Harry Potter Location Picker
Where do the flames take you?
Places on the network
Tap a place to connect its grate to the network (up to 12 — all of them fit at once).
Pick which wizarding places are on the network, then throw the Floo powder. The flames turn green, the grates flash past, and you step out coughing at one of them — with a line on what you will find when you get there.
- Fanfic settings
- Tabletop scenes
- Quiz rounds
A random wizarding place, by Floo
The Harry Potter Location Picker chooses one of fifteen wizarding places at random — but instead of spinning a wheel at a list, you travel there. Throw the Floo powder, the flames in the hearth turn green and roar, grate after grate flashes past as you tumble through the network, and you step out coughing at wherever the flames drop you.
How it works
Choose the places
Tap the locations you want connected. All fifteen fit on the network at once, or narrow it to the shortlist your story actually reaches.
Throw the Floo powder
The flames turn emerald green and roar up. This is the moment of departure, and it is the fun part.
Rush through the network
Fireplace after fireplace streams past behind the flames — a first-person spin through the Floo Network — slowing the whole way.
Step out
The rush settles on one grate, the place lights up out of the soot, and the name plate drops in below.
The fifteen places, and what you will find there
Every arrival comes with a line of description, because "you got the Ministry" is a name and "underground, endless, drowning in memos" is a place you can picture. This is the full network, along with the object that stands in for each stop on the grate.
| Location | What it is | On the grate | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hogwarts | The school | Castle turrets | Moving staircases, ghosts, and a feast waiting whenever you finally arrive. |
| Diagon Alley | Shopping street | A brick archway | Everything a witch or wizard needs, and a few things nobody should. |
| Hogsmeade | Wizarding village | A snowy cottage | Butterbeer, sweet shops, and a shrieking house nobody visits twice. |
| Azkaban | The prison | A lone tower | A fortress on a rock in the North Sea. You are not travelling here on purpose. |
| Ministry of Magic | The government | A telephone box | Underground, endless, and drowning in memos. |
| Gringotts | The bank | A columned facade | Miles deep, guarded by carts and curses. The safest place in the world bar one. |
| The Burrow | The Weasley home | A leaning house | Held up mostly by magic and affection. The kettle is always on. |
| Forbidden Forest | The woods | Dark pines | Out of bounds, for extremely good reasons. |
| Room of Requirement | A hidden room | An ornate door | Becomes whatever you need — if you know how to ask for it. |
| Chamber of Secrets | A sealed chamber | A serpent door | Sealed for a thousand years, openable by one bloodline's voice. |
| Malfoy Manor | A grand house | An iron gate | Cold, impeccable, unwelcoming, and up to something. |
| Godric's Hollow | The village | A ruined cottage | Where it began and nearly ended. A great deal of history in a small place. |
| Grimmauld Place | The Order's HQ | A grim townhouse | Unplottable, hidden between eleven and thirteen, and it does not want you in it. |
| The Leaky Cauldron | The pub gateway | A hanging sign | The dingy pub Muggles walk straight past, and the doorway to Diagon Alley. |
| Platform 9¾ | The station | A luggage trolley | Walk at the barrier between nine and ten, and the Hogwarts Express is waiting. |
Why the Floo Network, and not a map
A picker for places had an obvious wrong answer: a spinning wheel with location names on it. A wheel has nothing to do with going somewhere. The Floo Network does — it is the everyday way witches and wizards travel, fireplace to fireplace, and the experience of it in the books is a first-person tumble past grate after grate until you fall out at your stop.
So that is the mechanic. The grates rushing past is the pick, and it is a journey you take rather than a dial you watch. It also keeps the page from being a wheel wearing a costume, which is exactly the trap a location list invites.
The places you would not choose
Half of this network is somewhere you would happily arrive and half is somewhere you would not. Azkaban is a prison in the middle of the sea. The Forbidden Forest is out of bounds for reasons that turn out to be sound. Malfoy Manor is beautiful and wants you gone. The Chamber of Secrets was sealed on purpose.
That is deliberately what makes the draw good. A network of nothing but pleasant destinations has no stakes; the chance that the flames drop you somewhere you did not want to be is the whole reason to throw the powder.
A shortlist beats the whole network. Fifteen places means each one comes up about one run in fifteen. If you are choosing a setting you will actually write a scene in, connect only the four or five grates that would genuinely change what happens.
Ways people use it
Writing a scene
Draw a location and set the next chapter there. The place does half the work — a conversation in Malfoy Manor is a different scene from the same conversation at the Burrow.
Tabletop and fan RPGs
Roll for where the Floo drops the party, where a lead points, or where a session opens. It is far more interesting when the answer is somewhere nobody wanted to go.
Quiz and trivia rounds
Draw a place and ask the table what happens there, who lives there, or how you get in. The obscure stops make far better questions than Hogwarts does.
Rewatches and rereads
Take a location each and follow only what happens there across a book or film. The background places are doing more than you remember.
The Floo Network, and the other ways to travel
There is more than one way to get around the wizarding world, and the Floo Network is the one that fits a picker best. Apparition is faster, but it is a solo skill you have to pass a test for, and getting it wrong leaves pieces of you behind. A Portkey drops you at a fixed destination at a fixed time, so there is no choosing involved. Brooms are slow and public. The Knight Bus will take you anywhere but the journey is its own emergency.
The Floo Network is the everyday option — the one most homes are connected to, the one you use without thinking about it. You throw a pinch of powder into the fire, the flames turn green, you say where you are going, and you spin through a chain of other people's fireplaces until you tumble out at your stop, usually coughing and covered in soot. That chain of grates flashing past is exactly the shape of a random pick: a rush of possibilities that narrows to one.
It is also the method with the best sense of place. Apparition is instantaneous and a Portkey is a yank, but Floo travel makes you pass through the network to get where you are going, which is why it is the right frame for a tool whose whole job is to land you somewhere.
Why the artwork is silhouettes, not maps
Every drawing here is original, which rules out a recognisable map or a faithful depiction of any of these places — those designs belong to someone else. Each location is a plain silhouette instead: a cluster of castle turrets, a lone tower on a rock, a columned bank, a leaning many-chimneyed house, three dark pines.
The silhouettes also have a job. A grate is small, and it flashes past fast during the rush, so the emblem has to read as an outline, not a picture. A distinctive shape survives that; a detailed scene does not. It is the same constraint the character picker and the professor picker work under, which is why the wizarding pages look like one set.
A fair pick, every time
The destination is chosen by your browser's cryptographic random generator before the flames move, and the rush is then built to arrive there. It uses rejection sampling, which removes even the tiny bias a plain remainder would leave, so every connected place has exactly equal odds — and the grates are reshuffled on every run, so no position on the network is luckier than another. The journey is theatre; the decision was already made fairly.
More wizarding pickers
After something other than a place? Try these:
- Not sorted yet? Put on the Hogwarts House Picker.
- Find out which wand chooses you at the HP Wand Picker.
- After a person: the HP Character Picker, or a teacher on the HP Professor Picker.
- Need something to cast? The HP Spell Picker.
- Want more? Browse all random pickers.