Palimpsest Plains

Here's an idea for a campaign setting.  Thousands of years ago everything was green and shire-like.  People were happy as hobbits.  Then a wizard discovered a way to teleport from one place to another by switching the land you are standing on with that of your destination. 

It was soon discovered that this was very useful for transporting troops.  The chunks or land that were cored and swapped became larger and were swapped from farther away.  Soon these wars spread to other planes and the cores of landscape that overlayed one another became more and more foreign.

Traveling across the plains you might encounter a circle of sand dunes, a perfectly circular salt lake, or geysers of molten steel.  These might be spread about like pock marks or each, nestled within another like rings on a target, or just overlapping like a surreal Venn diagram.

Centuries pass.  Humans have grown accustomed to living in this patchwork world-- fishing the circle lakes, casting the molten steel.  Others have become Restorationists, they long for the great olden days of green beauty (that they never personally saw) and have begun the means to magically return the land to the way it was.  But the people living in these pockets of strange land call them home now and will fight to the death to keep their land from being destroyed or moved. 

Complicate this with the fact that there are Purists within patches that want their swath of land rid of unsightly pockets of other geography.  So, the people of the circular sands would love to be rid of the patch of coral-like pink rock that juts from their sandy land to the edge of space.  But the humans that live there will fight to the death to protect their Reefhome.  But the Reefhomers might ally with the Sand dwellers against the Restorationists.
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Of course the shapes don't have to be perfect circles they could be weird jagged shapes or even geometric shapes tied to particular mages.  So the triangular patches were all teleports by the dreaded Angus the ugly.

This would do away with any need to make geography on the hexmap make natural sense.  It would give you a good reason to come up with the weirdest other-planar landscapes you could and it would have built in reasons for wars all over the map.

Thanks to Mr. Richard for the idea spur.

The Great Modron City

Mandelbox Zoom from hömpörgő on Vimeo.

I always loved Gygax's conception of the planes and I wish I'd gotten a mage high enough level to safely travel them. This video looks like a city in a plane of law to me.

via Boing Boing