Maps & Fog of War

When it's time to fight you might want to show your players a map. In Quest Portal you can easily upload your own maps or select from our library of premade maps.

Here's how you can get the most out of using maps and the available map tools.

To add a new map you have two options: 1) Upload your own or 2) Select a premade map.

To get a new map into your session you can upload it by dragging it onto your session screen or by creating a new scene.

You can upload a new map by dragging the file onto your session screen. It will show an option to upload as a token or a scene. Choose the upload a new scene option.

After the upload completes you will see the map in your scene deck on the left side of your screen.

We recommend editing the scene to add some music.

You can also add a map by creating a scene from scratch. Go into the Scenes tool. This will open the scene gallery with all the premade scenes. There you can create a new scene.

You can drag and drop your files into the big box at the top or click the box to open options to select a premade visual or upload your own. Select the upload option if you aim to get your own map uploaded.

Once the upload is done you will see the preview image. From this screen you can also add soundtracks to the scene and write a description. You can even upload multiple files if you want to have variants of the map (for example a day vs. night version).

Once you have added your custom map you can start adding things. From the session screen you will see tools at the top of the screen that we call Map tools.

The first tool to note is the Fog of War tool ('F' keyboard shortcut). This allows you to hide certain areas of your newly added map.

Click the cloud icon to start using the Fog of War tool. When enabled you will see a few options to choose from. The first is the filled square that allows you to apply fog and the second is the outlined square that allows you to remove fog.

The eye icon allows you to preview how the fog looks like from the player's perspective. The trash icon will remove all fog on the map.

Maps are often divided into grids. The gridlines can be visible or not on the actual image. In either case, we recommend using the Grid tool ('G' keyboard shortcut) to align the internal grid lines on your map.

When you click the Grid icon you will see another menu appear. There you can choose certain settings that should apply to the grid, such as the opacity of the lines, the size of each grid, and the units used to measure.

You will also see a blue box appear on your map. You can use this box to align the grid lines to any existing grid lines. Move the box around as you please and resize it to make it perfect. If you need to adjust by a pixel or two, use the size option in the grid submenu.

Applying a correct grid is important since it affects the measurements in the Measure tool and the size of the tokens when they are added to the map.

The other map tools available allow you to measure distances - the Measure tool ('M' keyboard shortcut), select one or more tokens -the Select tool ('A' keyboard shortcut), and move tokens - the Move tool ('V' keyboard shortcut).