Story maps
A map editor built for writers rather than illustrators. You place objects that know what they are, so every place on the map can point at a codex entry, a character, or an event you have entered in Quilvo. Move through story time to see the events and journeys you have planned.
Free map drawing software for writers: five maps, the whole editor, no watermark.
Drag to pan, hold Ctrl or Cmd and scroll to zoom, hover a pin to see what it links to. This is the real viewer, running on an invented world.
Objects, not pixels
In an image editor, Kingsbridge is a smudge of colour near a line. Here it is a marker, joined to the codex entry for Kingsbridge, which knows the three scenes set there, who narrates them, and which events happen on which day. That is the whole difference, and everything else on this page follows from it.
A marker is a place. Link it to a Codex location and it takes that location's name, colour and picture. Rename the place in your Codex and the map renames itself.
A region is territory. Draw a coastline or a county by clicking points that snap to the grid. Rough, hand-drawn shapes, not boxes, and reshapeable afterwards.
A path is a road, a river, or a journey. Give a route to a character and the line stops being decoration: it means this person travelled here, and the app can measure how long that took.
An icon is a stamp. Forty-eight bespoke glyphs across terrain, water, settlements, structures, travel, city and points of interest, all inheriting your colours.
A label is typography. Sized, rotated and themed with the map, for the things that have names but no single point.
A background is the paper. Parchment, plain, grid, or an image you upload, so you can trace a sketch or annotate a map you had drawn elsewhere.
Drawing
Most writers are not illustrators, and should not have to become one to draw their own world. Corners snap to a grid, so a coastline clicked out in twenty seconds has the confident, deliberate line of a printed map rather than a wobbly freehand trace. Reshape it afterwards by dragging any point, or drop in a rectangle, blob or island preset and pull it about.
One hand, one line weight, two registers. Everything below is the real symbol sheet from the app, and every glyph takes the colour of whatever it is stamped onto. Switch the map above between Parchment and Modern to see the same objects change clothes: paper, grid, path colours and label typography all move together, while any colour you set yourself wins.
Terrain 10
Water 4
Settlements 8
Structures 7
Travel 6
City 7
Points of interest 8
The cold start
A new map is an empty rectangle, and that is the single biggest reason worldbuilding tools go unused. If your Codex already holds forty locations, one click puts every one of them on the sheet, already linked, already named, already coloured, and ready to drag where they belong. Districts cluster around the town they sit inside, so the shape of your world is visible before you have moved a thing.
Codex locations 14
The living map
Link the scenes, events, locations and characters you enter in Quilvo. The map uses those connections to show where your story happens. It does not read or analyse your manuscript text.
Story time
Events light up as their moment arrives, places that have not happened yet dim back, and journeys draw themselves as the character travels. Follow the scenes and events you have entered as you move through story time.
Two orderings
Stories are told out of order, so the axis offers both: the sequence a reader meets your scenes in, and true chronology. A flashback sits in two different places, and both are correct.
Walk the story
Step scene by scene through the outline and a marker moves to each location, ringing the point-of-view character. The locations and point-of-view characters come from the scenes you have entered in your outline.
Journeys
Ask the map to trace a character and it builds their route from the located scenes and character-linked events you have entered, in story order. You get an ordinary editable path back, so you can bend it around the mountains and re-trace it later.
Living history
Give a region eras anchored to your own story events, and scrubbing redraws its name and colour as control changes hands. No date entry: it follows the event, even if you re-date it.
Reader reveal
Hide the eastern half of the world until chapter twelve. During playback it fades in exactly when your reader would learn it exists, and anything the app cannot resolve stays visible rather than being guessed away.
Travel estimates
Set your map's scale, then measure travel along a route you draw. This calculator uses the full road length and the example speeds shown below to estimate the days needed. Change the days to see which travel modes fit.
Separately, Quilvo's automatic continuity checks flag journeys that are implausible even at the direct distance between locations. They use the fastest travel mode allowed on your map, with extra tolerance, rather than following the drawn road.
These checks use the story facts you enter: dated scenes and events, linked characters and locations, and a scaled map. Use real dates or a world calendar so the time between events can be measured in days. No AI is used for these checks.
243 miles along the drawn road. The straight line is only 188 miles.
Route calculator
Horseback fits within the time allowed at the example speed shown. This is a route estimate, not an automatic continuity check.
Depth
Any marker can be a door into another map. Click into the port and you are on the port's own map, with its own scale, its own theme and its own pins, seeded from the districts your Codex already knows about. You can move between these maps in both the editor and your private read-only viewer.
Turn any marker into a door. The child map inherits the parent theme and scale as a starting point, then goes its own way.
If the marker's location has child locations in your Codex, the new map arrives with them already placed and linked.
Breadcrumbs run the whole chain, the index shows the tree, and double-clicking a door drops you through it.
Pricing
Story maps are part of Quilvo, not a separate subscription. Create up to five maps and export them as SVG for free, with the whole editor included: all six object types, both themes, all forty-eight glyphs, the story-time scrubber, nested maps and the continuity checks. Pro lifts the limit to unlimited maps, alongside the rest of the plan. You can share the exported files; the interactive maps in your account are private.