Aquilae: Western Realm Gazetteer Atlas

This is a cool product. You get this giant continent-sized map of a fantasy realm, complete with GM maps that see everything and player maps that see just towns and major features. What do you do with it?

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/384079/Aquilae-Western-Realm-Atlas

Anything you want, this is a blank slate!

Sample Player's Map (no GM locations shown)

The map is cut into 10-mile hexes at the lowest level, and that is still a huge area of land. For reference, here is about a 10-mile by 10-mile area from Google maps:

So each hex could contain a major town, a number of small villages, and some pretty cool areas of interest hidden here and there. Each hex is huge and could contain a lot of adventures by itself. A major metropolitan city in the US would take up a few hexes, for example, Las Vegas would be 2 wide and 3 tall.

Do you get a gazetteer, history, peoples, a timeline, location descriptions, and political factions? No! And that is a wonderful thing. The kingdoms and cities are all color-coded and divided up by borders, you get locations of castles and forts, towns, and plenty of small un-named villages - but nothing else! You get to make it all up yourself. How cool is that? This kingdom with all the dark gray castles and towns? Obviously the evil kingdom, right? Whatever you want.

And the GM maps give you plenty of secret locations done in the same way - fill them out and create adventures for them, put a mega-dungeon here or there, and just use them as you need them. The entire world is a blank slate all mapped out for you to begin thinking about what this place is or that place is and coming up with the details yourself.

There are no giant histories to read, no novels to fit in here or there, no politics to read about, no toes to step on for other people's ideas of what a place is, and no right or wrong. Better yet, come up with your own imaginary Forgotten Realms-style novels and fill the world full of GMNPCs that solve every problem in every location! And then kill them all and start there. Good stuff.

Take one kingdom and destroy every city, fill it full of bandits and humanoid tribes at war with each other, and call it the Lost Lands. Make a kingdom run by demons. Or dragons. Create a "we are not dying off" elven homeland and make them a strong world power. Make a kingdom of pirates on the islands. A dark elf homeland shrouded in perpetual shadows. A vampire kingdom. A goblin kingdom of tinkerers. There is plenty of room to do whatever you want.

And you can start in the smallest corner of the world, just one of those 10-mile hexes, and not worry about anything outside of it. You can leave the rest, say, yeah it is out there, and fill it in later. You don't need to know everything to start, just leave it all blank and when an idea hits you, find a place to put it and run with that.

An excellent campaign resource for those of us who love to look at maps, but don't have the time to make them and fill them out. This is really a cool playset and blank slate to create your own world from, and complete with secret places and lots of hidden spots and mysteries to last you years of gaming.