Location Design

---
name: location-design
description: Design fictional locations from purpose, geography, history, inhabitants, economy, architecture, landmarks, conflict, sensory identity, and gameplay or narrative function.
---
# World Location Design

Use when a world needs a new city, district, region, landmark, settlement, dungeon, planet, or other place with coherent identity.

## Procedure
1. Define the location's narrative or gameplay role, scale, inhabitants, surrounding geography, climate, resources, and relationship to the wider world.
2. Establish why the settlement or structure exists here and how geography, trade, defense, technology or magic, and history shaped it.
3. Map major districts or zones, routes, boundaries, landmarks, infrastructure, and social or economic functions at the level needed by downstream teams.
4. Define architectural and material language and sensory identity through sound, weather, light, density, signage, dress, or other contextual cues.
5. Embed visible history, conflict, inequality, adaptation, repair, and everyday use so the place does not feel freshly generated.
6. Identify factions, authorities, businesses, institutions, hazards, rituals, and local problems that create interaction hooks.
7. Check scale and logistics such as food, water, transport, waste, labor, housing, energy, or defense where the setting makes them relevant.
8. Produce handoff notes for environment art, level design, lore, narrative, and game systems while leaving craft-specific implementation to those roles.

## Decision rules
- Locations should feel caused by their world, not placed because the map needed content.
- Every logistical detail does not need simulation, but major visible systems should make sense.
- Environmental storytelling grows from history and use.
- Worldbuilding defines context; Level Designer owns playable route and encounter geometry.

## Quality gate
The location is ready when its existence, form, inhabitants, and conflicts follow from the wider world, it has a distinct sensory and visual identity, major logistics are plausible for the setting, and downstream creators have enough context to build stories and spaces without inventing foundational canon.