Explore the real-world places that appear in Season of Storms by Andrzej Sapkowski. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Kerack, Novigrad, Wizards' Guild Hall, Lytta Neyd's Tower, Temple of Melitele and 10 more.
Coastal city-state and seat of King Belohun
Geralt arrives in Kerack at the start of the novel, having been robbed of his witcher swords. He navigates the corrupt court of King Belohun and becomes entangled in the scheming of the king's sons Egmund and Xander. The city serves as the primary hub for the story's opening acts of political intrigue.
Kerack is a relatively young coastal kingdom grown wealthy from sea trade and fishing rights along the Great Sea. Its monarchy is notoriously unstable, with royal succession frequently decided by violence rather than law. The city's harbor is one of the most active trading ports on the western coast.
Kerack establishes the novel's central theme of theft and identity — Geralt is stripped of his defining tools and must rely on wit and reputation alone. The corrupt court mirrors the broader moral rot Geralt witnesses throughout the Continent.
The largest free city on the Continent
Geralt travels to Novigrad seeking his stolen swords, navigating its criminal underworld and guild structures. He crosses paths with Dandelion, who is performing at the city's famous inns. The city's maze of criminal guilds, thieves, and corrupt officials presents multiple obstacles to recovering his blades.
Novigrad is an independent city-state nominally free from any kingdom's rule, governed by its own council and heavily influenced by the Church of the Eternal Fire. It is a melting pot of races, criminals, merchants, and mages, and is widely considered the most important commercial center on the Continent.
Novigrad represents civilization's veneer over corruption — a place of culture and commerce that rests on exploitation and persecution. Geralt's quest through its criminal networks underscores the theme that law and justice are rarely aligned.
Seat of magical authority and sorcerous politics
The Brotherhood of Sorcerers and their political machinations form a critical backdrop to the novel. Geralt interacts with various mages including Coral and Lytta Neyd, whose schemes intersect with the theft of his swords. Sorcerous authority proves as corrupt as royal authority throughout the narrative.
The Brotherhood of Sorcerers maintains halls and lodges throughout the northern kingdoms, serving as advisors to kings while pursuing their own agendas. Mages who break the guild's strict codes face expulsion or worse. Their internal politics shape the fate of entire kingdoms.
The Brotherhood represents institutionalized power that claims neutrality while wielding enormous influence. Geralt's difficult relationship with sorcerers mirrors his position as an outsider who is used by powerful factions but never truly accepted by them.
Coastal tower of the sorceress called Coral
Geralt enters a turbulent romantic relationship with the sorceress Lytta Neyd, known as Coral, who resides in a tower near the Kerack coast. She assists Geralt in his search for his swords while pursuing her own political objectives. Their relationship is passionate and volatile, defined by mutual need and mistrust.
Coral is a sorceress of considerable power who was exiled from the Brotherhood for violations of their code. Her coastal tower serves as a base for her independent magical practice and her subtle influence over Kerack's court. She is known for her use of coral-hued magic and her capricious nature.
Lytta Neyd embodies the novel's exploration of desire, manipulation, and power between equals. Her relationship with Geralt forces him to confront what it means to be used even by those who genuinely care for him, and whether connection is possible for a witcher.
Sacred temple of the goddess of fate and fertility
Shrines and temples to Melitele appear throughout Geralt's journey, offering moments of reflection. The goddess Melitele is invoked by peasants and nobles alike seeking fate's favor. Geralt's relationship to faith and destiny is meditated through these encounters with her worship.
Melitele is among the oldest and most widely worshipped deities on the Continent, governing fate, fertility, and the hearth. Her temples serve as refuges and hospitals as much as places of worship. Priestesses of Melitele are often the only reliable source of healing in rural regions.
Melitele's temples represent the quiet spiritual undercurrent of the world — a faith older than kingdoms and more enduring than magic. For Geralt, they are spaces where the question of destiny, which governs his entire existence as a witcher, surfaces most acutely.
University city and center of learning
Dandelion's connections to Oxenfurt Academy prove useful to Geralt in tracking leads about his stolen swords. The city's academics and students represent a world of intellectual pursuit that contrasts sharply with the violence Geralt inhabits. Several informants and scholars assist in piecing together the conspiracy.
Oxenfurt Academy is the premier institution of learning on the Continent, attracting scholars, bards, healers, and mages from across the known world. The city enjoys special protections under Redanian law, making it a relatively safe haven for free thought and unconventional ideas.
Oxenfurt represents knowledge as its own form of power and vulnerability. The gap between academic understanding and the brutal realities Geralt faces highlights the novel's grounded, unsentimental view of how wisdom translates into action.
Hidden stronghold of renegade sorcerers
Geralt is brought to Rissberg, a secret fortress where a group of expelled and renegade sorcerers conduct forbidden magical experiments. He discovers that mages here have been creating magical hybrids and monsters in violation of Brotherhood codes. The fortress confrontation forms one of the novel's major climaxes.
Rissberg was originally a Redanian military outpost that was quietly ceded to a cabal of sorcerers seeking freedom from Brotherhood oversight. Its remote location and magical wards make it nearly impossible to find without a guide. Rumors of monstrous experiments conducted within its walls have long circulated in the underworld.
Rissberg is the novel's heart of darkness — where unchecked magical ambition produces genuine evil. It forces Geralt to confront not just monsters created by magic, but the human monsters who create them, reflecting the book's inquiry into what truly constitutes a beast.
Tavern at the Kerack docks frequented by criminals
The Anchor Inn serves as a meeting point for Geralt as he gathers intelligence about who stole his swords. Various criminal contacts, sailors, and informants pass through its smoky common room. Geralt pieces together the network responsible for the theft through conversations brokered here.
Dockside taverns like the Anchor are the true information exchanges of any coastal city, where guild criminals, sailors, and spies mingle freely. The Anchor has changed hands many times over the decades but maintains a reputation for discretion — no questions asked, no names remembered.
The Anchor Inn grounds the novel's opening mystery in the gritty reality of street-level crime. Geralt's detective work here establishes that recovering what was stolen requires navigating the same corrupt world that allowed the theft to happen.
Fortified crossing town on the Pontar
Pont Vanis appears as a crossing point during Geralt's travels through the northern kingdoms. The town's bridge across the Pontar is a contested political boundary between Redania and Aedirn. Geralt navigates border tensions and local politics during his passage.
Pont Vanis has been fought over by Redania and Aedirn for generations, its bridge representing not just a physical crossing but economic control over river trade. The town changes administrative hands periodically depending on which kingdom holds the upper hand diplomatically or militarily.
Border towns like Pont Vanis illustrate the fragmented, contested nature of power on the Continent. They remind Geralt — and the reader — that witchers operate in a world where the political map is never stable and neutrality is always costly.
Small Temerian town where Geralt takes a contract
Geralt takes a monster-slaying contract in the town of Dorian, confronting a creature that has been preying on local villagers. The contract illustrates the bread-and-butter work of a witcher while the locals' suspicion and fear of Geralt himself complicates the engagement. The episode reinforces that witchers are simultaneously needed and despised.
Dorian is a farming and timber town on the edge of Temerian territory, typical of hundreds of small settlements scattered across the kingdom. Its people live close to the wilderness and deal with monster threats as a practical fact of life, hiring witchers only when the danger becomes unbearable.
Dorian's contract episode encapsulates the Witcher's existential irony — Geralt is most valuable to society in the very moments society is most hostile to him. The town represents the ordinary world that Geralt protects but can never fully belong to.
Coastal trade port with criminal guild ties
Geralt's investigation into his stolen swords leads him through Bremervoord, a port town with deep ties to smuggling networks. He confronts members of the thieves' guild here and follows the trail of his missing blades further up the criminal chain. A violent confrontation with guild enforcers occurs at the docks.
Bremervoord grew from a fishing village into a significant port by becoming a haven for goods that could not pass through more regulated harbors. The local harbor master has long maintained a pragmatic arrangement with the criminal guilds, taking a cut in exchange for looking the other way.
Bremervoord advances the novel's mystery plot while highlighting the systemic corruption that makes crimes like the theft of Geralt's swords possible in the first place. It shows that individual villains operate within larger structures of complicity.
Remote village near Nilfgaardian influence
In one of the novel's most striking sequences, Geralt encounters the village of Houttuyn in the southern reaches, where the shadow of Nilfgaard looms over daily life. Villagers live in fear of both imperial expansion and the monsters that have multiplied in the instability of borderlands. A subplot involving a local magnate's crimes unfolds here.
Houttuyn sits in a region that has changed hands between northern kingdoms and Nilfgaard multiple times, leaving its population scarred and suspicious of all authority. Its people practice a blend of northern and southern customs, and their loyalties are guided entirely by survival rather than patriotism.
Houttuyn represents the human cost of the great powers' political games — the ordinary people ground between empires who never asked to be part of history. It connects Season of Storms to the broader Witcher saga's themes of war and its victims.
Port city with a prominent mages' academy
Gors Velen appears in connection with sorcerous networks Geralt investigates while tracking his stolen swords. The city's magical academy has links to the Brotherhood and to independent practitioners operating outside official sanction. Geralt gathers crucial information here about the enchantments placed on his blades.
Gors Velen is a prosperous city known for its magical academy, which trains hedgehog mages and lower-tier practitioners who lack the talent for the Brotherhood's full ranks. The city has a complex relationship with the Brotherhood — technically subordinate but practically semi-autonomous in its magical affairs.
Gors Velen illustrates the hierarchy of magical power and the ambition that drives people to circumvent it. The information Geralt obtains here is crucial to understanding that his swords are not merely stolen property but objects sought for their magical properties.
Coastal fortification and prison stronghold
Geralt is briefly imprisoned in the stronghold known as Jealousy during his entanglements with Kerack's royal court politics. The imprisonment forces him into an unlikely alliance with other prisoners who have information about his stolen swords. His escape involves both brute force and careful manipulation of his captors.
Jealousy is a fortress-prison maintained by Kerack's crown for political prisoners and those who run afoul of the royal family. Its name derives from an old local legend about a jealous sea spirit who demanded a fortress be built in its honor to prevent it from sinking ships. Few who enter Jealousy leave by conventional means.
Geralt's imprisonment in Jealousy is a literal stripping away of freedom to mirror his earlier stripping away of his identity as a witcher through the theft of his swords. The escape represents his reassertion of agency in a world that seeks to confine and control him.
Isolated sorcerers' archive and repository
The archive at Loxia holds records of magical contracts, enchanted objects, and sorcerous transactions that prove vital to Geralt's investigation. With the help of a sympathetic archivist, Geralt uncovers the true origin and enchantments of his stolen swords. The discovery sets him on course for the final confrontation at Rissberg.
Loxia was established by the Brotherhood of Sorcerers as a neutral repository for magical knowledge and contractual records, theoretically accessible to any mage of standing. In practice, it serves as a leverage point — whoever controls access to Loxia controls a great deal of what the Brotherhood knows about itself.
Loxia represents the power of knowledge as property — the idea that information about magical objects is itself a form of magic. Geralt's discovery here transforms him from a victim of theft into an agent of justice, propelling the novel toward its resolution.
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