Fictional Map Thread

Discussion in 'The Tavern' started by Yuli Ban, Apr 6, 2018.

  1. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    There are loads of software around that lets you create your own fictional world map, which you can then edit to some degree. Some allow you to genuinely create an entire world, while others give you our world's geography and then lets you color in the lines. Some are randomly generated. And then there are those who meticulously handcraft their own maps. So I'm dedicating this thread to posting such maps!

    For starters, I've been using Mapchart.net and its sister site, Historicalmapchart.net.

    Create Custom Map - MapChart
    Create Custom Historical Map - Historical MapChart
    [​IMG]

    Some manually editable ones:
    Inkarnate Map Generator: Inkarnate
    Dungeon Painter Online: Dungeon maps for RPG. Create maps online, download as PDF and PNG.


    Some randomly generated ones:
    Medieval Fantasy City Generator: Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou
    Fantasy Map Generator: Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator
    Terra Incognita Map Generator: Terra Incognita :: Yet Another Fantasy World Map Generator


    If you find others, post them below and I can add them to this OP for ease of access.
     
    SmilingBlueWolf and Paul Bellow like this.
  2. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Cthulu's world by QuantumBranching on DeviantArt.
    [​IMG]
    "Two hundred years ago, the Stars Were Right. R’lyeh arose, and the most psychic 20% of mankind either went mad from fear, killed themselves or went gleefully psychotic. The seas arose as the new land mass displaced uncountable tons of water (not all at once, admittedly) and billions of Deep Ones flooded ashore. Vast abominations emerged zombie-like from the Earth, rose from the seas, or ripped their way out of sinister mounds and creepy mountains. Things that should have been long dead emerged from countless hidden tunnels. Darkness fell upon the Earth.

    Nuclear weapons could at most annoy Great Cthulhu himself and destroy some of his stuff, but a sufficient number of them could in theory wipe out most of humanity and deprive him of subjects, as well as doing a serious number on his oceanic minions and his Spawn, as well as some of the lesser Abominations. A rump US and Russia managed to negotiate a tenuous armistice on the basis of “you don’t eat our brains, we don’t blow up the world to spite you.”

    Two centuries passed. The continent underlying R’lyeh arose further, and the seas penetrated deeper inland. The spawn of the Great Old Ones multiplied and built monstrous cities across the face of the earth. The wild shoggoths of the sub-Antarctic were taught obedience with the aid of the Primal Abomination which lurked atop the highest peaks of Antarctica. Some disputes with distantly related horrors deep within the earth were resolved with the death of only a few tens of millions of humans, mostly from famine from the ash and dust released into the atmosphere, although some through submersion in hot magma. (Humans are still unsure if this was a serious challenge to their rule, or the equivalent of someone banging on the roof with a broom because the kids are playing their damned music too loud). The ancient enemies of the Great Race of Yith emerged from underground and claimed Australia as their own, inviolate territory.

    Now, while in some places the Great Old Ones take a direct hand in the management of their human subjects (and in some places not so much manage them as graze on them), in most areas they rule the world indirectly, through the heirs of the Cthulhu Cult and opportunistic evil bastards and mages, some (relatively) pure humans and others of mixed human-Deep One blood, an all-powerful priesthood whose rule as “shepherds” of the human flock includes slaughterhouse delivery and whose rule is backed by divine retribution far more swift and sure than any previous variety [1]. Mass human sacrifice is pretty universal, although the details of how the various human states are ruled are otherwise of no great concern to Cthulhu and the other Great Old Ones which are his “family” and friends. Bloodlust, violence and weird sex are the social norm: close influence of the Great Old Ones may lead to power, but it leads to either crippling madness or the madness of utter inhumanity in the long run, and as for those too psychically insensitive or strong to be driven to mindless worship by the general psychic background, they are reduced to a state of foggy placidity by various foul magics, such as television. (Yes, there is television in the Cultist lands. There is a lot of television. Trying to tune in to Cultist TV is a death sentence crime in the US and Russia).

    Besides TV, technology is an odd mix, mass slave labor and 20th century hardware, cities more monumental than New York but no computers, the occasional odd bit of unearthly super-science and the use of weird forces best called “magic.” The Great Old Ones prefer their subjects and soul-munchies ignorant: research, scientific or otherwise, is not encouraged. There are forces Man Was Not Meant to Know, given that some of them could actually inconvenience the Great Old Ones. Such as summoning the Outer Gods.

    Living standards vary wildly. Some Cultists try to improve things, seeing their own wealth and power being increased by More Pie, or their predecessors having looted the place so thoroughly that there is hardly any Pie left. Others simply squeeze the rest of the population, even unto death – and beyond, given the value of zombie labor. Some areas, once you discount for the existential terror, have living standards not that far behind the first world of OTL, at least for those who aren’t actual slaves: others are the worst of third-world squalor interrupted by the occasional monument city, while still others would be counted as failed states OTL, except the local cultists like it that way. Much depends on whether there is a local Great Old One interested in whether the temples tend to stay up or fall down, and whether the Shoggoths run on time. The servants of the Great Old Ones which please them get to indulge every foul pleasure that can be conceived: those who annoy them perish in ways horrible beyond conception – if they’re lucky enough to die.

    Cthulhu is worshipped everywhere, but it’s sort of a Zeus and other Gods situation: there are local cults which have other “favorite” deities, or have a Great Old One in the neighborhood which might be stirred into unpleasant action at not getting enough sacrifices. Generally, even small towns/work camps/mass torture facilities have multiple shrines.

    The spawn of the Great Old Ones and associated horrors – Cthulhuoids (like the big C, but smaller: think classic King Kong vs. Godzilla), shoggoths, night-gaunts, zombies and litches and giants made of many human bodies crudely smushed together, Hounds of Tindalos and hideous hybrids great and small, walking trees and crawling boulders, etc. – inhabit and build the monster cities of dubious geometry that disfigure the face of the Earth, with some of the detail work being done by disposable human labor. What everyday life (or undeath) is like in these cities is unknown – for all but the eldest and most sanity-deprived [2] of the cultists, they work like a roach motel unto Blattidae, humans check in but do not check out. There is often but not always a full Great Old One in residence in the central temple complex, sometimes more than one; Cthulhu generally stays in R’lyeh, although he occasionally visits his human subjects for a little Al Fresco dining (Yum yum!) and to remind his human subjects Who’s the God? Some areas are dominated by a particular city and its chief Abomination, or by two or more Abominations working together, while others get only distant and spotty monitoring by local GOOs.

    It’s not just Cthulhu: there are a number of Great Old One cities on the Dark Continent, many of the horrors being apparently uninterested in close interaction with humanity. Details are lacking; not even the heads of the Cthulhu cult have been allowed onto the Dark Continent and into R’lyeh itself. The Dark Continent itself is disturbing in various ways, from the physics-defying Black Lake to the lack of any mechanism to explain its rapid rise from the sea floor, and then there’s the vegetation: initially bare rock and sea-floor slime and sediment when it arose, has in the last two centuries developed an increasingly dense covering of weird and disturbing vegetation, black and purple, fungoid and mobile, quivering, pulsing, and shooting out clouds of spores, where it is not spiky, geometrical and impossibly large. Ecologists are greatly worried about what might happen if it spreads to the other continents.
     
  3. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    My own storyline:
    Mexican Civil War: 21st Century Edition



    Very rudimentary idea right now, but the gist is: shit goes down later this year after the elections are heavily disputed. Andrés Manuel López Obrador clearly led in the polls and was fresh on the way towards victory, but then the election came around and very obvious signs of election fraud occurred, leading to mass protests. From here, other major triggers were pulled, such as more mass graves being discovered, discontent in the South blowing over, and the drug lord-backed assassination of reformers and human rights activists taking too many souls. This is exacerbated in 2019 following drought and a triple whammy of major hurricane landfalls, including the most powerful storm ever recorded on Earth that October. Crackdowns to crush dissent backfire, especially as innocent civilians are terrorized.



    As the Syrian Civil War begins drawing to a close in 2019, a new civil war erupts halfway across the world. It starts in December 2018 but truly accelerates in 2019 and going into 2020. Communists from the Zapatista regions of Chiapas take control of various states and begin finding and executing drug pushers, smugglers, and kingpins wherever they can find them.



    This begins a very deadly civil war, one whose death toll would average 150,000-200,000 a year going forward right up to 2026.



    In 2022, the Civil War seemed like it was almost over as the Communists were pushed back to one last state and a few other disputed states.



    However, crushing the Zapatistas was not an easy task and repeated offensives failed.



    Further complicating matters was the secession of Baja California into its own nation, La Nación de California. It wasn't so much the two states' desire for independence as much as it was Mexican ultranationalists using the chaos to create a nationalist state for themselves in a region that would not be easily defended. Claims that Russia and China funded the Nación were rampant and this caused tensions to flair up between the USA/Mexico and the two Old World superpowers for a time.



    In 2026, things spiraled out of control as the Zapatistas managed to launch a Tet Offensive-styled push that wound up stealing half of the entire country, encircling Mexico City and launching a siege. This plunged the country into complete collapse, turning Mexico into an officially recognized "failed state" by international standards. Warlords emerged, some of them being former drug lords rebranding themselves and others being CIA-backed fronts. China threw its support behind the Zapatistas and Nationalists. By 2028, there were essentially four Mexicos— Northern Mexico, which was the United Mexican States as it was since the 1800s; Southern Mexico, a libertarian socialist revolutionary state; Nation of California, a racist and nationalist/socialist strip that saw itself as locked in a race war against Europeans; and "Dead Mexico", the central region of the country obliterated by a never-ending civil war, which includes the once mighty megalopolis of Mexico City.

    By 2029, Mexico's GDP had fallen by 70% of what it was in 2019, and much of its population had fled to the United States, further aggravating nationalists and nativists while also greatly altering American demographics— between 2019 and 2029, some 48 million Mexicans moved to the USA, doubling the nation's Hispanic population and turning Hispanics into the single largest minority group in the country by some distance. In fact, by 2030, it's found that there are 115 million Hispanics in America, making up 1/3 of the entire population by themselves. By contrast, there are 210 million non-Hispanic Whites. This demographic shift, one that claimed that Whites would become a minority in the United States, essentially occurred a full decade before what was originally predicted entirely due to the chaos in Mexico.

    The USA deployed "advisers" to Mexico in 2018 in the days preceding the civil war. However, this became a full-fledged troop build-up after 2026, which led many to claim that Mexico had become the "new Vietnam". At the peak, there were 350,000 active personnel in Mexico— mostly central Mexico.



    Further complicating matters was the rise of the M.O.R., Milicia Obrera Revolucionaria, or Revolutionary Workers Militia, in Northern Mexico (especially Chihuahua and Sonora). Though not aligned to that Zapatistas (the MOR is a much more authoritarian movement aiming to create a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist state), they nevertheless claim to be "historically aware" and refuse to let ideological differences keep them from fighting alongside the Zapatistas, who they see as fellow anticapitalist revolutionaries— they'll work out their differences after they wrest the country away from the old order.

    The MOR brings the war to previously unscathed areas, and their repeated attacks on American tourists is what truly prompted an American military response.

    The final straw for the United States came in 2026 when the MOR did the unthinkable and launched missiles into El Paso, Texas, aiming specifically at the upscale districts in an attempt to take the lives of wealthier American citizens. They succeeded, killing 15.



    When the USA moved into Mexico, they entered a nation that had been at war for the better part of two decades— first having dealt with the narcowars and now dealing with a civil war that had since become the 21st century's first war to claim over a million lives*. For the most part, America engaged in a mechanized war— most actual "casualties" were combat drones (aka 'killer robots'), autonomous combat units (aka 'killer robots'), and automated weapons systems (aka 'killer robots'). However, 27,000 US troops did lose their lives between 2026 and 2030.



    *disputed, due to disagreements about the death tolls of the Iraq War and Syrian Civil War.
    [​IMG]
    Death toll of Mexican Civil War: 310,000.



    [​IMG]
    Death toll of Mexican Civil War: 783,000.


    [​IMG]
    Death toll of Mexican Civil War: 930,000.
     
  4. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Continued...

    [​IMG]
    Deadliest year of the war, with 1,760,000 confirmed fatalities (mostly civilians due to resource deprivation).

    Death toll of Mexican Civil War: 2.7 million.


    [​IMG]
    Death toll of Mexican civil war: 3.2 million.


    Has it ever occurred to anyone that Mexico looks like a chili pepper?




    [​IMG]
    In the end, Mexico was split in three. To the north, the current Mexican government persisted. To the South, you had the People's Republic of Indigenous Nations led by the EZLN. Popularly, it's referred to as "Mayan Mexico" and "Republic of Maya" but neither of these are technically correct— generally, Maya is the most colloquial term used. The Mayan constitution defines the republic as being a hodgepodge of libertarianism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, anarchism, market socialism, syndicalism, and communism. Internationally, it's called a "Marxist-Zapatist" state. The Mayans also possessed Mexico City and renamed it Tenochtitlán, the city's original name.

    The Nation of California was the weirdest one, as many observers claimed that it presented itself as essentially the rightist answer to the Mayans— economically, it was a social democracy with many benefits for workers and the downtrodden, but almost no one other than hard-right conservatives would ever call it a leftist paradise. Indeed, many observers noted that the Nation of California and its ruling party— La Vanguardia Nacional or "The National Vanguard"— displayed most of the traits of fascism. Indeed, it seemed to be something of an analog to Greece's current ruling Golden Dawn party. It was anticapitalist, but very far-right. Ultranationalist, openly racist, and anticommunist— yet consistently denying claims of being fascist or national-socialist. They consider themselves third-positionist, populist, and nationalist and the general social order also reflects populist authoritarian sentiment.

    All three are one-party states, with the USM returning to representative democracy in 2035 and the Mayan republic turning to it in 2038— in the latter's case, becoming the first noteworthy multiparty socialist state, with the political parties active representing this (i.e. all mainstream parties are socialist or Marxist, while capitalist parties are considered fringe). The Nation of California never returns to democracy.

    Mexico had been reset. Half of its population had fled, leaving the other half to rebuild a divided and war torn country.
     
  5. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Make of this one as you will.
    [​IMG]
     
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  6. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Ọ̟̫͉͢ͅh̵̻͚͔͓̙̠͈ ҉͚̙͕̥̟h̷̯̥̜̺͍e͚̗̦̜r̤̟̟͎̀ͅe'̴̭̺̮s̨ ̤̠t̢͈͓o͠ m̸̭̟̳̼͕y̴͙͚̟͖̩̤ ̯͈̭̀ś̝w̦͉̖̫͓͓e̛͎̬͕̳̣̠͔et̠͚̺̠̜ͅ S͚̣̼͔̝͇ͅa͔̘̮̥̱͈t͟a̳̦̣͔̤̳̜͠n.͓ͅ ̻̺͔̪ͅͅT͖ͅh̥̥͓̩͉ȩ ̹͘o̩̟̳͕̯̠͜ͅn̖͎ę̪͈̩ ̸w̛̬̫̱̩̫̦̩h̶͙͙̯͔̦͉ǫ̩̹̠̯̹̙͉s̜͙̠̣̮̘̜͡e̬̮̙̞̮̼͘ ̹̳͖̹̲l͚̮͍͇̗̮͍i͔̠͈̩ṯ̰̞̫͕͔͇t̛̺̙̦̟̞̖l̲͚͍̭e̞͕͜ ͉̯̠̹̞͠ͅp̝͝á̖̫͈̘͓̣t̗̠h̶ ͉͢w̙͍͓͍o̵̪̖̜̳u͙̱̗l̪̤͔͙̻͕͢d̞͖̙͍̘ ̷̬̳̼̲m̥̭̰͔̣͢a͔̙̺͍͉̠k̫̝̜͢e͍͉͔͙ ̞̩͉͔̜m̪͍̤̝̖̰͕e̱̠ ̨̟͕̫̞͉s̸̝̗̺̘̦ͅa̤̫̦̙̞͞d̬͎̞̻̩ͅ.͔̺̟͖̱͈͜ ̤̬̠W̸̜̠h͙̤̙̭̰͖͖͝o̳̹ͅs̹̞̮̭͔͘e͇͝ ҉̙̻̗̙͙͉͉p̰͢o̻̞w̘͍̳̺e̛̪͓r͚̩̬ ̛͇̜̼̪i҉͎͇̮̟̟͖s͖͈̰̩̝ ̦S͖̹̯̤a̙̮̫̲̟ͅt̵a҉̫̻n͉̤͕.͉͓͡ ̝H͇̞͇e̮͔̖̙͚̞̦'l̮̹̰͎͚͎̜̀l҉̱ ͙̩͕̱̗͇͉g̱̩i҉̻̭͕̰̹̺̞ve̥͈̟͚ th̗̝̺o̷̦̣̼s̖̻e͓̯͇ ͙̟͓͖́w͓̥͓͉̦i̯̻̪͚t͎̦̬̝h ̗h̥̼i̻͙̳̲̭̼m̰͕̞̫̮̮͉͟ ͓̘̯͖̜̪6̧̺̤̺6͏̫̘̪͚̬6͓̖̖͔͠.̨͕̝̬̼̫̣ ̪͎̰T͉̮̯͈͇͓̣͢h̙̲͙e̶̞̰̳̼̠̟͓r͙̜̞͖͈e͟ ͕̤͡ͅwa̼s͙͔ ͉̣͉̲a̜̟ ̺̘̝̟̪l͙̣̹̭̲ͅi̜͈̰̝̪͎͓t͏̜͖̰̣t͎ļ̩͈̮̣̺̖̤e͉̜ ͔̰͖͔̩ṯ̭̪͔̯o͘ol͈̺͚̖ṣ͚͍̭h̻̳e̸̤͈̯̹͈͇d̢̳͖͍͔̰̦̪ ̮̙̬̞̫͜w̗̳̤̝̻̻̗͠ḫ̵̻̳̬̖̭e̹͖̯r̢̘̟̙ę̖̦͖̹͓͓̤ ̝̝̘͢h̥̝͇̹̣͙͙͝ę̝̮̖͕̠ ̴͇m͚̮̰̥̜ád͙̜̫̤̩̟̞ḙ͉͎̬̖ ͖͈̣̪̜u̯̰̖̥̠͡s̨͈ ̩̲̦̞s̛̬̩u͔̲̝̼̬̖͔f͎͚f̗̟̭̯͙̯é͍̣͎̦̗͉r̟̭,̷̼̜̳̬̞ ̘͚̖ś͉͕̤̙̖͓à̩̩͍͇̱̜d̡̲ ͚͖̠̲͇S͇̞͇̘̮̘̘͞a̝̭͝t̤͜a͕͚̩̯̩n̛̘͍.͉̯͚̪̀



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