Short answer: The Story Map (the Story Map tab in Forge's top bar) is your whole project as a flowchart. Every scene is one card, cards run in the order the story reaches them, episodes are drawn as bands of their own scenes, and arrows show every way the story can route - fall-throughs, jumps, calls, returns, choice options and paywall fallbacks. It is a navigator and a diagnostic, not a second script editor: clicking a card takes the Stage there.
How the map is laid out
Each episode is a band of its own scenes, in order. Inside a band, how far along a card sits is how far into that episode the story has to travel to reach it, so the chart reads in story time. Scenes that branch sit in their own lanes. A scene nothing can reach parks in the band's last lane, past everything live.
Out of the box the map reads the way the tab always has: scenes left to right, episodes as rows stacked down the chart.
A card carries what it is worth knowing at a glance: the scene title, its episode, its access (free, paid or members-only), how many lines and roughly how long it reads, its choices and conditions, its first backdrop, and its TODO count. The start of the story wears a rose halo, the scene the Stage is currently playing wears an amber dot, and an ending wears an ivory cap.
Arranging it for your screen
Three toggles in the map's chrome decide the shape, and you set them separately:
- Episodes: Rows or Columns - whether your chapters stack down the chart or sit side by side.
- Scenes: Across or Down - whether the scenes inside a chapter read left to right or top to bottom.
- Wrap: Wrap or One line - whether your chapters pack into groups that fit the screen, or stay on one unbroken line.
The first two give four arrangements, and each suits a different room:
- Episodes as rows, scenes across (the default) - a chapter per row, story time to the right. The most familiar shape, and the one a wide monitor likes.
- Episodes as columns, scenes down - a chapter per column, story time downward. This is what the Split drawer opens with, because a tall space beside the Stage reads a story down.
- Episodes as columns, scenes across - chapters laid end to end, each one a row of its own scenes.
- Episodes as rows, scenes down - the same idea turned: chapters stacked, each one a column of scenes.
Wrap then decides whether a long story folds. With Wrap on - how the map has always drawn, and still the default - your chapters pack into groups that chase the shape of the screen, so a twelve-chapter saga fills the window instead of running off the side. Turn it off with One line and every chapter stays on one unbroken run, in whichever direction the Episodes toggle points: one very long line, or one very tall column. It is the honest picture of how long your story is, and it is worth a look before you decide a chapter is too short. Wrap applies to all four arrangements.
The toggles sit as small glyph keys in the island at the map's top-left - hover one for what it does. A narrower window keeps as many as fit on one row and moves the rest to the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + K), which can switch any of them at any width: Card size goes first, then Wrap, and Episodes and Scenes are the last to leave. Narrower still, the whole chrome folds into a single bar, and all of them live in the sheet that bar opens, as Episodes, Scenes, Wrap and Card size rows.
Every one of these choices is remembered per project and per place you opened the map: the Story Map tab, the Split drawer and the pop-out each keep their own. Nothing about it is shared with your readers, and the map never rearranges itself when you resize a window.
The arrows
An arrow is a route the reader can actually take, read straight from your story:
- a scene flowing into the next one in its episode,
- the last scene of an episode into the first scene of the next,
- a jump or a call to the scene it targets, and a return back to whoever called,
- a choice option to where that option leads,
- a paywall's fallback, for readers who do not buy.
An arrow inside a condition is labeled with the condition, so you can see when the story takes it. A target that names no real scene is drawn as a dangling arrow and reported as a problem rather than silently dropped.
Finding your way around
- Click a card to select it everywhere and send the Stage to that scene. Double-click to park the timeline on it.
- Search (
/or Ctrl/Cmd + K) flies to the first hit and flashes it - looking around never changes what the Stage is showing. - Fit (
f) frames the whole story; the camera you leave behind is remembered per project. - Arrow keys walk the map: the two arrows along the way scenes read follow the arrows on the map, and the other two move between lanes inside a chapter.
- The minimap in the corner and the jumper pills on cards (a long arrow across the chart becomes a labeled pill on both ends, one click to fly to the far end) both keep a wide story navigable.
- Drag a card to put it somewhere that suits your story better. The position is saved for the project, on every machine. A position belongs to the arrangement you made it in - an offset inside a row means nothing inside a column - so a card you drag with episodes as rows stays put there and does not follow you to the other three arrangements. A card keeps one position, though: drag the same card again in another arrangement and it moves there rather than holding both, and it goes back to its automatic spot in the arrangement you dragged it out of. Different cards placed in different arrangements do keep their own. Reset layout puts back the arrangement you are looking at and leaves the rest alone.
Filters, routes and problems
Four chips emphasize what you are looking for - paywalls, variables, TODOs, unreachable scenes - dimming everything else; two more decide whether return arrows and jumper pills are drawn at all.
The isolate picker lists your endings. Pick one and the map shows only the route from the start to that ending, with the arrows on it marching. It is the quickest answer to "how does a reader actually get here?"
The issue counter lists what the map found: scenes nothing reaches, dead ends the author never marked as an ending, arrows pointing at scenes that do not exist, choices whose every option goes to the same place, and empty episodes.
The lens - what happens in a scene
The lens is a panel down the map's right edge listing the selected scene's beats: its choices, jumps, calls, conditions, payments and inputs, with plain runs of dialogue collapsed into one "12 lines" row that quotes its first line. Clicking a beat sends the Stage to that exact step without opening an editor - a look at the scene, not an edit of it.
Where it shows up
The same map appears in four places: the full Story Map view, the Split drawer's Story Map tab, a pop-out window of its own, and the dock's Map tab, which draws just the neighborhood of the scene playing right now and follows the playhead.