Places, Regions & Ecology

The location type is deliberately flexible — it has to hold everything from a single room to the whole world. The conventions below are what keep that flexibility from becoming a mess.

The hierarchy

Locations nest through parentLocation: the world root at the top, regions beneath it, then routes, towns, and landmarks under those. The project ships with one root — The Pokémon World — and your first building job is to hang regions off it (Kanto, Johto, or your own), then towns and routes off those. Keep the tree shallow: world → region → place is usually enough; a fourth level for districts and dungeons when a place is big enough to need one.

connectsTo is the adjacency list — what you can walk to from here. It should match the map players see, and it should be reciprocal: if A connects to B, B connects to A.

The fields and what they're for

• type is your label — settlement, wilderness, dungeon, landmark, route, region. Be consistent across your project; the framework doesn't enforce a list, so pick yours early and stick to it.
• hook is why a party would ever go here — the job, the rumor, the sight. A location without a hook is a blank square on the map.
• appearance and senses are what the GM paints when players arrive: sight, sound, smell, feel. atmosphere is the mood under the description — the town that's too quiet, the route that feels watched.
• secret is what's true here that nobody's told the players. Not every place needs one, but the best places have one.
• inhabitants is who lives here in prose; faction (a reference) is who claims it. A town's inhabitants and its controlling faction can be very different things — that gap is story.
• localName is the name locals actually use, distinct from the chart name. Free flavor, and it sells the world cheap.
• notes is the builder's scratchpad — what you plan to do with the place, not what players see.

Wildlife and encounters

wildlife lists the species found here, by reference to the dex. Don't fill it with everything in the region — list what a visitor might actually encounter, and let each species' regionalStatus do the work of rarity: common and uncommon are everyday, rare is a real find, migratory is seasonal, rumoured is a rumor someone could prove.

Encounters are scenes, not random tables. When the party travels a route, look at its wildlife, pick what fits the time of day and the current thread, and play the creature as a creature — hunting, curious, territorial, scared. The dex entry tells you its temperament; the scene tells you what it does.

Making places worth returning to

A place earns a second visit when it has a secret, a faction with an agenda, or a thread playing out inside it. When you build a region, sketch each place's hook and secret first, then connect them with threads — the route that's been quiet since the mine closed, the town whose gym leader everyone's afraid of, the lighthouse whose keeper hasn't been seen in a week. The map is the shape of the story.