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There are plenty of fantasy worlds and fantasy maps out there which have nothing to do with our own Earth. Sometimes, it’s nice to not be restricted to earthly shapes, physics or geography. But what about using a real world place as a base, and then altering it to suit your fantasy setting?
Recognize the land on the right? Quite different from the real world, yet also lots of similarities.
Or see what happened here! Clearly, that’s Europe right? Yet, a very different Europe than the one we know. Italy merged into Greece, Ireland jumped on top of Scotland, Denmark floated away, Crimea moved to Greece, Iberia moved to the east, etc etc.
With just some tweaks, you can create a whole new fantasy setting for your next dnd campaign while still keeping places that everybody recognizes.
If you want to move a bit further away from reality, you can use the Herodotus approach. Herodotus was a historian from ancient Greece who wrote a lot about all the places he travelled to or heard about. Naturally, he knew most about Greece. The farther away from Greece, the less precise were his descriptions. Some like this can be great to start your campaign or fantasy story in reality and slowly progress into unknown lands.
Of course, you can also keep the lands more or less the same, but delve into an alternative history. Like this one is based on King Arthur and the Arthurian legends. The only alterations to the landmasses are the island of Avalon north of Ireland and and extended Cornwall. The rest is all up to you as writer or gamemaster to create an alternative fantasy setting in lands that we all know.
By the way, if you like this map, you can get it here!
In the end, our own world that we call Earth is quite beautiful and worthy of a fantasy setting all by itself. You can just take any country or region and without any transformation, it’s already a great starting point for your world building. Who needs a fantasy world if the real world is already full of dragons, myths and legends?
Click here to get your free map of Britain and Ireland!
