Favorite setting geography

[VoxRationis]

Simply put: what settings appeal to you most from a geographical perspective, and why? Do you like the geographic skill of the cartographer, producing something that seems plausible and realistic? Do you like a particular consequence or implication of the setting? (I, for example, love complicated coastlines, both because I like ships and sea travel and because I appreciate the look of such regions aesthetically.) Do you simply like the look of a particular map?

[Honest Tiefling]

I am personally of the opinion that a DM should either make a realistic world...Or not. A realistic world can add quite a lot to a campaign world, if done well. If done badly...Just hide it with other interesting set pieces. They're not easy to do!

Of course, I personally suck at this sort of thing so I tend to just say that there's weird magic running around screwing with everything. Enjoy your magical hazards, players. Exploding crystals is a favorite.

[Balyano]

Not sure what maps for official settings I prefer. But for homebrew settings I'm a fan of complicated coastlines and lots of islands and interesting places to visit by boat, usually with them having been relatively isolated till recent sailing and navigation improvements.

My personal favorite is to re-purpose some real world islands and blow them up to continental size. Like the Kerguelen Islands made Australia size or the Falklands increased to Eurasian proportions.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Falkland_Islands_location_map.svg

[JAL_1138]

Places on the map that are given enough detail to work with and glean inspiration from, but are simultaneously sufficiently ill-defined that I can drop in new ruins, new towns, new cities, new countries, or whatever I like.

Or the Outer Planes. Might as well get weird and/or physically-impossible with it. Visit the toroidal city floating at the top(!) of an infinitely(!) tall spire, walk from Hell to Heaven, see distance and direction turn bizarre in the outer reaches of the Outlands, climb the branches of Yggdrasil, find a ruined town that looks like it was built on the warped and fossilized corpse of a long-dead god in the Astral plane...you know, another typical Tuesday in Planescape.

I've also used Dwarf Fortress as a map-generator. It's fairly decent at making sure rivers flow in the right directions, deserts are in the right places, etc., and even has a tendency to put civilizations and settlements in reasonably-plausible places. I've also used Civ games for the same purpose, which are much easier to use than DF. And are especially convenient since they broadly-speaking map to grids quite nicely (square grid for old-school, hex-grid for later games)--very useful to someone like me with all the artistic ability of a stoned-and-drunk howler-monkey.

Something I do like to see in medieval maps is cities which are properly, historically walled (if they're walled at all, anyway) and castles with historically-accurate kinds of layouts and defenses. Multiple sections with gatehouses (two portcullises, dang it, not a big open arch or a single flimsy door) between them, functional defenses/battlements, walls heavy enough to actually withstand bombardments, interior layouts that reglect functional architecture you could actually build in the real world using the materials specified without needing to resort to "it's magic, because fantasy, totally not because the designer hasn't researched construction or medieval buildings in the slightest." Leave the "it's magic" or "it's fantasy" explanations for the stuff that's supposed to be weird and/or eldritch, like Sigil, Limbo, the Astral Plane, or the Overlook Hotel from the Shining.