Locations & Maps
A Location file is a place the characters can be. The default world ships with exactly one — the Crosswater Wayhouse — built deliberately as the hinge where four frontiers meet. Before you build a second place, understand what that one file is doing, because it is whispering the design intent of the whole type.
The three-part anatomy of a place
Every Location has three prose fields, and each plays a different role:
- description — what the place is: timber and stone, long tables, four roads out. This is the durable, "any night" truth a master uses to establish the setting.
- atmosphere — what the place feels like right now: hearth-lit, loud, woodsmoke, with a seventh candle whose flame bends the wrong way. This is the current mood — the load-bearing, scene-defining layer.
- notes — the master's pointer rail: exits, secrets, watch, the pressures in play. This is where a GM finds the hooks — a sealed cellar door, an old god's name, rising missing-persons notices.
Description is the world; atmosphere is the moment; notes is the machinery. A good Location file has all three and keeps their jobs separate. A paragraph of mist describing every detail is atmosphere doing description's work, and then nothing tells the GM what is actually there.
Type is a contract, not a label
The type field (Settlement, wilderness, dungeon, landmark, or another label) is the master's cue for how to operate on the place. Match it precisely. A place labeled wilderness and a place labeled dungeon run differently under the world engines. If a place is a true hinge like the wayhouse (Hub · Waystation), say so — the label is the master's first read on what the place is for.
Four roads, each a genre
The wayhouse's notes list four exits, each pointing at a different frontier — the Kingsroad into settled lands, the Drowned Ford into marshes, the Ashborn ridge-track into burnt country, the cargo-rail toward the industrial fringe. This is the technique the system is built around: one location can launch any of the nine genre openings. When you build a world, place your hinges where multiple genres can plausibly meet. A single well-made crossroads does more for the fiction than a grid of moody rooms.
Maps point at locations
Locations are the things a map pins. A map's pins reference Location files by name, and a well-pinned world links map ↔ location so the two stay in sync. The corollary of the reference rules in The Content Map: when you add a place to the world, add the real Location file first, then pin it on the map. A pin to a name with no Location file behind it is a doorway to nowhere.
The test for a good Location entry
Ask yourself three questions before you finish a file:
- Could a master run a scene here from the file alone? — description for the stage, atmosphere for the mood, notes for the hooks.
- Could a player act on it? — if the notes' secrets and pressures don't invite a choice, the place is scenery, not a location.
- Does it belong to the world's genre architecture? — does it sit where a story can pivot, the way the wayhouse sits where four roads meet?
If all three answer yes, the place will earn its keep the way the wayhouse does.