People & Things on the Map

You don’t place characters on a map the way you place a pin. You write that a character is in a place — the same relationship you’d record anyway — and the map works out where to draw them. This page explains how that works, and what happens in the tricky cases: someone in a room you never pinned, an item carried by a traveller, a sword locked in a vault.

How a character finds its spot

An entity appears on a map when one of its relationships places it somewhere the map can show. The everyday one is located in, but it isn’t the only one — an army that guards a fortress, a god that inhabits a mountain, an event that happened at a square all place their entity too. The Layers panel lists every place-based relationship in your world so you can show or hide each kind.

The clever part is what happens when the exact spot isn’t on this map. MythTapestry walks outward — from the room, to the building, to the district, to the city — and draws the character at the finest place this map actually has room for.

Picture a map of the Empire with Rome pinned, but no streets:

Where your notes put the character	Where they show on the Empire map
In Rome (pinned)	At the Rome pin
In a tavern, in a district, in Rome	At the Rome pin — the map has no finer place
In Rome’s Forum District, drawn as a region	Inside the Forum District region
In a city that isn’t on this map at all	They don’t appear here

Open any character’s marker and its drawer tells you why it landed where it did. When a character folded up to a larger place, the drawer names the spot you actually recorded and adds “Shown at ⟨place⟩ via containment,” tracing the trail it climbed (for instance Temple of Jupiter › Forum Romanum). Nothing is hidden; if someone’s missing, it’s because none of the places in their chain are on this map yet.

There’s one case that used to look like a bug rather than a gap: a character located directly in the very place this map depicts, not a room or district drawn on it, but the place the map itself is a picture of. Picture a floor plan of the Forum Romanum — recording that a character is in the Forum Romanum doesn’t hand the map anything finer to draw them at, because the Forum Romanum isn’t a pin or region on its own map. Until now, a character noted there with nothing finer would simply have nowhere to appear.

Open Place Entity and a character already in that spot now shows up in a Located here group. Click anywhere on the map for them, and instead of asking where they should go, it drops a precise pin marking exactly where they stand. Your notes don’t change — you’re only deciding where within that place to draw them. (For a character who isn’t here yet, Place Entity works the way the next section describes.)

Placing a character with a date

When you do want to put a character somewhere directly from the map — say you’re blocking out a scene — use Place Entity (P) in edit mode. Click the character, click the place, and confirm the date. That records a dated “located in” relationship, exactly as if you’d written it on the character’s page, so it shows up in their history and on every other map too.

Because the placement carries a date, it also participates in time-travel: scrub to before that date and the character isn’t there yet. See Maps Over Time for the full picture, including moving characters between places.

Carried and stored things

Your world is full of objects — swords, crowns, ledgers, relics — and most of them don’t sit still. MythTapestry follows one simple rule so you don’t have to place every item by hand:

What a character owns travels with them — unless you’ve stored it somewhere.

Turn on the Possessions layer (5, off by default) and items appear on the map according to that rule:

The item is…	It shows…
Owned by a character, not stored anywhere	Wherever that character currently is — it rides along
Stored in a place (a chest, a vault, a warehouse)	At that place, and it stays there even while its owner wanders
Stored in a container that’s itself in a place	At the place — a scroll in a chest in a villa shows at the villa

So Marcus’s travelling sword follows him from Rome to Ostia without a single extra note, while the crown he keeps in the temple vault stays in the temple — because you stored the crown, and storing wins over carrying.

An item’s drawer spells out the connection: “Carried by Marcus” or “Stored in the Temple Vault,” and if it took a couple of hops to get there — a scroll, in a chest, in the villa — it shows the trail.

Packs, gear, and loot (opt-in)

Ownership covers most worlds, but adventuring stories often want to say who’s physically holding a thing without implying they own it, or to keep a tidy pack instead of hanging twenty items off one character. Turn on Items & Equipment — in the new-world wizard, or later under World Settings → Inventory — and three more tools appear:

Relationship	Use it for
Carries	Something a character physically has — a borrowed map, a torch, a pack — whether or not they own it
Equips	Gear that’s actively worn or wielded — a sword in hand, armor on the body, an attuned relic
An Inventory entity	A named pack, kit, or loadout. The character carries the inventory; items are stored in it

They all resolve on the map through the same engine: a character carrying a Ranger’s Pack with rope and rations stored inside shows the pack — and everything in it — wherever the character stands. Equipped gear rides along the same way. It’s the ownership rule extended to the things a story physically tracks.

Quantity isn’t tracked on these connections (a “5 loaves” count would have no history). For a stack you want to follow over time, make it its own item with a quantity field — an entity field records dated changes the way the rest of your world does.

When the owner is travelling

If a character is mid-journey between two places (see Maps Over Time), the things they’re carrying are tucked away for that stretch — an item can’t be at a definite spot while its owner is somewhere on the road. Stored items are unaffected; they were never riding along in the first place.

Reading the details drawer

Click any marker — a character, an item — to open its drawer. Under an On this map heading it explains the placement:

The relationship and the place — e.g. Located in Forum Romanum — with the span it holds (From … Until Still present).
Shown at ⟨place⟩ via containment — when the exact spot wasn’t on this map and it folded up to a larger place, with the trail it climbed.
Carried by ⟨owner⟩ / Stored in ⟨place⟩ — for possessions, with the trail if there was one.

It’s read-only on purpose: you change where something is by editing its relationships (or using the placing tools), never by dragging the resolved marker — that keeps the map honest to your notes.

Next steps

Maps Over Time — move characters with dates and watch journeys unfold.
Placing Locations & Regions — the places characters resolve to.
Understanding Relationships — where “located in,” “owns,” and the rest come from.