Regional and Site Design Framework

Overview

This document defines the current framework for distinguishing broad regions from concentrated sites on the Caeldon place shelf.

It exists to keep place design from flattening into a list of names. Places should carry scale, function, and historical layering differently depending on whether they are broad lived worlds or tightly bounded flashpoints.

Core Distinction

A region should usually be a broad geographic world with ecological identity, strategic consequence, civilizational ties, and long-lived historical role.

A site should usually be a singular or tightly bounded place where larger regional, civilizational, sacred, or strategic pressures become concentrated enough to matter in a more focused way.

Places Should Do Work: a named place should usually carry ecological, strategic, symbolic, historical, or civilizational weight. If it does not shape movement, memory, settlement, conflict, exchange, legitimacy, or inheritance, it probably does not yet need a dedicated document.

The practical test is simple:

regions organize extended habitation, movement, ecology, or frontier logic
sites concentrate conflict, memory, legitimacy, exchange, or sacred pressure within a bounded place

Region Rules

Regions should usually focus on broad geographic identity, ecological and strategic importance, major civilizational ties, and long-lived historical role.

The strongest regional map on the current shelf is layered rather than flat. Regions should ideally read as one or more of the following:

pre-contact regional fields
homeland regions
branch-forming or identity-forming heartlands
interface regions
corridor regions
mixed-custom frontier regions
deep conflict-threshold regions

This helps regions feel inhabited and historical rather than decorative. A region should not read like empty terrain waiting for a people to arrive. It should usually already be a meaningful field that shapes the peoples living in and around it.

Site Rules

Sites should usually focus on singular or tightly bounded places of strategic, sacred, historical, or symbolic importance.

They work best when they gather larger tensions into one bounded location. A strong site is often where broader regional history becomes impossible to treat as abstract: a receiving ground, reserve point, harbor threshold, legal marker, sacred remnant, route anchor, or disputed necessity that multiple groups cannot ignore.

Sites therefore should not merely duplicate regional identity at smaller scale. They should intensify it. A good site explains why one place becomes materially or symbolically dense enough to hold conflict, memory, or public legitimacy in concentrated form.

Historical Layering in Place Design

The place shelf should read as historically layered geography.

The strongest current model is:

an older planetary ladder of regional differentiation beneath the named map
named heartlands that become legible through species and civilizational history
interface and frontier regions where those worlds grow entangled
concentrated sites where larger pressures harden into durable symbols, disputes, or coordinating institutions

This layering keeps places from feeling like isolated labels. Geography should shape history, and history should make geography legible in return.