Maps

An image with your world pinned to it.

Getting a map in

Upload an image — a drawn map, a sketch, a photograph of a napkin. The map is the image plus everything you pin to it, so the quality of the drawing matters less than you would think.

Pinning locations

A pin ties a point on the image to a location record. Click it and you are in the record; open the record and you can see where it is. The pin is a reference rather than a copy, so renaming the location renames the pin.

Layers

A map has layers, and layers can be shown or hidden independently: political borders over geography, the same city in two centuries, the routes three different characters took.

Layers are also how a map stays legible when a world gets dense. Twelve pins on one image is a mess; twelve pins across four layers is a map.

Generated maps

For a world without a drawn map, the generator produces one procedurally — coastlines, terrain, settlements — from a seed. The same seed always produces the same map, so it is stable enough to build on, and you can save a generated map as a layer and pin to it like any other.

It is a starting point rather than a substitute for a cartographer, and it is most useful early, when you need somewhere for things to be rather than a finished artefact.

Town maps

A location can carry a generated town plan — streets, districts, walls — for when a city needs to be somewhere specific rather than a name. Like the world generator it is seeded and deterministic.