Cool beans: Every country on earth is transformed into a Dungeons & Dragons campaign simply by translating all the place names.
Hat tip to (where else?) the endlessly excellent Strange Maps. Check for wandering monsters once per hex.
The Atlas of True Names
December 7th, 2008 · 3 Comments
Tags: Eye Candy · Visualization
3 responses so far ↓
1 Adam // Dec 7, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Cracks me up that Newfoundland remains the same. Sure, so are Havana ‘n’ Kingston, but Newfoundland? It sounds so fantastically simplistic, or simplistically fantastic! More maps please.
2 Rob // Dec 7, 2008 at 3:09 pm
@Adam: Click through and you can see a bunch more maps from the Atlas – the rest of North and Central America and one of Europe as well.
Strange Maps warns that some of the translations/etymologies in the Atlas are a little shaky – and made more so by the fact the atlas was originally published in German, then translated to English. But that just makes it more like a D&D fantasy world…
3 Adam // Dec 8, 2008 at 9:50 am
To be clear, I _like_ the mistranslation/maletymologics. Taking a huge data set like place names around the world and uhhh renaming them, it’s bound to produce anomalies [strange consistencies?] like Newfoundland. Not quite a cartographic esperanto, but it’s in that direction, maybe more like a language twins teach each other. I can totally imagine a 13 year-old german-speaking DM, “So floh sie Atlantis und ankamen in einem neuen land gefunden.”
Clickety-click!
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