Fantasy & Worldbuilding Cartography
From Tolkien's tectonic mountain walls to Le Guin's archipelagic non-hegemony and FromSoftware's vertical sightlines, fictional maps encode narrative causality, player psychology, and worldbuilding philosophy.
Middle-earth (Arda)
The foundational fantasy map establishing the modern canon of mythopoetic sub-creation
The Earthsea Archipelago
A decentralised archipelago replacing continental empires with seafaring island balance
The Known World (Westeros & Essos)
Massive latitudinal stretching combining medieval Britain's politics with South America's scale
The Kingdom of Hyrule
The quintessential ludic open-world layout anchored by cardinal environmental beacons
The Continent of Tamriel
The wheel of nine imperial provinces centered around the White-Gold Tower and Red Mountain
The Discworld
The flat 10,000-mile disc carried by four giant elephants standing atop Great A'Tuin the World Turtle
The Ringworld
The artificial megastructure ring 600 million miles in circumference encircling a star
The Empire of the Isles (Dunwall & Karnaca)
Victorian industrial whaling psychogeography and vertical urban architectural manifolds
The Lands Between
The vertical layered continent anchored by the radiant celestial axis of the Erdtree
Gotham City & Metropolis
The dual psychogeography of American urbanism: Gothic subterranean decay vs Art Deco utopian elevation