A legacy map is your image with a grid of tiles laid over it. Getting that grid to line up with the picture underneath is most of the work, and it is much easier to do before you have filled in fifty tiles — so it is worth taking the setup slowly.

Before you start

Have your image ready. Chronica accepts .jpg, .jpeg, .png, and .gif files up to 15MB. A larger image gives you more room to zoom in on detail, but the file size limit is firm, so a heavily detailed map may need compressing first.

It also helps to know roughly how many tiles you want across the image. You can change this later, but changing the grid on a map that already has tiles filled in will move which part of the picture each tile covers.

Creating the map

1. From the maps index, click New Map, then Create Legacy Map on the chooser.
2. Name your map. This is required in spirit — if you leave it blank, Chronica saves it as "Unnamed Map".
3. Optionally choose a Map Folder.
4. Game Masters can set Secret? to hide the map from players entirely while they build it.
5. Set Grid Across and Grid Down — how many tiles wide and tall the grid should be. Both accept 1 to 40, and a new map starts at 10 × 10.
6. Under Tile Settings, choose a Tile Orientation: square, horizontal hexes, or vertical hexes. Then set Tile Size (Pixels) — the default is 104px, which allows for the tile borders. Roughly 100px is the practical minimum for tiles that are still comfortable to click.
7. Under Image Settings, upload your map image.
8. Add Notes if you want — this field is shown to players, so it is the right place for the in-world description of the region.
9. Game Masters get a separate Game Master Secrets section, which players never see.
10. Click Create Map, once. Generating the grid takes a moment on a large map.

The two display toggles

Two settings on this form change what players see, and both are easy to misread:

• Disable Color Overlay removes the coloured shading that hides unexplored tiles. Turning this on means the whole map is visible to everyone all the time — the exploration mechanic is switched off. Use it for a map that was never meant to be hidden, like a city your party lives in.
• Disable Tile Codes hides the little coordinate labels (a1, b2, and so on) printed on each tile. Useful when your image already carries its own grid labels, or when the codes are visual clutter. The codes still exist behind the scenes; you just stop seeing them.