Geography in The Wicked West is history made visible. The Eastern Seaboard, Southern Shadows, and Western Frontiers do not experience the supernatural in the same way because centuries of different events, institutions, bargains, conflicts, and pressures shaped each region differently.
The canonical regional history is organized around three broad American areas. Within them sit dozens of settlements, routes, battlefields, wilderness regions, institutions, and local supernatural conditions.
The oldest American layers of the setting gather here: colonial towns, Atlantic ports, universities, inherited wealth, secret societies, occult institutions, and supernatural pressures that have had generations to become entrenched.
The South enters Era 5 carrying the immediate aftermath of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Blood Creek Battlefield, Sergeant Raines, ruined estates, river country, and communities rebuilding after catastrophe belong to this regional history.
Gold, railroads, migration, mining, boomtowns, vast distance, and comparatively thin institutional reach define the western setting. Supernatural pressure often develops faster here than old organizations can understand or contain it.
These regional names survive in the setting's geographic record. They describe broad landscapes and local traditions within the larger regional history rather than separate nations or cosmologies.
Dense forests, craggy coasts, weathered colonial towns, industrial growth, old graveyards, and settlements where several centuries of recorded history sit close to the surface.
Rugged, mist-shrouded mountains filled with narrow hollows, isolated settlements, mines, phantom lights, difficult roads, and local warnings outsiders rarely understand until too late.
Moss-draped riverlands, battlefields, ruined estates, swamps, abandoned homesteads, and communities living among the consequences of slavery, war, Reconstruction, and unresolved death.
A desolate expanse of barren rock, crumbling frontier towns, dry mines, open plains, harsh weather, strange mirages, spectral coyotes, and places where fragments of the past sometimes refuse to remain past.
Mesas, canyons, arid plains, isolated settlements, missions, forts, mining routes, brutal distances, and supernatural sites whose surviving history is often incomplete or contradictory.
Open grasslands, lonely farmsteads, rail corridors, ghost towns, cursed fields, enormous horizons, and scattered communities whose local knowledge can matter more than any distant institution.
Towering granite peaks, mining settlements, abandoned claims, dense forests, difficult passes, lost trails, and the lingering supernatural consequences of the Gold Rush.
A storm-lashed coastline of black cliffs, dense forests, fogbound coves, maritime settlements, shipwreck stories, strange lights, and stretches of shore where the sea seems to keep its own record.
A place becomes dangerous because of what happened there: war, mass death, supernatural intrusion, long-lived agreements, repeated ritual activity, industrial disruption, or the sustained presence of something that should not be there.
Frontier pressure tends to be raw and unstable. Old eastern cities can become patient, layered, and bureaucratic. New York develops its own industrial and voracious expression.
People may not know the cosmological explanation for a place, but generations of survival can produce reliable warnings, customs, routes, taboos, and practical knowledge.