Okay. Deep breath. This is the biggest update I have ever shipped for MapForge, and I am a little nervous and very excited to finally put it in your hands.

For a long time, the things you place on a map in MapForge were beautiful and completely dead. A chest was a picture of a chest. A lever was a picture of a lever. You could paint a gorgeous room and then, at the table, nothing in it could do anything. That always bugged me. So for the past weeks I have been building one thing, and it turned into a monster in the best way.

MapForge 1.1 adds a new tab to the editor, the fourteenth one, called Actions. It lets you pick any object on your map and give it a life of its own. No macros. No code. Just cards you read, and things that happen when your players touch the map.

Let me walk you through it, because there is a lot.

Living objects

Open the Actions tab, click an object, and you get its behavior card. On one card you see everything the object is: its states, its trigger, and the steps it runs.

A state is a look. Closed or Open. Lit or Out. Each state can have its own image, tint, scale and a looping sound, so a torch that goes out really goes dark and quiet.

The trigger says when it fires, who can fire it, and from how far away. Then the steps say what happens, in order: play a sound, animate, switch state, whisper something in chat, give an item, roll damage, teleport a token, open a linked door. There are 77 actions in the box right now, and I keep finding excuses to add more.

Eighteen ways to wake an object up

Click, double click, hover. A token walking in, walking out, or stopping inside. A signal from another object. The scene loading. Darkness changing. Game time passing. Combat starting. A linked door opening. A manual GM click for the things only you should fire. And two more that arrive with the optional modules (more on that below).

The part I am most proud of: players fire the triggers, but the GM decides. Every click from a player is checked on the GM side before anything runs. If a player is too far away, the object gives a gentle little shake instead of silence, so they know it noticed them.

Steps, lanes and dice

This is where it stops being a toy. Steps can branch. If/Else. Random with weights. Repeat. And my favorite: ask for a check. The object asks the player for a Dexterity save, and you get one lane for success and one lane for failure.

My test chest opens as treasure ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent it is a mimic. It shakes, it bites, it does 1d6 damage and yells MIMIC over the token. I have laughed at this testing with my players more than a grown adult should.

Invisible trigger zones

This one was born while I was recording the launch video. I realized traps need something to step on that nobody can see. So now you can draw a rectangle anywhere on the map and it becomes an invisible trigger zone. Players see nothing. The GM sees a quiet dashed outline. A token walking in, out or stopping inside fires it, and so does a click.

Draw it over the wrong flagstone and the room catches fire. Draw it over a whole room and every player gets a whispered line the first time they walk in. I shipped two presets just for this, Fire trap and Whispering room, so you can try it in ten seconds.

Rehearse, restore, rearm

I did not want you to test a trap by blowing it up in front of your players. So every object has a Rehearse button: it runs the whole thing for your eyes only, step by step, with little dots lighting up. Then Restore puts everything back exactly as it was. And Rearm resets the once only steps, so the chest that only opens once can open once again next session.

The narrator pause

There is an action that stops the map. Literally. Nothing moves, nothing fires, the table waits, and a small banner tells everyone the narrator is speaking. When you are done, you release it. I built it because I kept losing my own dramatic moments to a player clicking on the next thing.

24 ready made behaviors

You do not have to build anything from scratch. There are 24 presets in the box: Treasure chest, Snuffable torch, Dart trap, Rolling boulder, Potion bench, Portal, Watchful statue, Counting lever, Mimic chest, Door of the three levers, Alarm bell, Campfire, Cursed throne, Town well, Whispering idol, Lectern of the prophecy, Ghost diary, Tavern guestbook, Fire trap zone, Whispering room, Healing fountain, Secret passage, Whispering sign, and The Bucket, which is an homage and I will not explain it further.

Stamp one on an object, read the cards, change what you like. Every preset speaks English and Portuguese.

Objects that talk to each other

Objects can send signals, and any object can listen. Scene variables count things. Conditions decide when it is enough. Three levers pull, a door hears all three, and it opens. That is the whole Door of the three levers preset, and you can read it card by card to learn how it works.

Five optional shelves

If you use my other modules, the Actions tab grows a shelf for each of them. Narrator's Jukebox turns the map into the DJ: a lever plays a track, a fireplace starts its own ambience. Exalted Scenes puts portraits and emotions on stage from a click on the map. SessionFlow gives objects timers, clocks, and a formal roll through The Bones. Mortal Needs lets a well relieve thirst and an idol drain sanity. Heavy Lore hands a book to whoever clicked, and when the last reader finishes, the passage opens.

All of it is optional. Turn a module on and its shelf appears. Turn it off and nothing breaks. Without any of them, MapForge works exactly the same.

At the table

Everything is checked on the GM side. A sleeping object goes quiet until you wake it. The whole tab, every card, every preset and every message your players see, is in English and Portuguese.

Also in 1.1: the floor paints its own border

This one lives in the Floors tab and it is small, quiet and I love it. Turn on Edge path, pick a pairing like grass over dirt or a cliff rim, and every floor stroke you paint gets its border automatically, hugging the exact outline, wrapping into closed rings when you close a shape. Each region remembers its own pairing, so the meadow keeps its grass lip and the pit keeps its cliff edge. Turn it off and the borders stay as ordinary paths you can edit like any other.

Available now

MapForge 1.1 is live on the Foundry package page. If you already own it, just update. If you are on the fence, this is the version I would show you.

Thank you for being here.

Gabú