Map of Termina

I quite like maps, I'm not much of an artist though. So here's a map of my default, standard issue, campaign setting known as Termina, that I made in hexographer. One of these days I'll likely make something less rudimentary and slightly more functional with names and icons and everything else in an actual image editor but for now this is the what I've got.

Fig. 1 The Continent of Termina. Scale is 24 miles per hex

There are currently no places marked and I think that technically this is a map from before the massive deforestation that comes with tool using, tree chopping intelligent mortal life anyway. There are however places on the actual real and present day Termina, the one that exists in my head and not this feeble representation. Places like the Rot, the Rainbow Forest, and the Broken Tusk Mesa. Most of these places are a few paragraphs scattered in text documents on hard drives, the rest are less concretely free floating in my head.

The eagle-eyed of you may recognise the contours of this land from a certain place on Earth. It is in fact based on a map of Antarctica 'cept no ice. The original inspiration and map I drew over came from here or one of the other alternate Earths on that site, though Termina is not in the tropics. Those vestigial white lines on the edges at 1/3rd and 2/3rds the y-axis mark latitudes of 30 and 60 degrees north, putting her firmly in the temperate regions.

I've put brainpower into things like prevailing winds, rain shadows, and ocean currents even though such things truly matter quite little. But my whims tell me to follow a method and so follow a method I do. It's not easy to just use your gut and imagination when your gut is telling you to "use a system, any system, oh god please."

The name Termina follows from the naming convention seen for Europa. She is known as Termina to her human inhabitants because to the first human settlers she was considered to be the end of the world.

Fig. 2 As yet un-named planet. Graticules mark 30 degree intervals of latitude and longitude. The scale is the same as Earth

As you can see the rest of the world is altered Earth too, I've never been very happy making up maps whole cloth and the idea of my default fantasyland being a kind of not quite upside-down Earth tickles me fiercely. I've excised the landmass that was known as Eurasia because I don't think any fantasy world needs to be as big as Earth is, there's plenty of room to fit adventures into without it. Yes, that does mean the plate tectonics no longer make any sense. No, I don't care.

I'm not yet convinced I won't also excise the continent known as North America, I quite like the idea that the entire southern hemisphere is one empty ocean, endlessly rotating, generating absolutely colossal winds and waves. I can always have her rise triumphantly and without explanation from the depths of the ocean if I find a need for her at some point in the future.

There's a certain extent to which putting out a map like this ossifies it. If I show the true map of Termina to any of my players then any change made to it is them having to update their mental model based solely on my whims. If I show them a map drawn by a diegetic cartographer then any changes made simply prove that figment of my imagination wrong, not the actual factual record. So I'm stating here for my remembrance that I reserve the right to change this map completely, to throw it away, to drop a small moon on it, to pencil in islands, and sink coastlines into the sea.