Set Up a Map

Let the wizard drive

Open a fresh VTT session as GM and the setup wizard opens itself, because a session with no scenes in it has exactly one useful next action. You can also summon it any time from the Scenes layer of the build dock (Run setup wizard) or from Help, on the Session layer.

Six steps. Every one is skippable and you can jump between them with the progress dots.

Steps 1, 2 and 6 are proper dialogs. Steps 3, 4 and 5 shrink to a docked card at the edge of the screen, because they're the ones where you need to see the canvas — you can pan, zoom and draw with the wizard still open and still telling you what it wants.

1. Name your scene

A scene is one map or one location. You can add more later and flip between them mid-session, so don't overthink it.

2. Add a map

Upload Map (or Replace Map if there's one there already). JPG, PNG and WebP are what the button promises; the server will also take GIF and HEIC. Ceiling is 20MB, and anything enormous gets scaled down to 4096px on its longest side.

There's also a map library so you can reuse an image across scenes. There's no limit on how many maps you can keep — what's metered is total storage, not a count. A map is small; refusing you a sixth one while an hour of ambient audio goes through unmeasured would be counting the wrong thing.

3. Line up the grid

The important step, and the one worth doing properly.

Squares or hexes. A scene can be either. Almost everything understands both — the grid, token snapping, all the fog tools, vision and lighting — but the ruler, the area-of-effect shapes and the Draw square calibration below are square-only for now, and the Shape panel disables them with the reason written where the button is.

Switching between them wipes the scene's fog, deliberately. Fog is stored as bare cell coordinates with no record of which grid painted them, so a square index read as a hex isn't slightly-wrong fog, it's scattered nonsense. Better to clear it than to draw a lie. Set the grid type before you paint fog, not after.

Press Draw square and drag a box over one grid square on the map. That's it — the wizard works out cell size and both offsets from that single square. Redo if you fumble it.

Grid changes are a preview for you until you save them. Your players keep seeing the old grid until you press Save & continue. This has confused people; it isn't broken.

If you'd rather do it by hand, the Grid layer of the build dock has the lot: cell size, offset X and Y, line colour, opacity and width, and — when there's a map on the scene — width and height sliders to stretch the image up to 30% either way, plus skew on both axes for maps that were photographed at an angle. Same rule applies: Save and Reset only appear once you've actually changed something, and nothing persists until you press Save. Leave the Grid layer without saving and the changes are thrown away.

4. Draw walls for line of sight

Wall tool, then click to chain segments. Hold Shift to snap, right-click a segment to delete it. There are two kinds: a wall, which blocks sight, and a door, which you double-click during play to open and close.

Walls block sight, not movement. Tokens walk straight through them; that's intentional.

Walls do nothing at all until Dynamic Vision is on. This is the single most reported piece of confusion in the VTT. It's off by default and it is still a manual switch — Walls block what players see, on the Walls layer beside the wall tools, and it takes effect the moment you press it. The wizard also spots it, says so in as many words, and gives you a Turn it on button right there. Take it.

5. Add NPCs and monsters

Open Tokens panel and place them. The wizard's notes cover the four things worth knowing here: token colour, the GM-only layer (for things players shouldn't see yet), each token's vision range, and HP.

6. Ready to play

Your room code is on this step, with a Copy code button. There's also a checkbox to stop the wizard auto-opening on future sessions, once you know the routine.

Then Open to players. Until you press it the session is in setup, which means two things:

• Nobody can join, and anyone who follows a room link will just sit there connecting.
• Fog of war doesn't render at all. If you've enabled fog and can't see any, this is almost certainly why — it isn't a fog bug.

During play

The canvas toolbar holds the tools everybody shares, with their shortcuts:

The map-making tools are on their own layers of the build dock, as named buttons, and their keys take you there:

While one of them is in your hand, a note across the top of the map says what the next click will do, with a Done button beside it.

Beyond those, and worth knowing they exist rather than discovering them by accident:

• The boundary tool (GM, building, Trace the floor on the Walls layer) traces the playable floor, so a cave stops being a rectangle. Click the corners or drag to trace. Rings inside rings cut holes; two that don't touch are two chambers.
• Emitters drop a light or a sound onto the map — armed from the Light or Sound layer, placed by the next click, with the map in full view the whole time. Each one is then a marker on the map you can drag, with a ring at its reach. They don't snap to the grid, because a torch is on a bracket rather than in a square. Switch on Keep placing until I stop for a row of torches.
• Marks — freehand, arrow, box, circle and text — are for pointing at things. Not GM-only: a player circling a door is the whole use case. They draw above the fog on purpose.
• Cell names (off by default) label squares like a spreadsheet — A1, F7, and AA after Z — and hexes with four digits, column then row.

Escape goes back to Select — except on the wizard's canvas steps, where it disarms whatever tool you've got armed instead. Fog tools only appear on a scene that has fog switched on.