Maps

Fantasy and science fiction authors who take worldbuilding seriously almost always end up with maps, and the maps almost always end up being more trouble than they should be. You commission a map from an artist or draw one yourself or download a generic “fantasy world map” from the internet. Then you stare at it for a year with a vague sense that the city labels are slightly wrong and the borders have drifted since the last draft. You want to annotate it — add a pin for a new settlement your protagonist visits, mark the territory of a faction you just invented, trace the route of the caravan in chapter four — but the image is a PNG and annotations mean opening Photoshop and that’s three hours of yak shaving you’d rather spend writing. The Maps module is Ishvana’s answer. Upload the image once, annotate it in the canvas viewer with pins, regions, paths, and labels, link every annotation to a lore entry, and the map becomes a live, editable, navigable reference instead of a static PNG that goes stale the moment the story evolves.

This page covers the whole system — uploading, the four annotation types, legends, calibration for distance measurement, hierarchical drill-down between maps, and the keyboard shortcuts that make the canvas workflow fast.

Supported formats

Maps accept PNG, JPG, WebP, and SVG images up to 100 MB. Vector SVGs scale cleanly at any zoom level; raster formats are fine for most author workflows but may pixelate at extreme zoom.

Map management

The basics of getting maps into the module and keeping them organized:

• Upload maps. Drag and drop onto the map list or use the file picker. Accepts PNG, JPG, WebP, and SVG up to 100 MB per file.
• Hierarchical maps. Assign a parent map to create drill-down navigation. Continent → region → city. Each level has its own annotations and its own legend. Click a pin on the parent map to navigate to the child.
• Replace image. Swap the underlying map image without losing any annotations. Useful when your cartographer sends an updated version and you don’t want to lose all the pins you placed.
• Rename and describe. Every map has a title and an optional description.
• Delete maps. With undo support — deletions don’t nuke your work immediately.
• Search. Filter the map list by title.
• Object counts. Sidebar displays pin, region, path, and label counts per map so you can see which maps are heavily annotated and which are thin.

Drill-down maps are the most useful feature

Create map hierarchies by linking pins to child maps. Your continent map has pins for each major city; each city pin links to a detailed city map; each city map has pins for specific buildings or districts. Readers can zoom from the whole world to a specific tavern in a few clicks. The same drill-down system is what makes the maps module feel like a proper atlas instead of a single flat image.

Annotations

Four annotation types, each fully editable and each linkable to a Legendry entry.

Pins (points of interest)

Pins mark specific locations. Cities, ruins, key landmarks, meeting spots, battlefields, hidden caches — anything with a specific coordinate on the map.

Place a pin by clicking on the map in Pin mode. Once placed, you can customize:

• Icon. A searchable icon library with options for cities, ruins, settlements, taverns, religious sites, natural features, hazards, and more.
• Color. Pick any color.
• Size. Small, medium, or large.
• Label text. What shows on hover or at certain zoom levels.
• Lore entry link. Link to a Legendry entry — the pin displays the entry title and type on hover, and clicking navigates to the entry.
• Child map link. Link to another map for drill-down navigation. Click the pin to zoom into the child map.
• Legend category. Assign the pin to a category (Cities, Ruins, Taverns, etc.) for bulk visibility control.
• Zoom visibility range. Make the pin only appear at certain zoom levels — so high-detail pins don’t clutter the world map when you’re zoomed all the way out.
• Notes. Freeform notes about the pin.

Drag any pin to reposition it. The underlying coordinates update automatically.

Regions (polygon areas)

Regions mark territorial areas. A kingdom’s borders. A faction’s area of control. A forbidden zone. A climate region. Anything that covers space rather than a single point.

Draw a region in Region mode by clicking three or more vertices to define the polygon shape. Double-click or press Enter to close. Customize:

• Fill color and opacity. Set the color and transparency of the shaded area.
• Stroke color and width. The border’s color and thickness.
• Label text, lore entry link, zoom visibility range, notes — same as pins.

Regions work especially well for territory disputes, climate zones, and anything you want to visually shade. A map with three factional territories becomes legible at a glance when each territory is a differently-colored region.

Paths (polyline routes)

Paths mark lines. Caravan routes. Rivers. Roads. Trade routes. Borders (as lines rather than filled regions). Migration paths. Anything linear.

Draw a path in Path mode by clicking two or more waypoints, then double-clicking or pressing Enter to finish. Customize:

• Stroke style. Five options — solid, dashed, dotted, dash-dot, wavy. Use dashed for borders, wavy for rivers, solid for roads.
• Optional direction arrow at the midpoint, for showing which way the route flows.
• Stroke color and width.
• Label text, lore entry link, zoom visibility range, notes — same as pins and regions.

Paths are the annotation type most authors underuse. A clear path layer can turn a blank map into something that tells a story about how the world is connected.

Labels (text annotations)

Labels are pure text placed on the map. The name of a continent, a sea, a mountain range — features that span an area but don’t have a single point. Customize:

• Font size, color, rotation, font style, letter spacing.
• Zoom visibility range — so tiny labels only show up when zoomed in and continent-spanning labels only show up when zoomed out.

Labels are visual only — no lore links, no legend categories. They exist for visual typography.

Legend categories

Create categories to organize pins by type. Example categories: Cities, Ruins, Taverns, Religious Sites, Military Bases, Trade Hubs, Hazards.

• Color-code each category for visual clarity.
• Toggle category visibility to show or hide all pins in that category at once. Useful for decluttering the view when you only want to see cities, or only want to see ruins.
• Rename and delete categories inline.

Categories only apply to pins. Regions, paths, and labels don’t use the legend system.

Calibration and measurement

Maps can be calibrated for distance measurement. Once a map is calibrated, you can measure real-world distances between any two points on it.

• Calibrate scale. Place two reference points on the map and enter the real-world distance between them plus a unit (miles, kilometers, leagues, days-travel, or a custom unit). The system computes the map’s scale from the reference.
• Measure distances. In Measure mode, click two points on a calibrated map to get the distance between them. Works at any zoom level.
• View existing calibration. Open the calibration panel at any time to see the current settings.

Calibration matters more than it looks. The single most common worldbuilding error in fantasy fiction is “characters traveling implausible distances in implausible times.” A calibrated map with real scale lets you check your travel times against actual distances before the book goes to a beta reader who will notice.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Tool	What it does
V	Select	Click to select objects; drag pins to reposition
P	Pin	Click to place a new pin
R	Region	Click 3+ points, Enter or double-click to close
A	Path	Click 2+ points, Enter or double-click to finish
T	Label	Click to place a text label
M	Measure	Click two points to measure distance (calibrated maps only)
Esc	—	Cancel the current drawing operation

Learn these. The canvas workflow is built around keyboard tool-switching, and clicking through the toolbar for every annotation slows everything down.

Zoom controls

• + / - buttons to zoom in and out.
• Fit to view button to see the entire map at once.
• Current zoom percentage displayed at the bottom of the canvas.
• Mouse wheel zooms in and out.

Navigation

Drill-down maps use a breadcrumb navigation system:

• Breadcrumb trail at the top shows the map hierarchy path. Click any breadcrumb to navigate up.
• Pin drill-down. Pins linked to other maps act as portals — click to navigate into the child map.
• Back navigation returns to the previous map in the navigation stack.

A continent map with a pin linking to a region map which has a pin linking to a city map produces a three-level hierarchy: Continent > Region > City. Click any level in the breadcrumb to jump directly there.

A typical workflow

1. Upload your world map via drag and drop or the file picker.
2. Enter a title and description. If this is a child map, assign the parent.
3. The map opens in the canvas viewer.
4. Press P to enter Pin mode. Click to place pins for key locations.
5. For each pin, open the properties panel and link it to a Legendry entry.
6. Press R to enter Region mode. Draw polygons for territories or climate zones.
7. Press A for Path mode. Trace caravan routes, rivers, or borders.
8. Press T for Label mode. Add continent and sea names.
9. Create legend categories and assign pins to them.
10. Calibrate the map scale and test a distance measurement.
11. If you have detail maps for specific cities or regions, upload them and link parent pins to the child maps for drill-down.

Every annotation you place is a live object — not a baked-in pixel on the image. You can edit, move, delete, or update any annotation at any time without touching the underlying map image.

What’s next

Legendry The worldbuilding database that map annotations link to.

Visual Studio The broader visual reference system — gallery, mood boards, character sheets.

Timeline Studio The time-based counterpart to maps — chronology instead of cartography.