Do the gameworld maps look like distortions of earth?

[Lanefan]

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.

That one's quite obvious, yes. (again, another full-world map I've not seen before)

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.

Those ones aren't nearly as obvious as the North America analog.

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.

The "south-east US" bit and some of the ocean south of that is what was in the map in X1 Isle of Dread, which is what many old-schoolers would be most familiar with. Just looking at that map, the resemblance to North America isn't clear at all.

 

[Hand of Evil]

In creating fantasy maps, a quick trick that was promoted, back in the day, was just rise or lower or both, the sea levels on a current map. Another was just to turn the map upside down or flip the landmasses. Think this was taken to heart by many GMs.

 

[aramis erak]

In creating fantasy maps, a quick trick that was promoted, back in the day, was just rise or lower or both, the sea levels on a current map. Another was just to turn the map upside down or flip the landmasses. Think this was taken to heart by many GMs.

Most of the commercial ones since about 1990 seem to apply continental drift, rather than just rotating the existing map.

L5R's Rokugan doesn't seem to have an official world map. At one point, it was apparently part of the same world as 7th Sea, but that was a long time ago.

 

[SelmaAdam]

In creating fantasy maps applying continental drift is cool.Others do not resemble real earth at all.

 

[Malmuria]

There's Midgard, which has explicit cultural analogues:

What's hilarious about Toril is that fantasy Europe is huge and fantasy Africa is reduced to a small peninsula. It's like they looked at the Mercator projection and were like, "hmm, Africa seems a little too big on that map." And then I guess they just obliterated Chult in 4e?