The Atlas

The Atlas is where your campaign lives between sessions. Maps you have scanned, photos and clues you have collected, encounters you have built, and the rules reference all sit here, sorted into the sections you made in chapter 6, Campaigns.

Think of it the way the name suggests: a traveller's atlas, with the maps bound in and everything else tucked between the pages.

Four areas as DM, three as a player

Tap the Atlas tab and you get a row of sub-tabs across the top.

As DM you see four:

• Maps, tinted blue. Your exploration maps and battle maps.
• Assets, tinted amber. Photos, clues, and player portraits.
• Encounters, tinted teal. Fights you have prepared.
• Rules, tinted cream. The rules reference and your homebrew pages.

As a player you see three. There is no Encounters sub-tab at all, and nothing anywhere in the app shows you what the DM has built.

The tint is not decoration. It carries through into the section stripes and buttons inside each area, so a glance tells you where you are. The light theme uses its own muted set of the same four colors.

Maps, Assets, and Encounters hold campaign content. Rules is a different animal: it is a reference book, the same for every campaign, and chapter 35, The Rules Reference, covers it on its own.

Two levels: sections, then things

Every content area works the same way. You land on a list of your sections, each row showing how many things it holds. Tap a section to drill in and see the maps, assets, or encounters inside it. There is no third level and no loose bucket of unfiled items: everything you create belongs to the section you were in when you created it.

For the DM, the drilled-in section is shared across Maps, Assets, and Encounters. Open chapter 3 in Maps, switch to Assets, and you are still in chapter 3. That is deliberate. When you are prepping one part of your adventure, you want all three views pointed at it. The Rules sub-tab keeps its own place independently, and so does the whole player-side Atlas.

What players can and cannot see

This is the part worth getting exactly right, because the app is strict about it.

Maps and assets are private until you reveal them. Everything you author starts life unrevealed. On your own device an unrevealed map or asset shows dimmed with an UNREVEALED badge, so you always know what the table has not seen. On a player's device it is not dimmed, it is absent. Sections work the same way: a player only sees sections that hold at least one revealed thing, so an empty-looking Atlas on their side is the app doing its job.

Revealing is always a deliberate act, done one thing at a time. There is no "reveal everything" button and there never will be. Chapter 18, Revealing Your World, covers every way to do it.

Encounters are never revealed. They have no reveal control, because there is nothing to reveal. The Encounters area is DM-only by construction. Players find out about a fight when you start it, not before. Chapter 12, Building Encounters, and chapter 13, The Map Prep Workbench, are DM chapters end to end.

Note pins are the exception. During a live session, a Note pin dropped on the exploration map is shared the instant it lands. That is the point of them: they are table talk, not prepared content, and both DM and players can place them. Chapter 17, The Play Tab and the Exploration Map, covers the pin tools. Outside a session, players cannot place notes, because their offline Atlas is read-only.

Getting around

• Tap a section row to drill in, and the back arrow to come out.
• Long-press a section row or a tile to open its management menu: rename, move to another section, delete, and the reveal actions. On a Mac or Windows machine, right-click instead.
• Tap a map tile as DM to open its detail screen; as a player in a session, tapping a map puts it on your own Play tab.

The three content areas each get a chapter of their own: chapter 8, Adding Maps, chapter 11, Photos, Clues, and Portraits, and chapter 12, Building Encounters.

The Atlas after the session ends

Everything the DM revealed stays on each player's device. They can open it later with no session running and no DM online, browsing the maps and handouts they were shown, as of the last session they attended. It is read-only, and chapter 30, Browse Offline: the Player's Atlas, walks through it.