Placing Locations & Regions

Everything on a map starts with places. Pin the ones you’ve already written, invent new ones where you click, and — when a place is bigger than a single dot — draw it as a shaded region. All of it happens in edit mode (the pencil, E).

Pinning a place you already have

Your world already has location entities — the cities, keeps, and forests you’ve written about. Pinning one drops it onto this map’s image.

1. Enter edit mode and choose Place Location (L).
2. A panel lists your world’s locations, with a badge on the ones already pinned to this map.
3. Click a location, then click the spot on the image where it belongs.

To nudge a pin later, just drag it (still in edit mode). To remove one, open its drawer and remove the placement — the location entity itself is untouched; you’ve only taken it off this picture.

Tip

A pin is a presentation choice, not a fact about your world. Moving or removing a pin never changes the location’s history or its relationships — it only changes where the dot sits on this image. That’s why pins don’t need dates.

Creating a new place on the spot

Sometimes you’re looking at the map and realise there should be a village there. Rather than break away to make an entity first:

1. Choose New Location Here (N).
2. Click where the new place should sit.
3. Name it. MythTapestry creates the location entity and pins it in one step.

The new place is a full location entity from that moment on — it can hold characters, get its own map, join a trade route, and everything else.

Drawing regions

A pin is right for a point — a tower, a well, a crossroads. A region is right for an area — a district, a province, a contested borderland. Regions are shaded polygons you draw straight onto the image.

1. Choose Draw Region (R).
2. Click around the area to drop each corner of the shape.
3. Close the shape, then fill in its details: a label, a type (region, territory, danger zone, or political border), and its colours.

To reshape a region later, click it and choose Reshape on map in the Properties panel — its corners become draggable handles you can move, add (click an edge’s +), or remove (shift- or right-click a corner). Prefer to start over? Redraw it.

Curving a region’s edges

Straight edges not enough? While reshaping, click a corner to select it, then Alt-drag out of it to pull out a pair of Bezier handles — drag those to bend the edges into smooth curves. The two handles stay mirrored (a flowing curve) by default; double-click a point to break it into a sharp corner with independent handles. Moving a point brings its handles along, and everything undoes with Ctrl+Z (redo with Ctrl+Shift+Z). Regions imported from Azgaar come in with straight edges — this is how you round them off.

Decorative regions versus place regions

When you fill in a region’s details, one choice matters more than the rest: whether to link it to a location.

If you…	Then the region is…
Leave Location blank	Decorative — a labelled shaded area, and nothing more. Good for “The Blighted Marches” or a shipping hazard.
Link it to a location	That location’s footprint on this map — the area it actually covers.

Linking is powerful. Once a region is a location’s area, any character your notes place in that location — but whose exact spot you haven’t pinned — appears inside the region, at its centre. Draw “Forum District” and link it to your Forum District location, and every senator you’ve placed in the district shows up inside the shaded shape without a single extra click.

Note

If a location has both a pin and a linked region, the pin wins for placing characters — a precise point beats a general area. The region still draws as the location’s shaded footprint.

Regions that come and go

A region can hold a Valid From and Valid Until date (both optional). A dated region behaves like everything else on the map: it’s drawn only while ViewTime sits inside its window, and only then does it position the characters inside it. Leave the dates blank and the region is simply always there.

This is how borders that shift over time work. Draw the province of Gaul as it stood under the Republic and set its window to those years; draw the later, larger imperial Gaul as a second region for the years after. Scrub across the boundary year and the map redraws the province — and a character living in Gaul the whole time resolves to whichever shape was current at the moment you’re viewing. See Maps Over Time for the scrubbing side of this.

Keeping the map readable

• Toggle the Locations (1) and Regions (2) layers off when you want to focus on people or routes.
• Zoom in and out freely — pins and labels scale to stay legible rather than ballooning or shrinking to nothing.
• Nearby pins gather into a small cluster badge when you zoom out; click it to see everything stacked at that spot.

Next steps

• People & Things on the Map — now that places are down, see who shows up in them.
• Trade Routes — connect your places with roads and lanes.
• Maps Overview — the tool rail, the layers panel, and drilling between maps.