Building Locations
A location is the stage, the rulebook, and the clock all at once. It is the file type with the least margin for laziness, because it is the one the players will actually stand in.
Start with the hidden truth
Before you write a single room, write the secret — the hidden fact that makes this place playable. A facility whose power grid is a teleporter. A village whose harvest is people. The secret is the engine; the rooms are just where the players walk while trying to find it. If a location has no secret, it has no reason to exist as a location instead of a corridor.
The three reads
Every location should reward three different kinds of attention:
- Atmosphere — what a player sees, hears, and smells on arrival. Write it as a room description, not a history. One detail that tells players something is waiting beneath the surface.
- Description — what the place is, plainly, for the record.
- GM notes and secrets — the truth, the hazards, the things that will bite. The gap between what players are told and what the GM knows is where the game lives.
Site type and status
The site type (facility, settlement, ruin, wilderness, vessel, installation, otherworldly, region) is genre. The status (intact, contested, overrun, sealed, destroyed, anomalous) is a state that play changes — and the world state's sites-lost record exists precisely because status moves. Wherever you mark a status, ask yourself what would change it, because that is the scene you are building toward.
Connections decide travel
The connections array is the travel economy: each edge points at another location and carries a route, a travel cost, and a risk (safe → lethal). This is the field the travel rules actually spend. Design connections the way you design consequences — watched crossings, dangerous roads, the one lethal shortcut everyone knows. The between is part of the map; leave it blank and the world feels like a sequence of rooms.
Populate deliberately
Perks available, threats present, notable characters, intel here — these reference fields are the location's content plan. The discipline is scarcity. A perk machine on a hard-to-reach shelf is a reward; a machine in every room is a vending row. A named threat worth a location says something about the place; a list of everything in the bestiary says nothing. Place a few, and make each one tell the GM what to do with it.
Hazards with an out
Each hazard should carry how to avoid it. A hazard with no avoidance is a tax; a hazard with an avoidance is a puzzle, a choice, and a story. The avoidance is also how you hint at the secret without telling it.