All-knowing map that shows everything.
Direct us to the nearest Burger King.
Direct us to the nearest Burger King.
A regular map can be anything from a crude sketch of a particular intersection to a highly detailed professional quality atlas map that shows every mountain, hill, river, town and road in the area. But what if you're looking for something beyond all that? Something that won't show up on ordinary maps. Something hidden, something that is never in the same place, or something not of this world? What if you're not even looking for something but someone? In cases such as this, you need a magic map, something that will reveal the location of whatever you need; a person, a MacGuffin, places of power, you name it.
Sometimes may be used alongside a Magic Compass or Dowsing Device, and will probably be in the hands of The Navigator For when a map has the power to alter the area it shows, see Reality-Changing Miniature.
Globes may also fit, but tablets with Google Map or anything like that do not count.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, Joseph Joestar's Stand, Hermit Purple grants him the power of divination. One such application to is conjure a map of a city out of some spilled dirt, with a marker showing him the precise location of something he needs.
Comic Books
- W.I.T.C.H.: Hay Lin's grandmother gives her a map that shows the locations of the twelve portals as glowing areas.
Fan Works
- Divine Jealousy and The Voice of Reason: Wind Whistler, captive inside Discord's mind, has constructed an interactive model of the Multiverse.
- How Friendship Accidentally Saved Magical Britain: After giving up the canonical Marauder's Map to Harry, Fred and George decide that they need to make their own magical person-locating map. It takes them over a year, but they manage it, and also add some enhancements over the original, including a search function for quickly locating a specific person, zoom capabilities, automatic layout updates (in case a passageway becomes inaccessible or the walls change, as the castle is wont to do), the ability to track ghosts and some pets, and two passwords, because the twins were able to figure out the original Map's password as first-years, which they consider to be poor security. The new map is called The Power of Friendship, after the rest of the group imagines how silly it would be for Tom to ask them for something by that name, and the two passwords are "All for one, one for all" and a (anachronistic) verse from the My Little Pony theme, the latter of which must be sung.
- In The Keys Stand Alone: The Hard World, Durothé creates a giant map of the entirety of the gameworld of C’hou. It updates in real time, can be used to track/watch/hear anyone now or in the past, can view any area or thing down to the molecular level if need be, and in general can depict any aspect of anything that's been recorded in the game, except those areas that are hidden to game masters. The map is Magitek, since Durothé created it by magic by tapping into the database of the Con Fusion. The four mostly use it to research towns where they can free captive Tayhil during their Zero-Approval Gambit.
- The Untouchable: Along with his letter inviting him to attend Hogwarts, Harry receives a map that points the way to Diagon Alley. The map has a marker for the holder always in the center and magically changes the rest of the parchment around it to reflect their surroundings.
Films — Animation
- Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: The map to the wishing star is magical in nature and displays anyone who enters the Dark Forest in addition to changing the environment of it depending on whoever is holding it.
- In Rise of the Guardians, the North Pole has a large globe covered in lights that represent believing children.
Films — Live-Action
- The map that everyone wants in Dungeons & Dragons (2000), which at one point pulls two of the main characters inside it.
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: As the Obscura goes on a rampage, MACUSA watches a map of Manhattan which shows its progress as a moving light.
- The charts used in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End can guide the reader to places not displayed on more accurate charts. They also bear vague instructions on how to overcome the obstacles encountered along the way.
- The map of the universe stolen from God in Time Bandits.
Literature
- The Bird King: Hassan's Reality Warper powers are expressed through his maps — with a few lines of charcoal and ink on paper he can create secret passages under an enemy's town, build towers out of thin air, and even fold space between doorways to make shortcuts through the palace of the Alhambra. It's almost impossible to find his creations without holding the map that created it, and the magical spaces created by his maps disappear once the paper they're drawn on is torn up. Fatima uses Hassan's powers for frivolous things like sneaking around the palace when she's bored (and bringing him nicer food from the Harem), but later the pair push his abilities to the limits by drawing a map that shows an entirely new island out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
- Gaunt's Ghosts: One of the Chaos assassins in Blood Pact has a living map on his hand's skin, created by powerful Chaos sorcery, which shows the part of the building where he currently is.
- Harry Potter: When they were students at Hogwarts, James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew created their own map of the school. The Marauders' Map, which is activated by pointing a wand at it and saying "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" (and reset by saying "Mischief managed"), shows the location and movement of everyone on the Hogwarts grounds, including all the secret passages into and out of the school. This makes it a very effective security tool, for it cannot be fooled by Polyjuice Potion or Animagi forms (although it can't differentiate between two people who share a name). As a bonus, it is also enchanted to deliver targeted insults at Snape if he specifically attempts to use it.
- The map of the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit is a more subtle example. Most of the time it's just a regular map, but in the light of a certain phase of the moon it reveals information crucial to getting into the mountain alive.
- The Kane Chronicles:
- In The Red Pyramid, the Egyptian Queen navigates into the Land of the Dead via a map called Spells of Coming Forth by Day, a.k.a. The Book of the Dead.
- In The Serpent's Shadow, the First Nome is shown to have a map of the world showing clay figurines being destroyed as loyal magicians are lost. It's not clear it it's the map itself that's magic or the figures, but it could well be both.
- In Jeremy Strong's Krazy Kow Saves the World — Well, Almost, the Mappa Monstrosa is a gigantic map of the world which functions similarly to a fantasy Crystal Ball or a security camera. Genocidal alien warlord Gobyob Badmash uses it to plan his various crimes.
- The Magic Map naturally has one in the form of the Living Map, a world of its own inhabited by Anthropomorphic Personifications of various geographic features that David happens to fall into, or at least dream about falling into.
- Memory Maps are essential tools and reoccurring MacGuffins in S. E. Grove's The Mapmakers Trilogy. The books are set on an Earth shattered into different time periods, so maps evolved to not only record geography but time-specific elements via people's memories. Different maps are for different things to experience memories of (glass for people, clay for landscapes, metal for cityscapes, and cloth for weather), and all must be "awakened" to be read, e.g. a light is shone through glass maps and clay is wet with water.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians: When Percy Jackson goes to the undersea kingdom, there is a mosaic in the palace there that forms a map of the battle taking place, with colored tiles that move around on their own for the different forces.
- Madame Weatherberry from The Tale of Magic owns a map that tells the location of all magical people. Each person is represented through a white light; the brighter the light, the more talent they have. The map is never wrong and updates.
- In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Coriakin creates a map for King Caspian, depicting the voyage to date with supernatural accuracy — including photorealistic details (in a setting where photography doesn't exist!) on the cities, when viewed under a magnifying glass.
Live-Action TV
- One episode of Legend of the Seeker has a mapmaker selling maps to bounty hunters that revealed Richard's location as a glowing point of light.
- Once Upon a Time (2011):
- Rumpelstiltskin gets a blood-activated globe from Cora that enables him to locate his son.
- In the third season, Peter Pan gives Emma a map that is blank, but will reveal the way to Henry when she admits who she really is.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Dragon magazine #125 had the following magical maps.
- Map of Illusion: Detects and shows any illusions within range.
- Map of Magic: Magical auras are highlighted in pulsating red.
- Map of Secret Doors: Secret doors appear as yellow dots on the map.
- Map of Traps: Detects and shows any traps within line of sight.
- Kingdom of Nithia: The artifact map Master Plan shows the current position of all burrowers in the Hollow World who have been paralyzed by the Spell of Preservation.
- Dragon magazine #125 had the following magical maps.
Theme Parks
- Disney Theme Parks: Disneyland has a live show called Mickey and the Magical Map. Mickey tries to complete the sorcerer Yen-sid's enchanted map, but while trying to work on in one area that refuses to be filled in, it comes to life and sends him on a strange journey.
Video Games
- In Dark Souls II, the rather vague and sculpted-on-the-floor map in the basement of Majula's mansion is seemingly connected to the Primordial Bonfires, as a small flame will appear whenever a Primordial Bonfire is lit, indicating where it is in Drangleic. On top of that, those small flames are the only way to relatively tell where anything is, as the map lacks labels of any sorts or details within the map itself.
- King's Quest:
- When Gwydion first finds the magic map from King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human, the map is completely blank. As he explores Llewdor, though, the map lights up and he can quick travel to that location. Even more than that, when he is both on the pirate ship and the coast of Daventry, the map updates so that it reflects the new region.
- In King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, the magic map, so named because it allows you to teleport to any island shown on it, also reveals the location of the mysterious Isle of Mist after a certain point in the game, a hidden island which is rumoured to change locations. The map isn't altered by anybody to show the island; it appears on its own.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- In dungeons, Link finds maps of them that reveal rooms he's been in, and when paired with the compass they reveal all the dungeon's treasures as well.
- In The Wind Waker, Link can collect a series of sea charts, some of which have special properties. Treasure and Triforce maps cause a pillar of light to appear over the treasure's location, and the ghost ship map allows it to be boarded to retrieve a Triforce piece.
- The Sheikah Slate in Breath of the Wild has an updateable map of Hyrule that lets Link warp to activated Shrines. It can also produce 3-dimensional maps of the dungeons that let Link manipulate certain mechanical portions of them. The DLC also adds a function that lets Link review the last 200 hours of progress in the game.
- Minecraft's map is crafted from a Magic Compass, and in multiplayer, it'll show the positions of other players if they happen to be holding their own copy of that map at the time.
- One of the main objects in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is actually called the Magical Map. It's mostly blank at first, but each Crystal Star Mario claims causes the map to get filled in with the location of another. Said Crystal Stars tend to fall into various characters' hands and move about before Mario starts tracking them down, and despite it being made a thousand years ago, displays locations as they are in the present, such as a suburban neighborhood or a Space Base.
- The magic map from Quest for Glory II works similarly to the one from King's Quest III above in that it fills itself in and lets you instantly travel to any place it shows. Unlike the King's Quest one, it only covers the city where you spend most of the game, and not the desert outside.
- Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey: Downplayed — Athena claims her map is magical, but game-wise it's just a way of selecting a destination to sail on to.
Webcomics
- Amazing Super Powers has one
that is also a Reality-Changing Miniature.
- In Widdershins, the wizard Sidney Malik produces one of these by cutting a deal with a spirit of Curiosity, who enchants the map to display live updates of spiritual activity in the town.
Western Animation
- The Map from Dora the Explorer shows the destinations relevant to that episode and it changes what it shows for each and every adventure. Also, it's sentient.
- The Infii-Map in Danny Phantom is, at its core, a complete map of the ghost zone with the locations of all portals between the real and ghost zone, both natural and human-made, but it also magically changes, somehow knows where every ghost in the zone is at, open portals between the dimensions on its own, fly a user to a specific portal if they are holding on, and even has some telepathy.
- The Dragon Prince: Viren puts on quite an impressive display with his scroll map of the five kingdoms while trying to convince the rulers of the other four to join him in war against Xadia.
- Season 5 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic introduced the table-sized holographic magical map in Twilight's castle that points certain members of the Mane 6 to locations where they are needed by having their cutie marks hover over the place's representation in the map.
- In Wakfu, the main characters come across a map possessed by a shushu named Grufon (as in, the minor demon is stuck inside the map). The map is very accurate and offers handy shortcuts to various places. However, it also has a mind of its own, and it's mean - Grufon often tries to trick the party by offering false information based on half-truths (when Eva asks for a harbour, he directs the group to an abandoned one, because she never said "working harbour"). Frequently, Grufon is threatened (usually with fire) by the protagonists into giving them proper, useful and true information.
- As in the comic book, the girls in W.I.T.C.H. (2004) get a map that shows where the portals to Meridian are. It's blank until used with the Heart of Kandrakar.
