We're excited to announce the biggest feature we have ever shipped: Story Maps are now live for all users in Quilvo. You can draw the world of your book, link every place on it to the codex entries, characters and events you've already written, and then drag a timeline underneath the map and watch your whole story move across it.
Is the map of your world currently a photo of a napkin sketch? Have you drawn a beautiful map in an art tool that has no idea who your characters are, where chapter twelve happens, or how far it is from the port to the capital? Do you secretly suspect your hero crosses the kingdom suspiciously fast in act three? Story Maps are for you.
A map made of objects, not pixels
Most map tools give you a picture. Quilvo gives you a model of your world.
Instead of painting, you place objects that know what they are: markers, regions, paths, labels, icons and backgrounds. A marker is a place, and when you link it to a codex location it takes that location's name, colour and picture. Rename the place in your codex and the map renames itself. Hover the pin and you'll see the scenes set there and who narrates them, because the map is joined to everything else you've built in Quilvo.
That one idea, places that are real story data rather than smudges of colour, is what makes everything below possible.
You don't need to be able to draw
Most writers are not illustrators, and shouldn't have to become one. Corners snap to a grid, so a coastline clicked out in twenty seconds has the confident line of a printed map rather than a wobbly freehand trace. Drop in a rectangle, blob or island preset and pull it about. Stamp any of the 48 bespoke glyphs, from mountains and walled cities to lighthouses, taverns and standing stones, all drawn in one hand and one line weight, all inheriting your colours.
Two full themes, Parchment and Modern, restyle the entire map at once: paper, grid, path colours and label typography all move together. And if you already have artwork you love, upload it as the background and place your linked markers over the top.
Start from the places you already wrote
A new map is an empty rectangle, and that's the single biggest reason worldbuilding tools go unused. So if your codex already holds forty locations, one click on "Populate from the Codex" puts every one of them on the sheet: already linked, already named, already coloured, with districts clustered aroto. The whole scatter is one undo if you hate it. Or open the Locations palette and dragplaces on one at a time; it doubles as your list of what hasn't been placed yet.
Then drag time, and watch
This is the part no drawing app can copy, because it needs your outline, your timeline and your characters in the same place.
Toggle Story time and a time axis docks under the map. Scrub it and events light up as theihat haven't happened yet dim back, and journeys draw themselves as the character travels. Press play and watch the whole book cross the map in fifteen seconds. Because stories are t offers both orderings: the sequence a reader meets your scenes in, and true chronology. A flashback sits in two different places, and both are correct.
You can also walk the story scene by scene: a "you are here" marker follows your outline from location to location, ringing the point-of-view character as it goes. Ask the map to trace a character's journey and it builds their route straight from the scenes they narrate, in story order, then hands it le path you can bend around the mountains.
And the world itself can change as history turns. Give a region eras anchored to your own sredraws its name and colour as control changes hands. You can even hide parts of the map until a chosen scene or event, so the eastern half of the world fades in exactly when your ts.
The map proofreads your draft
Tell the map how big the world is, in miles, kilometres, or a unit you invented (leagues and "days on foot" compute just like anything else), and every drawn line becomes a real distance. The measure tool snaps to your markers and reads along the road you drew, never the straight line, so a route arout it should. Travel modes (on foot, horseback, cart, ship, or your own airships and dragons) turn every distance into days of travel, right down to per-leg times on a character's itinerary.
Then the continuity checker starts reading the geography. It quietly flags a journey leg your fastest travel mode couldn't cover in the time the story allows, and the silent teleport: two consecutive scenes far apart on the map with no story time between them, which is the commonest draft error nothineaks when a leg is clearly impossible, with slack on top, and one click on "It's intentional" mutes any notice forever.
World, region, city, street
Any marker can be a door into another map. Click into the port and you're on the port's own map, with its own scale and theme, seeded with markers for the districts your codex already knows about. Breadcrumbs run the whole chain back up to the world map, and the read-only viewer follows the same doors, so anyone reading your map can descend too. When you want the map outside Quilvo, export the whole sheet as a crispSVG, and the full map API means your maps travel with the rest of your story data.
Free for your first five maps
Story Maps are part of Quilvo, not a separate subscription. Every account can draw and link five maps for nothing, with the whole editor included: all six object types, both themes, all 48 glyphs, the story-time scrubber, nested maps and the continuity checks. No watermark, no export lock, no trial clock. Pro lifts the limit to unlimited maps, and if you ever drop back to free, nothing is deleted; your maps stay readable and exportable.
Open Maps from the Plan section in your sidebar and start drawing, or take the full tour on the Story Maps feature page. We can't wait to see where your stories go.