Locations and control

A location is a place your players can move through, from a whole continent down to a single point of interest. Locations nest into a tree, and each one can record the faction that holds it. The navigator shows the tree; the detail panel shows everything tracked about the selected location.

Location types

Every location has a type that labels what it represents:

• Continent
• Country
• Settlement
• Point of Interest

The type is a label, not a constraint. Any type can sit at any depth and hold children of any type. You set the type from the location’s config drawer.

The hierarchy

Locations form a parent and child tree. A location with no parent sits at the top level. A location with a parent is a sub-location of it, and the parent’s detail panel lists it under sub-locations.

The detail panel shows the selected location’s sub-locations as a list. A player clicks one to navigate into it. The parent is set from the location’s config drawer, which lets you reassign a location to any other location or to the top level.

Deleting a location promotes its children to the top level rather than deleting them. Their controlling faction and other links are preserved.

Reparenting in the navigator

You drag a location onto another to move it in the tree. The drop target shows where the location will land:

• Dropping on the upper edge places the location above the target as a sibling.
• Dropping on the lower edge places it below the target as a sibling.
• Dropping on the middle nests the location inside the target as a child.

Reparenting is GM-only and follows the navigator’s drag toggle.

Cycle protection

A location cannot become its own ancestor. If you try to drop a location onto one of its own descendants, Bondsmith rejects the move and reports “Cannot move a location into one of its own descendants.” The tree is left unchanged. The same guard applies when you reassign the parent from the config drawer.

The controlling faction

Each location records which faction or factions hold it, shown under Controlled By in the detail panel. You add a controller from the detail panel or the config drawer. A faction or an actor can be set as a controller.

Each controller carries a control share. When more than one controller holds a location, the panel draws a segmented bar weighted by share and marks the location Contested. The leading controller is named on the bar, and you expand the Control Breakdown to see every controller and its share. Clicking a controller navigates to that faction or actor.

You can hide a controller from players. A hidden controller still counts toward control but is concealed from the player view. You can also clear all controllers to leave the location uncontrolled, which players see as “No faction controls this location.”

Control is separate from the factions and actors merely present at a location. A location’s Factions and Actors sections list who is there without implying control. See Factions and hierarchy for how factions themselves are structured, and Relationships and graphs for how control and presence surface on the graph.

Settings

Drag behaviour, hidden-information defaults, and other location controls are configured on the settings page.