Geography — Overview
The Geography layer contains hexes, terrain features, regional routes, and wilderness space. It’s the substrate on which everything else sits.
Geography nodes are the least frequently pinned layer in play — players traverse them but rarely observe them in detail. This makes them the most mutable layer and the cheapest to regenerate. It also makes them the primary delivery mechanism for the seeded discovery pool.
Opposite Face: Settlements
Geography without settlements is empty terrain. The Settlements layer is the opposite face — the constraint axiom requires every settlement to have a geography post explaining why it exists where it does. The founding resource is this post.
Inversely, geography nodes become more significant when they have settlement posts. A hex becomes interesting when there’s something in it. The hex is coordinates; the settlement node is content.
The Hex as Coordinate, Not Container
A hex doesn’t contain content — it provides coordinates for content. “There’s a herb garden in hex 7” doesn’t mean hex 7 is a herb garden. It means somewhere within that three-mile stretch, there’s a patch of silvervein moss. A single hex can hold multiple discovery nodes.
Three-mile hexes (one league): roughly an hour to cross on a road, four hours through wilderness.
Node Types
(To be formalized — hex terrain types, regional feature types, route types, discovery node types)
Key Relationships
- Posts to Settlements — what’s built here, what resource anchored it
- Posts to Factions — what territory is claimed or contested
- Posts to Quests — what destinations are quest-relevant
- Posts to Lore — what history happened in this landscape
Generation Sources
Geography nodes are seeded by Hexmancer (hex terrain and features), Perilous Wilds (wilderness travel and discovery), and the seeded discovery pool procedure. Most geography nodes start uncollapsed and are revealed through travel.