Maps, timeline and the world

Any image will do to start: a hand-drawn coastline, a screenshot, a photograph of something on graph paper. Upload it and you can pin things on it.

1. 1

   Drop a pin

   Click the map. A pin has a label and a position, and the position is stored as a fraction of the image rather than in pixels — so re-exporting the map at twice the resolution does not move everything on it.

2. 2

   Point it at something

   A pin can open a wiki page, or it can open another map. That second one is how a world gets a province and a province gets a city: one image per zoom level, linked by the pin you would have clicked anyway. A pin naming a page nobody has written yet behaves like a red link on the wiki.

3. 3

   Draw territory, if there is any

   Click around the edge of a claim to fill in an area. Corners come back as handles afterwards, so a border can be reshaped without being redrawn — drag one to move it, click one to remove it. The whole shape is saved in one go, so a drag you abandon halfway leaves nothing behind.

A map, a pin and a border can each be marked GM-only independently, so a visible map can carry a secret. A GM-only border is drawn dashed as well as tagged, so you can see at a glance which of the things on your screen the party knows about. Map images live in private storage and are served through links that expire; a map is not a public URL somebody can pass on.

What happened, in the order it happened. An event has a year, optionally a month and a day, and optionally an era — which is what makes an invented calendar work. With an era the year’s sign is spent on ordering and the label carries the meaning, so -800 with an era of BC reads as 800 BC and sorts correctly against everything else.

Events connect to the wiki in two directions. An event can name the article it grew into, and any wiki page an event mentions becomes a filter — so you can ask the timeline for the history of one city, or of everything tagged as a war, rather than reading the lot. Events can be GM-only like anything else.

A drawing of how the world hangs together, assembled from wiki links rather than maintained by anybody. Infobox fields give an edge its meaning and plain mentions give it weight. More on the wiki page.

A D&D or General campaign does not have these, and that is on purpose. They were offered to every system once; what a campaign actually gained was four more tabs, a settlement record saying less than the wiki page and the map pin it duplicated, and a coordinate box for a world with no coordinates. A campaign describes its factions on a wiki page and pins them on a map, which is one tab rather than four.

Nations

The powers on the server: who runs them, who they answer to, who lives there. Each holds towns, keeps a citizen roster, and carries the colour its territory is drawn in.

Places

Everything on the ground — towns, bases, farms, monuments — grouped by whether they are planned, being built, finished or abandoned.

Wars

Wars and treaties, recorded once with the sides named rather than as three pages that disagree about who started it. Anything with a date puts itself on the timeline.

Seasons

A run of the server. Starting a new one files everything made after it under the new season and leaves the old one exactly as it was.

Minecraft campaigns also get a Server tab, which holds the address, the edition and the rules everybody agreed to. It sits before the wiki in the tab order because it is the first thing a new member needs, and because answering “where is it” here and “what are the rules” three clicks away is how somebody breaks a rule nobody showed them.

A campaign is invisible from outside, and that stays true until somebody decides otherwise. But a server recruiting players has the opposite problem to a D&D table: the world is the pitch, and nobody outside can see it.

So each of these can be published — a place, a power, a war, a moment in the history, and any wiki article. Each is its own switch and each starts off, and the campaign-wide switch in settings has to be on as well before a stranger can read any of it. Two deliberate acts, so nothing goes public because it was forgotten.

Anything GM-only can never be published, and marking a published thing GM-only un-publishes it rather than leaving a setting that means nothing.

Maps too. Publishing a map publishes the pins and the borders drawn on it — you do not mark thirty pins one at a time. Anything GM-only stays hidden, and a pin pointing at a place you have not published does not appear at all rather than appearing without its link: a pin is nearly always labelled with the name of the place it points to, so leaving it unlinked would hand over the very thing withholding the link was meant to keep.

Unpublishing a map takes it off the page at once, and stops the picture being fetchable within about a minute. That minute is worth knowing about, and so is the thing after it: a copy already in somebody’s browser is theirs. Unpublishing is a stop, not an erasure.