Adding Maps

Maps are the floor of everything else in Far Table. Pins, handouts, and staged fights all sit on top of one, so this is usually the first thing a DM builds. Chapter 7, The Atlas, covers the sub-tabs; this chapter is about getting a map into the Maps one.

Where maps live

Open the Atlas tab and pick Maps. You land on a list of sections, one row per chapter of your campaign, each showing how many maps it holds. Tap a section to see the maps inside.

As the DM you see every map you have made; one you have not revealed yet is dimmed and carries an UNREVEALED badge. Players see only revealed maps, and only sections holding at least one. Revealing is chapter 18, Revealing Your World.

Adding one

Inside a section, tap Add Map. A source sheet offers:

• Photograph with phone, on a Mac or Windows machine with a phone paired to it. The phone opens its camera and does the work. See chapter 34, Pairing Your Phone.
• Take photo, on a phone or tablet, using that device's camera.
• Photos library, to pick an image you already have.
• Files, to pick an image file.

The two camera routes go through a corner-correction screen before anything is saved: four draggable handles on the photo, one for each corner of the paper, then Use this map. That squares the page up, so a map photographed at an angle across a kitchen table still comes out rectangular. Images picked from Photos or Files skip this step and are stored as they are.

Then Far Table asks for a name; Save stays disabled until you type one. The map appears as a tile with a thumbnail, the name, and a pin count.

A map added while a session is live is shared with your players straight away. A map added offline stays private until you reveal it.

Managing a map

As the DM, long-press a map tile on a phone or tablet, or right-click it on a Mac or Windows machine, for the management menu:

• Place on Play tab makes it the live map every connected player is looking at, revealing it first if needed.
• Rename changes the name, and tells the table if the map is already revealed.
• Move to Section files it under a different chapter.
• Delete asks once, then removes it. If the table was looking at that map, their view clears.

Players get none of this menu. A map a player taps during a session simply becomes their own Play tab view.

Update Map

Hand-drawn maps grow. Some map tiles carry an Update Map chip. Tap it, photograph the same map again, drag the corners, and the new photo replaces the old image in place. Pins do not drift: the update is locked to the original image's proportions, so everything you pinned stays where you put it.

The chip is deliberately fussy. You see it only when all of these are true:

• The map came from a camera, either directly or through a paired phone. Maps imported from Photos or Files are one-shot and can never be updated this way.
• You are the person who captured it. Other people's maps are not yours to re-photograph.
• A camera is available: the device's own, or a paired phone on a Mac or Windows machine.

Updating a map that is not the one currently on the Play tab does not yank your players over to it. Their view only changes if they were already looking at that map.

Maps a player made

The classic table moment: the DM describes a dungeon out loud, a player sketches it on graph paper, and everyone works from that sketch. Far Table supports this directly.

During a live session a player can open a section on their own Maps tab and tap Add Map, exactly as the DM does, camera and corner correction included. What happens next is different. Nothing is written on the player's device. The image goes to the DM, whose device writes the real map into the campaign, in the section the player was standing in, and it comes back to everyone through the next Atlas update. The player sees a confirmation reading "saved on the DM"; if it does not arrive, they get a message saying the map could not be sent.

The DM's copy is authoritative from that moment on. The player who took the photo is recorded as its owner, though, so the Update Map chip appears for them and not for the DM. Their re-photographed sketch also ships to the DM rather than being kept locally.

Once a map exists, the next job is usually telling Far Table where its walls are. That is chapter 9, Preparing a Battle Map: Define Space.