

Note

You never type map data into a separate form. Locations come from your location entities, characters from the relationships that place them, routes from your trade routes. The map is a lens — see People & Things on the Map for exactly how an entity finds its spot.

Creating a map

1. Open Maps in the world sidebar and choose Create Map.
2. Pick the location this map depicts — the city, realm, or building it’s a picture of. (You’ll need that location to exist first; make it like any other location entity.)
3. Give it a name and upload a background image (your drawn map, a photo, a sketch — anything).
4. Save. You land on the new map in view mode — click Edit Map (E) when you’re ready to start placing things.

You can make as many maps as you like, and the same location can even have its own map and appear as a pin on a larger one — that’s what makes drilling in and out work.

Looking versus editing

A fresh map opens in view mode: you can pan, zoom, click markers to read about them, and scrub through time, but nothing moves by accident. This is deliberate — the most common complaint about other map tools is pins that shift when you meant to just look around.

To change anything, click Edit Map (the pencil, shortcut E) in the tool rail along the left edge of the map. The rail holds every action — placing a location, drawing a region, building a route, undo and redo — and the authoring tools only appear there once you’re editing.

Everything you can see — locations, regions, entities, routes, possessions, and any stacked image layers — lives in the Layers panel on the right, always visible, never behind a click. Toggling something off there costs nothing: it’s just what you’re looking at right now, not a change to the map itself.

Click anything on the map — a region, a route, an image layer’s row, a character pin — and its details open in the Properties panel just below Layers, in that same right-hand panel. Renaming a region, moving an image layer, or reordering a route’s waypoints all happen right there next to the map, never in a popup that covers what you’re looking at. Every change you make while editing can be undone with Ctrl+Z and redone with Ctrl+Shift+Z, so it’s safe to experiment.

Layers and Properties collapse independently — click either section’s header to make room for the other — and you can drag the panel narrower or wider from its left edge.

Note

On a narrow window (a laptop split-screen, say), there isn’t room to keep the panel docked. It becomes something you open with the button in the top-right corner instead, and tucks itself away once you’re done — the map keeps the full window either way.

Drilling between maps

Places nest, and so do maps. If a city pinned on your kingdom map has its own map, its details drawer offers Open map of ⟨city⟩ — one click takes you inside. When you’re on the city map, the header shows Up to ⟨kingdom⟩ to climb back out.

This is the same nesting your locations already have. A character standing in a tavern that sits in that city will show on the city map at the tavern (if you’ve pinned it) — and on the kingdom map at the city, because the kingdom map isn’t detailed enough to show individual taverns. The map shows things at the finest place it actually has room for.

Stacking several pictures on one map

Most worlds have more than one picture of the same place — the terrain, the borders, the rivers, who trades with whom. Rather than keeping them as separate maps and scattering your pins between them, you can stack them on one map and turn each on or off as you look.

In the Layers panel, choose + beside Images to add one. Each layer gets a name and a slider to fade it — dropping the political layer to 40% lets the terrain read through it.

Drag a layer up or down the list to change what sits in front of what. The bottom entry is your map’s main picture: it sets the frame everything else lines up with, so it stays put, and you change it from the map’s own settings.

Hiding a layer is just for you and just for now — it doesn’t change the map for anyone else. If you want a layer to start hidden whenever the map opens, turn off Shown by default when you edit it.

Pictures that only cover part of the map

A layer doesn’t have to cover everything. A siege map can sit over the city it happened in; a hand-drawn sketch can cover one province. Choose Place on map and drag the picture where it belongs, then pull a corner to size it. It keeps its proportions as you resize — hold Shift if you deliberately want to stretch it.

A picture shaped differently from your map is fitted neatly inside it rather than being squashed to fit.

You can drag or size a layer so it hangs partway off the edge of your map — useful when a siege map’s frame doesn’t quite line up with the city underneath, or a sketch is slightly bigger than the province it covers. Whatever spills past the edge of your map’s main picture is simply not shown; you’re never forced to shrink a layer just to keep all of it “on the page.”

Layers that come and go

Like regions, a layer can hold a Valid From and Valid Until date. Give your pre-war borders one window and your post-war borders the next, and scrubbing across that year swaps them while the terrain underneath stays put.

Showing a map to your readers

If you’ve shared a canon with readers, your maps go with it. They get the same map you do minus the pencil: pan, zoom, click a pin through to a character, drag the timeline and watch the borders move. What they see on it stays limited to the sources you shared, so a city that only appears in an unshared book leaves no pin behind.

There’s nothing to switch on — it comes with the invite. See Sharing Your World for what readers can and can’t do, and for one spoiler caveat worth knowing about map titles.

Where maps fit

Maps are one of three ways to look at the same underlying world:

• The graph shows how everything connects.
• The timeline shows when things happened.
• The map shows where things are — and, because it obeys your world’s clock, where they were at any moment in the past.

That last part is what makes maps in MythTapestry unusual, and it has its own page: Maps Over Time.

Next steps

• Placing Locations & Regions — pin places and draw areas.
• People & Things on the Map — how characters and their belongings find their spots.
• Trade Routes — draw roads and shipping lanes between places.
• Maps Over Time — scrub through history and watch your world move.