Following characters across the map, chapter by chapter

Every long novel has a chapter where someone walks into a room they cannot possibly be in. The sister who left for the coast three chapters ago pours the tea. The captain on night watch at the East Gate is also, according to chapter twelve, drinking in the lower city. Readers notice. Copy-editors notice later, at a higher price.

The fix is to track character locations the same way you track anything else in a story bible: as a record of what was true at each moment, not a note you overwrite. I built Lokee's maps so that characters are never drawn on them by hand. You draw places. Lokee works out who is where from what the cards already say, at whatever moment you are looking at. When I turned my own novel Medalion into a vault, this was the part that paid for itself fastest. One look at the map at a given moment and the continuity of a whole chase was either right or visibly wrong.

This guide uses the demo story The Ashen Circle and its city map of Duskhollow. You can follow along in the demo or in your own vault. If your places are still scattered across notebooks, how to organize worldbuilding notes is the step before this one.

Tell Lokee which field means "where"

A map can only place people once something on their card says where they are. Lokee reads three sources, in this order, and the first one that says anything wins:

1. A Place field. A field of type Place on the entity type, holding a place entity. This is the most precise option: it can also hold an exact spot on a map.
2. A text field marked Says where someone is. If your characters already have a plain text field such as "Whereabouts", open the vault's entity types, tick Says where someone is on that field, and Lokee matches what you typed ("The Gilded Lantern") to a place entity by its name or one of its aliases.
3. A location relationship. In the relationship types, set On maps to Says where something is (location) for a type such as "located in". The first entity is then somewhere in the second.

In the demo, the Character type has a Place field called Location. Rowan Ashe's Location is The Gilded Lantern; Mira Voss and her son Finn are in Tarnside; Captain Aldric Thorne and Magistrate Ophelia Crane are at The Watch House.

Places sit inside places. The Gilded Lantern's own Location is Tarnside, and Tarnside's is Duskhollow. That chain matters: if a map has no shape for The Gilded Lantern, Lokee rolls the person up through the place's own location until it finds something drawn. A tavern too small for your world map still puts its regulars in the right district.

Open a map before any of this exists and the page says so, with an Open type settings link. Lokee cannot guess which of your fields means "where", because entity types are whatever you made them, in whatever language you write.

Two differences between the sources are worth knowing before you choose:

• The consistency check's "in two places at once" finding only looks at Place fields and fields marked Says where someone is. A location relationship puts people on maps, but the check ignores it. If catching impossible presences is the point, use a field. Running a continuity check before every draft covers the finding itself.
• A field gives you history per character (each move is a recorded change on that card); a relationship gives you history per relationship. For people who travel, a field is the simpler model.

Link the drawn places to their entities

A shape on a map is only a place once it is linked to an entity. Select the building, area or marker and, under Linked entity in the inspector, use Link to an entity…. The Duskhollow demo map already has Varnhold Manor, The Undercroft, The Gilded Lantern and The Watch House linked.

You can also set the spot from the character's side. On the card, a Place field offers Choose a place… and then pin on map: maps that show the place are marked ★, and you click where exactly. The value then reads "pinned". Without a pin, the character sits somewhere inside the place's shape, spread out so that several people in one tavern never stack on top of each other.

For the drawing tools themselves, see From a sketch to an editable atlas and the maps section of the help.

Read the map: who is here, who is elsewhere, who is in two places

Open the map. Everyone whose location resolves to a place on this map, or inside it, appears as a small token with their initials, coloured by entity type. If your entities have photos, the side panel offers Show photos.

The side panel is the roll call, in up to three groups:

• N on this map: everyone placed here. Filter by type narrows it to characters only, or ships only. A red ! beside a name means that person is In two places at once at the moment you are viewing; the token gets a warning ring too.
• Here, position not set: people who are at this map's own place but have no exact spot on it. On the Duskhollow map, anyone whose Location is simply "Duskhollow" lands here. Treat it as a to-do list and drag them where they belong.
• Elsewhere: everyone whose location is not on or under this map, with the place or text their card holds. It starts folded because in a big vault it is the longest list, but it is also where typos surface: a "Whereabouts" text that matches no place by name or alias shows up here with exactly what you typed.

Click any token to open the Where Rowan Ashe is popover. It says whether he is "At an exact spot in" a place or "Somewhere in" it with no exact spot set, and under Why is it here? it gives the reason in plain words: "Set on its card (as it is now)", "A recorded change put it here", "Because of the event" followed by the event's title, or "A location relationship puts it in" the place. That line is the one I use most. You are never left guessing which record put a character in a room.

Move someone now, or move them at a moment

This is where Lokee's model of time does real work. If you have not read Three kinds of "when", the short version: the card holds what is true Currently, and world points hold what was true at moments in your world.

At Current, dragging a token (or a name from the side panel) onto a linked place changes where that character is now. The popover says as much: "Drag it onto another place to move it now." Drop on an unlinked shape and you get "Drop onto a place that is linked to an entity."

At a world point, chosen in the Viewing control at the top of the page, the same drag asks first. The Record this move box offers two answers:

• Moved here at this moment records the move in the character's history at that world point. Earlier moments keep where they were; later moments follow the new place until another move says otherwise.
• Change where they are now edits the card's current value and records nothing in history.

Almost always you want the first. One quirk to know: the side panel's hint still reads "Drag a name onto a place to move it there now" even while you are viewing a world point. Ignore the wording; the drop still asks you Record this move, and nothing is overwritten unless you choose the second answer.

Before someone's first recorded move, the map shows the place on their card. So start a chase or a campaign by placing everyone at the opening moment, and the first moment is unambiguous.

If a type has nowhere to keep a location, Lokee refuses the drop and tells you to add a Place field, or mark a field or relationship type as a location, in the entity type settings. If you prefer typing to dragging, or want to note why, Record this as a change in the popover opens the ordinary change form for the place field. Maps themselves are edited at Current; at a point only people move, unless you use the over-time tools in Mapping a world that changes.

Dragging works with a mouse in the desktop app and on the web. On the Android app the map is for reading.

Track character locations through a chase, end to end

Here is the whole routine on three moments of The Ashen Circle. The demo has no world points of its own, so add them as you go: on the map's time stepper, New moment after this one takes a name (the placeholder suggests "Day 2, dusk") and switches the map to it. I will call them Night of the raid, Dawn after, and Day 2, dusk.

Night of the raid. View it. Nobody has moved yet, so the map shows the cards as they stand: Rowan, Sera and Old Bram at The Gilded Lantern, Aldric and Ophelia at The Watch House, Iseult and the Duke at Varnhold Manor. The Watch raids the tavern. Drag Rowan onto The Undercroft and choose Moved here at this moment. Drag Aldric onto The Gilded Lantern the same way; he leads the raid. Click Aldric's token: Why is it here? now says "A recorded change put it here."

Dawn after. Step forward with the stepper. Rowan is still underground and Aldric is still in the tavern, because a recorded move holds until the next one. Rowan slips out to his sister's dye shop: drag him onto Tarnside. Aldric returns to muster: drag him onto The Watch House. Ophelia never moved, and the map says so without you recording anything.

Day 2, dusk. Ophelia goes to question the Duke. Drag her onto Varnhold Manor. Now the awkward part. Your draft of chapter three has Aldric drinking at the Lantern that evening, so you drag him there too, forgetting that an earlier pass already placed him at The Watch House at this same moment through a different record. The side panel puts a red ! beside his name: In two places at once. Click the token and the popover reads "Recorded in two places at once at this point." Decide which record is the lie, and fix it there.

Then step back to Night of the raid. Nobody is where they will end up, and nothing you did later has disturbed it. That is the whole point: the map is a function of the moment, not a drawing you keep correcting.

Read trails and compare moments like an editor

A sequence of moves is a journey, and journeys are where continuity breaks: a ride that takes a day in chapter four and an afternoon in chapter nine.

Trails

Click a token and choose Show trail, or use the small trail button beside a name in the side panel. Lokee draws the character's stops across the moments of the timeline you are viewing, joined by arrows in order. Turn on several trails at once to see who crossed whose path. Hide trail turns one off.

Rowan's trail from the example reads Gilded Lantern → Undercroft → Tarnside. Reading a trail is a craft exercise more than a technical one. Look for:

• Jumps without a cause. A stop far from the previous one with no event between them. Either an event is missing from your plan or the character teleported.
• Back-and-forth stops the text never mentions. If the trail visits Tarnside twice and the manuscript only once, one recorded move is stale.
• Two trails converging on a meeting that never happens on the page. Sometimes that is a scene you forgot to write.

Compare two moments

Sometimes you do not want the whole journey, just "where was everyone before the betrayal, and where after?" Open Viewing, choose Compare…, and pick a left and a right side. The map draws dashed arrows from where each person was on the left to where they are on the right. Anyone who did not move has no arrow, which is its own kind of information: if the raid was meant to scatter the Ashen Circle and four tokens stand still, the aftermath chapter needs another look.

Compare is read-only. To fix something you found, go back to a single moment and record the move there. Stop comparing returns to the normal view.

The card remembers every move

Open a character's card and two sections tie it back to the maps:

• On maps shows every map the entity appears on as a cropped preview, with a note such as "is here", "drawn once" (for places) or "holds N areas" (for rulers and factions). It follows the page's Viewing position, so a past moment shows the map as it was then.
• Movements lists where the character was, point by point, with arrows between stops: "The Undercroft → Tarnside, at Dawn after", with the event in brackets when the move was recorded as part of a story event, and "exact spot" when it was pinned. It appears only for characters who have moved.

Movements is the trail you can read while drafting. I keep it open in a second window during travel chapters, because it answers "where did I leave her?" without opening the map.

Place people while you write: the Writer's map panel

Most moves happen in prose, not on a map page. In the Writer, open Views and choose Map. The panel shows the map you pick under Choose a map, as of the chapter you are writing: its header says As of the last narrative point at or before that chapter, or As things are now when the manuscript has no points yet. Move to another chapter and the map follows.

The panel's hint says what dragging does: "Drag a character onto a place to put them there from this chapter on." The move is recorded at the chapter's own point in reading order (a point is created for the chapter if it has none), so earlier chapters keep what they had. This is the "For your reader" lane of time: where the reader believes the character is, chapter by chapter, which in a book with flashbacks can differ from world chronology. Keeping a mystery fair shows how that separation protects alibis.

Find who is where runs this chapter's AI extraction with only the events, places and dates stage, then opens the review in the Writer. You accept or reject each proposed presence ("Rowan — at The Undercroft") before anything is recorded. It costs what any extraction costs: Lokee credits in a cloud vault, or your own key or local model in a local vault in the desktop app. Dates come only from the text. Turning a draft into a story bible covers that review in depth, and worldbuilding while you write is the wider habit this panel belongs to.

Shapes stay read-only in the panel, and reviewers on a shared vault see the map without being able to place anyone.

When it goes wrong

Everyone is under Elsewhere. The map's shapes are not linked to the place entities, or the places are linked but the characters' Location points at a place with no shape and no chain up to one. Link the shapes, or give the small place a Location of its own that leads to a drawn one.

A character is at the wrong place in every moment. You used Change where they are now at a world point. That edited the card and recorded nothing, so every moment without a recorded move falls back to the new value. Go to the moment the move happened and record it there; then set the card back to where the character is at the end of the story, or leave it and let the latest recorded move win.

A move shows in the wrong lane. A drag in the Writer's map panel records at the chapter's point in reading order; a drag on the map page at a world point records in world time. If a flashback chapter places someone, the reader learns it there, but the world point may be years earlier. Use the map page for the world moment and the Writer for the reveal, and let the Viewing control show you each.

The red ! will not go away. Two records put the person in two places at the same point: a hand-recorded move and an accepted extraction, say, or a Place field and a "Whereabouts" text that disagree. Open Why is it here?, find the record that is wrong, and delete or correct that change on the card's history. In a mystery, consider keeping it and writing it as a lie somebody told; Keeping a mystery fair shows the field setup for that.

The trail goes straight through a mountain range. Trails join stops with arrows; they are not routes. The mountain is your problem, not the map's, and that is the kind of problem worth finding before a reader does.

What Lokee doesn't do here

It does not know how far apart two places are or how long a journey takes, so a trail that covers a kingdom in one moment is not flagged. It does not read your prose and move people by itself; Find who is where proposes, you decide. It does not draw markers for people with no location on their card. And the Android app shows the map without dragging. For distances and travel days, a note on the place entity or a short table in a Notes page is still the honest tool.

In five minutes

1. Model "where" once. One Place field on each type that moves (characters, armies, ships, artefacts). Mark it as the location.
2. Draw and link the places scenes happen in. Leave small places as entities whose Location points at a bigger one; the roll-up does the rest.
3. Place everyone at the opening moment with Moved here at this moment.
4. Record moves at the moment they happen: the map page for world time, the Writer's map panel for reading order.
5. Before each revision pass, read the main characters' trails and run the consistency check. Anyone In two places at once is a mistake or, in a mystery, a lie. Decide which, and write it that way on purpose.

If you want to try this before setting up your own world, the demo has Duskhollow drawn and linked. For territories and wars on the same maps, continue with Mapping a world that changes; the people-on-the-map help section and the character map tracker overview give the short version.