Sigil City Atlas

A navigable atlas of an invented city, built in layers so you can move from a whole district down to a single building.

Web Personal project

Who uses it

Five people — my own tabletop group, used at the table while a game is running.

How long it took

One day.

Still maintained

Stable. It does what it needs to and has not needed changing.

Where it runs

lotus-blossom-district-atlas.fochizzy.workers.dev

The problem it solves

A setting used across many sessions accumulates more places, people and connections than anyone can hold in their head or find in their notes. The detail exists but is not reachable at the moment someone asks about it.

How it works

The city is held in layers — districts, then neighborhoods, then blocks, then individual properties — so you can start wide and go down to one address.
The lowest level of detail is filled in by the system as it is needed, rather than every building being written out in advance.
Anything the system produced is labeled as such wherever it appears, next to the material that was written deliberately, so the two are never confused.

What this is built with

Each part, and what it does, in plain terms.

Hosting

Where the site actually runs. These run on Cloudflare, the same service that carries traffic for a large share of the web, so pages load from whichever of its locations is nearest the reader.

A web page people use

The site itself, the screens people click through. It opens in an ordinary browser, so there is nothing for anyone to install.

A database

The filing cabinet where the information lives, so it is still there when you close the page. Anything someone types in and expects to find again is kept here.

Generated detail

Content produced by the system rather than written by a person. Wherever it appears it is marked as such, so a reader always knows which is which.