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Have you actually looked at this thing properly? I mean, come on! The rivers just appear out of nowhere! You can't have a desert smack bang right next to a forest! Who drew this stupid thing?
I've always said, the best thing about dwelling in the desert caves is the easy access to the lush rainforest.
In the real world, the landscape is determined by a complex combination of climate and geography. Deserts, for instance, are usually created because a mountain or valley blocks rain clouds from being blown over it. Tundra has to be at the right elevation and temperature. Rivers have to have a source. Swamps are generally not elevated higher than sea level.
Not so in the world of fictional geography, where you can have a vast jungle next to a desert with nothing separating them and no reason why the two should have different geological features aside from an invisible line. You'll also have swamps on mountain tops and caves full of ice slightly below a sunny surface.
Particularly notable in video games, which try to pack in a variety of environments in a relatively small space. Also tends to happen to maps of Magical Lands. Which makes somewhat sense - everything's possible with enough magic, let alone divine intervention.
See also Hailfire Peaks.
Examples:
- World Of Warcraft is a notable offender. Granted, this is because of its abundance of Copy And Paste Environments and limitations of the game engine... Still, apart from magic, there's no reason for the world of Azeroth to look like this
 .
- Note that this applies not only geographically but meteorologically as well. You can go from a bright, sunny day without a cloud in the sky to overcast and rainy simply by crossing a border. Or even entering a city!
- Not only that, but if you stand on a border or confluence of borders, you can look out into the neighboring areas and find that all of them share the same meteorology as whichever one you're actually in. Cross over, and not only will the weather above you change, the weather behind you will as well. This is especially disconcerting when going from, say, the crystal clear Alien Sky of one area in Outland to the impenetrable blue mist of the next.
- Oh, and "without a cloud in the sky" to rain? It can rain without a cloud in the sky!
- And even entering a city is overkill. How about entering a building? It's always bright and shiny in Theramore, but the keep there has its own weather!
- Extremely evident in The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The world is cleanly divided into four totally different environments.
- The Inheritance Trilogy has rivers having no source and going nowhere, as well as rivers running in weird directions in relation to the mountains.
- Grand Theft Auto San Andreas somehow manages to get around this one by placing the desert and the forest in different land masses.
- Parodied in Red Vs Blue:"The Burning Plains are next to the Freezing Plains? I bet there's some pretty wet plains in between." And it turns out there are some pretty wet plains in between, since after going through the burning plains, but before the freezing plains, they cross a swamp. OK, so it's not exactly a plain, but still, Caboose got something right!
- Referenced in The Discworld Mapp, when Stephen Briggs quotes Pratchett as describing traditional fantasy novel mapmaking as "putting the wiggly river through the pointy mountains", before adding that when he showed Pratchett the first draft (which was indeed drawn that way), he got the response "Do you know what a rain shadow is?" and a brief lecture on climatology.
- The Known World/Mystara setting for Dungeons And Dragons placed its Fantasy Arabs directly on the southern border of its Fantasy Vikings. (A Wizard Did It.)
- Averted, surprisingly, in The Neverending Story, where a desert reaches right up to a forest. It is revealed that a magic talking lion causes everywhere near him to be a desert, but it returns to normal when he's not nearby.
- At another point, it's explicitly mentioned that it's indeed possible in Phantasia that an icy area borders a hot desert. It's Phantasia, after all. In fact, drawing a map even would be impossible if the country wasn't infinite - it's written that the borders between lands aren't always even determinable.
- Fire Emblem (well the 3 GBA games at least) does this slightly differently, where forest and other terrain types are spread out in a ridiculously random way.
- Transformers Animated has a volcano on an island in the middle of Lake Erie.
- Final Fantasy XII has one particularly glaring offense: The Golmore Jungle, a lush and humid rainforest, is right next to Paramina Rift—a mountain covered in snow and ice.
- To be fair, in the real world, extreme changes in altitude do result in dramatic shifts in climate over relatively short lateral distances — for example, the proximity of the rainforests of eastern India to the Himalayas. Such a shift between Golmore and Paramina may not have been explicit, but it can be inferred through a reasonable interpretation.
- Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was an even greater offender; the world is divided into four climate zones of identical size, one representing each of the four classical elements, by a pair of planet-spanning mountain ranges that run directly along the equator and the prime meridian.
- The Final Fantasy games in general take the patchwork approach, most commonly with deserts.
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance even lets you make up your own map by placing different regions on the map. The sequel on the other hand does a surprisingly good job at averting it.
- The city of Ba Sing Se in Avatar The Last Airbender has a large area of Ghibli Hills between its inner and outer walls, but it appears that just outside the wall is a barren dusty desert. Then again, there's a lake inside the area, so maybe they just have good irrigation, and the walls are higher than some of the clouds. (Not to mention a lot of Earthbenders to create channels, transport fertile soil, etc.)
- Not to mention that Ba Sing Sae has about as large an area as some of that world's continents, that certainly affects climate.
- Hugely averted by Ian Irvine's Three Worlds series. While only one continent of one world actually appears in the books, Irvine apparently spent a lot of time mapping out the place so that it made sense - right down to a sea completely drained of water, and its effects on nearby climate. He went even further by, for instance, paying attention to phases of the moon that should show up during the tides.
- A nice case of Mr. Irvine showing his work, as he used to be a Marine Scientist.
- Also averted by Dwarf Fortress, which pays attention to things like rain shadows and biomes when generating worlds.
- 10,000 B.C. changed from (for example) freezing mountains to humid swamps with little transition.
- They also have difficulty with the transitions from paleolithic to early Egyptian technology, from North American animals to African ones, etc...
- The film Return to Oz features the Deadly Desert being right smack-dab next to a thick lush forest.
- This is a carry-over from the original Oz books by L. Frank Baum, which offers up perhaps both the original and definitive example of this trope: The land of Oz is a more-or-less perfect rectangle, filled cheek-and-jowl with every known and unknown variety of bizarre landscape and surrounded on all sides by wide expanses of desert. Baum should also be considered a patron saint of Continuity Drift, but in one of the books he established that a passing Wizard (Or Rather Fairy Queen) Did It.
- Bionicle's islands of Mata Nui and Voya Nui suffer from this, as each has volcanic, icy, desert, and forest/jungle regions pushing up against each other. On Voya Nui, a couple characters actually note that the forested "green belt" doesn't make sense and they hazard a guess as to why it thrives, but we're never really given an explanation for it.
- In the SF novel Midnight at the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker, the surface of the Well World is divided into regular hexagons, each featuring its own environment, often startlingly different from its neighbors in climate, biome, atmosphere, gravity, or even achievable tech level, with no apparent separating mechanism other than force walls that just about anyone can shove through without noticing. Justified as the construction of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
- This troper doesn't know how Middle-Earth had managed not to be mentioned thus far. The place has, among other things, a gigantic forest where there should be a desert, and at least one river whose path makes no sense topographically. Granted, the world was created by the Ainur and shaped by a series of global catastrophes, but there's nothing there to imply that the normal rules of climate shouldn't be taking place, especially in the Third and Fourth Ages when the world has become a round planet and the influence of the Ainur and other magical beings has dramatically decreased. At the same time, though, it is perhaps justified in areas like Lothlorien, Mordor, and Valinor that are controlled by powerful magical beings.
- Tolkien himself Lampshaded this.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind contains wasteland area terribly close to plains and forests, usually separated a single line of mountains. The north-eastern most part of the map contains the only gradual transition from one to the other. Blamed on a combination of the eruption of the volcano Red Mountain that dominated the island-region of Vvardenfell and the Heart of Lorkhan, under the Dagoth Ur crater of Red Mountain. There's also the fact that the game world is hugely compressed, meaning that there could be a transition - it's just too small to spot.
- Averted in the next installment, where it was mostly just meadows and forests, with snowy mountains to the north. Lots of people complained that this made it very repetitive. Whether that makes this trope on of the Acceptable Breaks From Reality, or if that's just part of the They Changed It Now It Sucks mentality of the Unpleasable Fanbase is anybody's guess.
- The chief problem is that Cyrodiil has a temperate climate in what should be a tropical climate. In all previous installments of the TES series, it was a jungle. A god apparently did it between games.
- A related issue with the Oblivion map is the fact that the giant lake/river in the middle of the map doesn't go anywhere. It was obviously originally meant to go through the southernmost town, but the person in charge of making it didn't seem to realize it. This makes one wonder where the ship in the Imperial City that everyone keeps talking about came from.
- Metroid Prime had swamps, snow, and volcanoes all within a five minute walk of each other.
- However, since travel between the zones is only possible by elevators, different elevaions might be responsible for the different climates. For example the volcanic area consists mostly out of series of tunnels located below other zones, while the icy zone could be assumed to exist at a much higher elevation than the other zones, thus explainign the lower temperature.
- Justified in the Everworld novels, since the world was created by the mythological gods of our world, with each pantheon having its own territory. So African gods would create an area of Everworld that resembles sub-Saharan Africa, and Norse gods one that resembles Scandanavia, and if the cold, forested mountains instantly give way to hot, arid grassland, who cares? This is one of many bizarre, illogical characteristics of the universe that the characters Lampshade by saying, "Welcome to Everworld."
- Justified in Arthur C Clarke's A Time Odyssey trilogy. Planets in pocket universe have mismatch of terrains brought from different times in the history as a museum and as Firstborn's expression of guilt in destroying these worlds, which will inevitably get destroyed because of gravitational attraction. Luckily for the humans in the main universe, the mismatched Mars has a Martian who can use technology to divert Q-bomb from Earth to Mars, sparing humans from destruction.
- Video game Civilization IV has a map option called "fantasy world" where the terrain types are strewn about randomly. Any given tile is as likely to contain tundra as forest, desert, etc.
- There are custom scripts you can download to make more realistic worlds. The 'Perfect World' script simulates plate tectonics, ocean and air currents, longitude, and even impact events to generate diverse maps with environments that look like they belong...provided you feel that it's worth waiting the 20 or so minutes it takes the script to run on a good computer.
- Settlers of Catan - Somebody had to say it.
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