Geography — Overview
The Geography layer contains terrain, regional features, routes, and wilderness space. It’s the spatial 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.
Spatial Structure: The Stalberg Grid
Geography is the only layer with an explicit spatial structure. The Stalberg grid provides an organic, irregular quad grid built from hexagonal patches that tiles infinitely and supports fractal zoom — the same algorithm generates grids at Planet, Continent, Kingdom, Region, and Settlement scales.
Constraint propagation on this grid is governed by adjacency rules that define which terrain types can neighbor each other and with what probability. These rules power all five generation modes identically.
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 tile becomes interesting when there’s something in it. The tile is coordinates; the settlement node is content.
The Tile as Coordinate, Not Container
A tile doesn’t contain content — it provides coordinates for content. “There’s a herb garden in tile 7” doesn’t mean tile 7 is a herb garden. It means somewhere within that stretch of terrain, there’s a patch of silvervein moss. A single tile can hold multiple discovery nodes.
Procedural Counterpart
The procedures for geography live in Sections — Geography:
- Hex Map — three-mile hexes, travel speeds, visibility, the shared map
- Travel & Complications — encounter tables, waypoints, weather
Node Types
Corner types on the dual grid define terrain identity. See Constraint Rules for the current type vocabulary at each zoom level.
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