Nobody is born knowing the shape of Skyrim. A map is a thing somebody drew, and until you are holding one the map key does not open at all. We want cartography to be a trade rather than a menu, so maps are drawn by players, sold by players, and marked by players who have actually stood in the place they are marking.
How it works
Drawing a map needs Speech 10 and one Roll of Paper. It gives you the world map and marks where you are standing. A scribe can also draw one for somebody else: they make the offer, the other player accepts it, and the paper comes out of the scribe's own pack.
The map shows you where things are and it does not carry you there. There is no fast travel in Aurbis, and a map adds none.
What is on your map is what you have found. A scribe who knows a place can mark it onto another player's map, which is how a guide earns a fee, and nobody can mark a place they have not been to themselves.
Custom maps are physical documents scribed at the writing desk (see Literacy, Scribes, and Written Works). A scrap, a regional chart or a treasure map is an item you can carry, sell, lose or have stolen, and it opens on its own surface rather than on the world map. The places on it that the scribe genuinely knew are copied onto your own map when you read it.
A map belongs to a life. When your character dies the map and everything discovered on it go with the rest of what you were carrying, and the next map is drawn again from nothing. Custom map documents are items, so they go to your corpse like anything else (see Death Has Weight).
Commands (/help map)
/map create draws your own map of Skyrim. Speech 10 and one Roll of Paper./map sell <playerId> [gold] offers to draw a map for another player./map buy accepts a map another player has offered you./map list shows your map status and how many places you have discovered./map mark <place> <playerId> marks a place you know onto another player's map./map open <name|doc-id> opens a custom map you hold./map scribe <scrap|regional|treasure> <title> scribes a map from a Roll of Paper. Speech 10.
