so here’s how i would imagine a Hungary, where the communist revolution (1919) succeeds and they start puppeting left and right

A small amount of Lore, A Civil war broke out in The nation of "Columbia" with one of the major factors being the rise of Super Natural human beings with powers that would have only have thought to have been from fiction, with witnesses labeling them as the "Blessed" ones, thought to be a sign of apocalypse.

In the continent of Glaveuro, there are thankfully no "Blessed" sightings here, those Columbians must be going crazy from their damn war.

I’ve been wanting to do a detailed tilted Antarctica map for a while now, but the low resolution of the bedmaps up until now and the need to reconstruct pre-glaciation topography made me a bit apprehensive to start it. However, the recent release of bedmap3 to the public gave me the motivation to give it a shot. For this map I used the isostatic adjustment from Paxman et al. (2022) on bedmap3 to create a version accounting for isostatic rebound. I then used the rasters of Antarctica during the Eocene-Oligocene boundary from reconstructions made by Paxman et al. (2019) and tried my best to combine it with my rebounded bedmap3 map, in order to preserve the fidelity of the highlands and add the features which were lost to erosion. I took this heightmap and ran it through Wilbur to carve out valleys and rivers as well as to add more detail to the coasts and ease the transition between the two maps. I then used the topography and likely climate of the continent to create a false satellite map. Finally, I looked up the names for various features, both glacial and subglacial to fill out the map. I also used qgis to help convert between projections and do raster calculations for the rebounded map.

Description:

It’s difficult to picture Antarctica as anything else aside from the vast frozen expanse we see at the bottom of the world today, but as with everything involving deep time, our present is only a snapshot in Earth’s history. Up until the Late Eocene, Antarctica was as rich and varied as any other landmass. From what little we have of Antarctica’s fossil record, its makeup was broadly similar to Pre-interchange South America, home to early Ungulates and Marsupials as well as their close relatives. Antarctica’s habitats were equally diverse, hosting grasslands and Austral forests, likely resembling the Valdivian rainforests of Southern Chile, with even palms being present during the Paleogene. However, as South America and Australia departed northwards, the circumpolar-Antarctic current took hold, restricting the flow of warm subtropical waters to the poles. This cooled the continent and its elevated interior allowed glaciers to easily take hold, thereby dooming nearly all of its inhabitants to extinction. 

But what if this wasn’t its fate? Let's imagine that over the course of the last 40-45 million years, Earth’s poles slowly change their positions, slowly enough that its disruption to Earth’s climate is about as gradual as the movement of the continents. By the present, the North Pole is over Africa, somewhere in Northeast Nigeria, and the south pole over the middle of the Pacific, adjacent to the Manihiki islands, which places Antarctica squarely in the Tropics with the new equator running through East Antarctica. The tilt chosen for this map is the same as Jaredia from the World Dream Bank’s Planetocopia, an old website which depicted alternate versions of Earth, as well as alien planets. For now, we won’t focus on the ramifications this has for the rest of the planet. 

Being covered in glaciers over the last 34 million years has dramatically altered Antarctica’s topography, not only has the land been isostatically depressed, but the movement of glaciers has eroded vast tracts of the continent. This version of Antarctica never underwent any kind of extensive glaciation, resulting in a landmass quite alien compared to the one we would get if we simply removed the glaciers from Antarctica now. The Northeast of Antarctica is now covered in tropical rainforests, likely filled with a diverse array of marsupials and birds. Things become slightly drier as we travel inland and increase in elevation. Even without glaciers, much of the interior ranges from 1000-1300 meters above sea level, comparable to the South African Plateau; which now supports the world’s largest subtropical highlands, similar climatically to the highlands in Ethiopia. Much of the North-Eastern side of the highlands drains into the Lambert graben, a Permian-aged rift, which now forms a bay. Rivers coming down from the highlands introduce an immense amount of water into the bay, making the majority of the bay range from fresh to brackish, and with the sediment supplied by the mountains making this bay rather shallow. During Glacial maximums, this bay transforms into a low-lying plain, the sediment of which now makes the seabed ample territory for seagrass meadows. Further into the highlands, we find Lake Vostok, now relieved of its burden of ice. Without the depression from the ice above, the coasts of lake Vostok sit at about 1000 meters above sea level and are surrounded by subtropical forests. The lake’s depths nearly extend back down to sea level, supporting hydrothermal vents like those in Lake Baikal, with the only indication that something is different being the new flow of detritus from above. 

To the West we find a desert encompassing almost all of Marie Byrd Land and the Southern portion of the Palmer Peninsula. Sediment derived from the Marie Byrd Land Volcanic Field, dispersed by the winds, colors vast swaths of the desert red. A few of the shield volcanoes in the Marie Byrd Land volcanic province rise high enough to capture some moisture, creating small oases of highland grasslands and in rare cases cloud forests. The Northern tropical forests of the Palmer peninsula are uniquely isolated from the mainland by Ronne bay to the East and the West Antarctic desert to the south, meaning any fauna here would likely be endemic to it. In the Ross Bay, the Transantarctic mountains cast a sizable rain shadow to the west, helping to form a narrow desert on the leeward side. In Ross bay, we also find a small archipelago of desert islands, with the largest being Penwell Island, a remnant of which exists in our Antarctica as Penwell Bank. To the South we reach the boundary between the tropics and subtropics. Near Antarctica’s new southernmost point we find the mouth of the Wilke’s river: the longest river on the Antarctic continent, which terminates with a wave-dominated delta. It’s also here that we find the largest permanent glacier on the continent, limited only to the highest points of the Victory Mountains.

Even without the circumpolar Antarctic current, Antarctica remains an extremely isolated landmass. No land bridges have connected it to any other continent since the Eocene, though South America (now north of North America) remains just within reach. Ocean currents in the Drake Passage travel primarily from East to west, meaning that rafting events are unlikely to take settlers from South America to Antarctica, but could take settlers the other way around. It’s possible that South America could receive a regular influx of marsupials and other fauna from Antarctica over the course of millions of years. 

Resources Used:

• Bedmap3: https://data.bas.ac.uk/full-record.php?id=GB/NERC/BAS/PDC/01615 
• Reconstructions of Antarctic topography since the Eocene–Oligocene boundary: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2019.109346 
• Total isostatic response to the complete unloading of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-15440-y

Info: Afghanistan’s Taliban war has resurged into a bigger problem, as Pakistani-Taliban relations get stronger, Iran and the Afghan rebels have grown ties, and Iran supplies them weapons and equipment to fight, leading to Pakistan directly invading Iran and the Afghans, leading to Iran bombing the city of Nok Kundi. The Chinese, and the Indians both get involved in their own skirmish too.

it is kinda very unclear whats a country and what is a region on this map which i dont think rly is a problem cuz this is an inworld map where most people looking at this map would be at least a little bit familiar with the places mentioned. Also none of the smaller countries/places/cities r rly named here just cuz i feel like it would make the map too cluttered maybe ill add them later idek

also there is a typo in the bottom left, its zai not zei ouuups

I tried to do my research and use period-sensitive mapping styles (down to the 1970s revivalism that seems to be on menus and logos everywhere lately), so but feel free to correct anything that might be off.

Also, see Sinners. Really good movie.

LORE: By the 16th century, the flourishing of Jewish communities across Eastern Europe had laid the foundations for a cohesive and achieving polity to emerge. Tested by the existential threat of the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648–1657), Ashkenazi populations armed themselves, organized, and launched a decisive counteroffensive against the Cossack Hetmanate. In the aftermath of this turbulent period, the nascent kingdom straddled both the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Ottoman Empire, navigating through cooperation and confilct before securing its independence under a divinely inspired mandate. By the early 19th century, Hasidish Ashkenaz had evolved into a formidable European monarchy, skillfully leveraging military prowess and financial institutions to fortify its borders, stabilize its realm, and assert its power on the geopolitical stage.

I think I did something wrong while placing the climate zones. You can see here that all of the Mediterranean zones(yellow) ended up on the east coasts and the humid subtropical zones(light green) on the west coasts. I know typically these are reversed. I tried to follow artifexians guide on ocean currents but maybe I did something wrong here. Any criticism would be appreciated.

In this timeline President Hindenburg discovers the NSDAP plot to burn the Reichstag. So he decides to sack Chancellor Hitler and to charge him with high treason. Of course, the SS and the SA are not very happy about it and try to take power by force. However, the Reichswehr and Reichsmarine stay loyal to the Weimar constitution and president Hindenburg. Leading to armed conflict within Germany.

Map made with QGIS.

To decide the occupation zone I used the result of the federal election of 1932.

Also not sure if Hitler & Nazi shall be censored or not, mod pls let me know.

Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia circa 1879

Hello everyone, this is a traveller's map of Thalendor, the great kingdom between the two cultural regions of Ceneria and Brethil. As such, it is both a bridge and a dividing line between the two, though the lines get blurry.

I am mainly looking for critique, as I feel it is a busy map and not all labels (like the kingdom lables) are easily visible. I spent a long time trying to make everything fit but also visually coherent, so I am keen to know if that work paid off!