Do the gameworld maps look like distortions of earth?

[aramis erak]

Side trek perhaps, but other than that there's a mix of land and ocean (i.e. it's an earth-like setting), a breathable atmosphere, and that it's cold to the north (and south) and warm toward the equator, I fail to see how the geography of either of those examples lines up with the real world.

Looking at the world map...

https://atlasoficeandfireblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/toril-final.png

THe left two continents are distortions of North and South America. The central continent is Europe and Africa; Europe is uplifted somewhat, and the sahara is home to a sea. South Africa is submerged. Northern China and Japan are missing, as is much of the Indonesian Archipelago, but Southern China and the southeast asian mainland are intact, and indeed, are joined directly to Arabia. Australian and New Zealand are combined by uplift. Antarctica not in evidence.

It's not that much further than Hyperborea.

Oerth, of Greyhawk, is a good bit more divergent.

Oerth and the Lands beneath the Waves by Grimklok on DeviantArt

www.deviantart.com

It looks like a 90° rotation of the Jurassic period map, stretched a little. Or perhaps the cretacious and only about 60°.

there are many great maps already done with vegetation and climate maps to go with, which makes worldbuilding quite a bit easier. Sure, there's a lot of speculation in those. Even more fun are the "post anthropocine" maps.

Here's a nifty timelapse. No promises about accuracy, but you can see similarities for the cretatious and jurassic eras to Oerth.

and another:

Many game worlds seem to use maps of drifted continents , with some added elevation change, to hide the sources.

 

[Lanefan]

Heh - I don't think I've ever seen that full map of Toril; I'm used to only seeing maps of the big continent on whose west coast lies Waterdeep.

It's far closer to real Earth than I'd ever realized.

 

[aramis erak]

Heh - I don't think I've ever seen that full map of Toril; I'm used to only seeing maps of the big continent on whose west coast lies Waterdeep.

It's far closer to real Earth than I'd ever realized.

Yeah. Most of us don't see the full map.

Let's try looking at Krynn...

https://atlasoficeandfireblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/dragonlance-world-map.png

The only immediately obvious at that scale is the western continents, which look an awful lot like the outline of the mountains of the US plus a new range in Canada connecting them, with a bunch of NE Canada flooded. But...

Ansalon (a continent) in my favorite mode...

The continent of Ansalon on the planet Krynn of the DragonLance series.

The continent of Ansalon on the planet Krynn of the DragonLance series.

inkwellideas.com

and another:

https://atlasoficeandfireblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/dragonlance-final-1.png

That looks remarkably like North Africa, the Med, Arabia, and Europe to the Urals. Southern Africa merged into the south polar landmass.

Is that intentional? Is it pareidolia?

Pareidolia is one of the strongest flaws of human cognition - we find familiar patterns and ascribe more meaning to them than was intended. It also causes us to reuse familiar patterns in our visual creative works.

 

[Doug McCrae]

There's no question about it in the case of Warhammer. The Empire, Bretonnia, Tilea, Estalia, Albion, Norsca, The Land of the Dead, Araby, Grand Cathay, Ind, Nippon, and the New World are clearly analogues of the Holy Roman Empire, France, Italy, Spain, Britain, Scandinavia, Egypt, Arabia, China, India, Japan and... the New World.

 

[aramis erak]

There's no question about it in the case of Warhammer. The Empire, Bretonnia, Tilea, Estalia, Albion, Norsca, The Land of the Dead, Araby, Grand Cathay, Ind, Nippon, and the New World are clearly analogues of the Holy Roman Empire, France, Italy, Spain, Britain, Scandinavia, Egypt, Arabia, China, India, Japan and... the New World.

Indeed, that's why I didn't mention it. It's explicitly Earth analogue. Well, except for the Elves in the North Atlantic.. It's too easy to recognize. Now, it's not so easy to remember the differences, like the Empire being all of the medieval Germanies, as well as portions of France, and that the balkans are filled with undead...

7th Sea likewise uses an explicit alternate earth with a sea in the middle of the Germanies.
Castle Falkenstein does so as well.
Both are very carefully adapted, and just slightly different -- different enough to require learning.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

The Forgotten Realms was originally designed as a direct parallel to Earth with part of the premise being that people would travel between it and Earth through portals and the like and that all our fantastical Earth legends originate from things that really happened in parallel parts of Toril. Getting there had become more difficult over the ages and hence they were now "forgotten" by us earthlings.

Concerns over kids in the 1980s confusing D&D with reality and just not wanting to be bound by Earth geography for adventure design led to this element being dropped, with the most heavily campaign trafficked, Faerun section ceasing to have much clear correlation to its pseudo-Europe origins at all beyond its rough placement in the world, and less used, less developed continents looking more like their Earth analogues.

 

[Lanefan]

One popular setting that, from what I've seen, doesn't resemble real Earth nearly as closely as some of these is Mystara/Known World.

 

[aramis erak]

One popular setting that, from what I've seen, doesn't resemble real Earth nearly as closely as some of these is Mystara/Known World.

Mystara is my favorite D&D setting.
But it's far more obvious in it...

http://pandius.com/Mystara72mphclear.png

That map closely matches the one in TSR1071 pages 280-281.
The Northwest continent is North America, rotated about 60° clockwise.
Southwest is South America, Africa, and a stretched and shattered Antarctic and Australia.
The north central is a partially flooded Europe. The Northeast is Asia, rotated about 20°...South west Asia and the middle east are absent.

It's worth noting that the eastern US and eastern Canada are the locations of the majority of the known world modules. Sind is in Florida...... It's only physical in resemblance, and it wasn't until late on that TSR let the world maps out again.

 

[Ixal]

I have the impressions many RPGs just copy earth with blur the lines a bit and that the trend has actually increased, but I might be wrong about that.
And its not only RPGs. Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire is also just a distortion of Britain and increased to nonsensical sizes.
And even if the map is original, the cultures on that map most of the time are not and are still blatant copies of existing cultures.

Yes, I know making up new cultures is hard but you could at least put some effort into it so that its not so very obious that this is NotChina, NotVikings, NotEgypt or NotJapan...

 

[Blue Orange]

I think I recall reading somewhere that the original Greyhawk was based on the upper Midwest (where Gygax lived), with the Nyr Dyv being Lake Superior and Greyhawk being Chicago. The Forgotten Realms had quite a few real-world analog cultures like Kara-Tur, Maztica, Mulhorand and the like.

As Ixal says, it's hard to make up entirely new cultures.