Patchwork Map - Television Tropes & Idioms

Yes, that is a desert right next to the frozen tundra.

I've always said, the best thing about dwelling in the desert caves is the easy access to the lush rainforest.

— Mike Nelson, Rifftrax of Battlefield Earth

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.

Examples:

Film

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... This was probably intentional.
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.
- Wicked gives Oz a far, far more realistic landscape, incredibly using only existing continuity to make it into an equivalent of 1930s Earth, right down to the general geographic locations of the regions/continents, which became counterparts. Gillikan is Europe, Munchkinland is (roughly) Asia, Quadling Country is Africa and the Vinkus is North America (specifically, the Native Americans of the Great Plains).
Appears in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The planet in question had recently been created with unstable technology, which made for interesting climate patterns. The shot of cactus in the snow was a particularly effective demonstration, but on the whole, this is a You Fail Meteorology Forever.
- In the novelisations, the scientists behind Genesis had apparently been competing to see just how improbable they could make the geography by hand-designing things Just So. Although that code was supposed to have been removed...

Literature

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.
Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle has rivers having no source and going nowhere, as well as rivers running in weird directions in relation to the mountains. This recap of The Movie sums it up nicely:
"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?"
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.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth 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 Lothlórien, Mordor, and Valinor that are controlled by powerful magical beings.
In the Everworld novels, 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."
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.
In The Neverending Story (at least in the book, the film doesn't go in depth), 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.
In Clive Barker's Weaveworld, the odd bits and pieces of terrain incorporated into the Fugue were stuck together in a frantic rush, creating literal patchwork geography.
In Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince trilogy, a major river has its source on one side of a group of mountains, flows up through them, and empties out in a bay on the other side. Yay, gravity!
Occurs in Suzanne Collin's Underland Chronicles: In the Underland there are plains, jungles, maze-like tunnels, small seas, arable land and desolate areas all with about one or two hundred miles of each other, and no transitions.
Explained in Wheel of Time by the Breaking of the World, as insane (and insanely powerful) male Aes Sedai altered the landscape as they saw fit. However, given how long ago that was, this can't quite explain why there is still a massive lake in the mountains above Baerlon (surrounded by much higher peaks, nonetheless) which feeds several large rivers and has nothing draining into it, nor any springs nearby...

Live Action TV

Smallville placed Metropolis in Kansas State for expediency... but that doesn't stop us from frequently seeing ships at the docks.

Machinima

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!

Real Life

This troper lives not two miles from an actual swamp on a mountaintop. Go figure.

Tabletop Games

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.)
Settlers of Catan - Somebody had to say it.
You just gotta love those rivers in the Dungeons And Dragons setting, Greyhawk. They start at the northern shore, and wind their way south to the bay.
- Yay gravity!
  - No.
D&D setting Eberron has the continent of Xendrik, which works like this explicitly, with such occurrences as sweltering deserts abutting arctic tundra. A Wizard Did It, in that it's all caused by a magical cataclysm in the continent's past.
- Happens in Khorvaire too. Consider Karnnath and The Mror Holds, who have weather like nothern europe or Canada, with lots of snow. Slightly East of them are Lazhaar Principalities, with a Caribbean-like weather and palm trees. Must be a really warm ocean. Similarly, Breland is supposed to be a tropical, rainy country, but most of the neighboring lands are depicted as temperate.
  - The Lhazaar Principalities actually have a wildly varied climate due to taking up most of the continent's coastline (a zoomed out map with territorial borders makes this clearer). Setting information just tends to focus on the southerly, warmer parts because...well, pirates of the arctic don't seem quite as cool.
Planescape has the ultimate example in Limbo, the Plane of pure Chaos, where pieces of the plane randomly and seamlessly shift between being completely dominated by one element or another.

Toys

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 (there's a Mask of Life nearby; they think it's leeching energy and promoting growth), but we're never given an official explanation for it.
- Mata Nui is ultimately justified when it's revealed that That's No Island.

Video Games

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!
  - Maybe the designers lived in the Bay Area.
  - Screw the meteorology. It seems to be perpetually between spring and summer in Elwynn, but if you walk for five minutes you can cross a river and its always fall over in Westfall. And, of course, there's places like Dun Morogh and Wintergrasp that are always in winter. Azeroth can't even agree on what season it is, let alone what the weather should be like.
- In some instances, this is actually justified.
  - Elwynn Forest and Loch Modan (fairly standard forested areas, with the latter being more alpine than the former) are bordered by the volcanic areas Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge because of an evil dwarf's summoning spell gone awry. The spell caused Ragnaros the Firelord to reenter the world and cause fiery destruction and whatnot in these areas. Previously, these two areas (and the Badlands, reminiscent of the area of the U.S. that bears the same name) were part of the Redridge Mountains.
  - The Swamp of Sorrows is bordered by the Blasted Lands, a charred wasteland. The Blasted Lands used to be another swampy area called the Black Morass, but it was transformed into its current state after the demonic Dark Portal was opened there.
  - Speaking of the Dark Portal, Outland has an excuse for its zones being like this - the planet Draenor was ripped apart by chaotic magic and turned into the dimension now known as Outland.
  - Sholazar Basin is a lush jungle in the northwestern corner of Northrend, so for all intents and purposes, it should be a frozen wasteland. However, the Titans installed five pillars there to create the jungle climate. However, two eastern pillars were wrecked, creating an avalanche in one corner, and leaving the other barren.
- One of the main points of Cataclysm is apparently trying to fix this so the map doesn't look like implausible crap from the sky.
Extremely evident in The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The world is cleanly divided into four totally different environments. A Giant Did It. Four Giants, to be exact.
- Whoever designs the map for the Zelda games clearly has no idea how rivers work. They do normally start high and end low, which is better than a lot of examples on this page, but they do all kinds of crazy stuff on the way. The worst offender is probably Twilight Princess, where two rivers cross.
- It always kind of bugged me that, in A Link to the Past, you can walk about 100 feet and go from a lush lake region to a miniature desert. Still a great game though.
Ragnarok Online suffers quite a bit from this; Ragnarok Wisdom comments on it.
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas somehow manages to get around this one by placing the desert and the forest in different land masses.
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.
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. Until that point in the game, it had averted this trope quite nicely. Rabanastre is surrounded by desert and very dry savannah. After Golmore, however, it all takes a turn for the kooky. The Phon Coast - a beach map with a very obvious ocean - is somehow at the top of a mountain.
- 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 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. It's a little jarring when authors resort to things like that to achieve some semblance of originality, but downright depressing when they do it in order for their work to be generic...
  - 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.
  - The complaints about Oblivion's map being not varied enough could be a variant of Reality Is Unrealistic. The Oblivon map is 16 square miles in area, and the terrain is actually more varied than most 16 square mile areas of land tend to be in real life, with snowy mountains, dense forests, and muddy swamps all within walking distance of each other, which means it's not a subversion and actually plays this trope straight.
  - The province is actually supposed to be closer to half of a million square miles, to make a quick estimate from the maps and the given distance between two of the major cities. To put it in proportion, the landscapes in the game engine are rendered on less than a 1/30000 scale. On a similar note, Vvardenfell's roughly 62,000 square miles, or a 1/7800 scale.
Yoshi's Island has a grand total of six biomes (though you only see five in the first game, and we're not counting the final world of the first game which is not apparently on Yoshi's Island), none of which seem to take rain shadows or elevation into account. Some levels in the "desert" world even have highly visible trees in the background!
Metroid Prime had swamps, snow, and volcanoes all within a five minute walk of each other — changing elevations, if that helps any.
- It does, a bit. The volcanic are is a serie of underground caverns, are it is mentioned in the in-game logs that the planet has lots of geothermal activity (that's how the space pirates powered their bases before switching to Phazon-power), and the snowy areas could be explained by being on a higher elevation. Metroid Prime 2 worldmap is somewhat less explainable, tho, having a desert, a swamp and a rocky, mountaineous area all withing walkign distance (altho apparently both the swamp and the desert used to be plains and forests, till the meteor impact fucked up the climate).
- Somewhat of a Justified Trope in Metroid Fusion, as the game takes place on a biological research vessel, and the various environments have been artificially created to support creatures that need a watery area or a firey area.
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.
Averted somewhat by Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, partly because it has less diverse terrain than its sister Civilization games, and so could put more work into the distinctions it did make. Rain shadows do exist, and it's even possible to create them on purpose by raising terrain.
- 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.
In Golden Sun and its sequel, the protagonists travel around a world that greatly resembles our own, complete with appropriate cultures and climates. The biggest notable difference is that the whole world is flat.
Also averted by Dwarf Fortress, which pays attention to things like rain shadows and biomes when generating worlds. Generating a new world can take about a quarter of an hour, depending on the size of the world and the number of potential worlds rejected for not having the right terrain distribution. On the other hand, the world generation is very powerful and flexible and you can set parameters that create worlds with glacier, sand desert, swamp, and mountain range all rubbing shoulders. Regions in half the map bursts into flames as soon as the game starts and the other half freezes every living thing dead within a minute are statistically uncommon (you really do have to make the effort) but not otherwise unusual.
Averted in Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom. The starting "world" is actually one of three isolated pods of a generation ship. Some have unusual climates: an early first generation quest suggests the ship's weather control system regulates the climes.
- Suggest? You have to fix the weather control in order to unfrieze one of the pods
Making a realistic-looking city environment in Sim City from a completely blank map is not easy without a geography degree or just copying the real world. Hence people making flat places like NYC or Chicago.
Hostile Waters takes place entirely on an island chicane (artificial archipelago) located somewhere around New Zealand. The enviroment varies from hot to frozen over. Justified by the chicane undergoing rapid, hostile (un)terraformation. Especially visible in the last mission.
Unavoidable in Nation States. You can make your nation's map as realistic as you like, but you can't really do anything about what the nations next to you do.
Justified as a major plot point of Suikoden Tierkreis, starting from the opening scenes where a forest mysteriously appears near your village. Sometime later, a massive savanna pops into existence in the middle of a snow-covered mountain range.
An extreme example in the graphic chat/MMO, Furcadia, users can make their own maps (called dreams) that other users can explore, chat, and RP on. Quite a few users have made dreams based on the Warriors series by Erin Hunter. In the books, the four clans of wild cats live in slightly different territories, such as one clan lives in moorland while another lives in a forest. In these fan-made dreams, however, the differences in the territories tend to be very drastic. It is not at all uncommon to find a Warriors dream with a barren desert, murky swamp, snowy tundra, and lush forest all sitting right next to each other with little or no transition in between, made even more drastic by the fact that the area of the dream would probably wind up being only 15 square miles or so in real life.
Justified in Endless Frontier which ends with five different worlds getting mixed together in a fairly haphazard way. Of course, Nature is soon to start asserting itself, so...
Morning Land in Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg. It has the wooded Forest Village, next to the beach/oceanic like Pirate Island, which in turn is right next to the volcanous Dino Mountain, which is next to Blizzard Castle (guess). And in the middle, with all the others surrounding it, is Sand Ruin! Circus Park and Giant Palce don't count, seeing as the former isn't in any particular biome, and the latter is in the sky.
Simon The Sorcerer. You have a temperate forest right next to a swamp right next to some icy mountains, and so on, and so on, in it's defense, it IS a magical world.
In Rune Scape the border between desert and grassy fields is a fence.
Pokemon provides a near literal example of this trope. In Heart Gold and Soul Silver, you can customise the Safari Zone, allowing you to put any terrain near any other, theoretically allowing fields next to deserts and lakes next to savannahs etc.
- There are other examples throughout the series, for example in Sinnoh (where the fourth generation takes place), a snowy city is fairly close to a tropical island, and in Hoenn (third generation) there is a rainy route near a desert route.
Somewhat deconstructed in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Since the two worlds merged together, the climates have gone insane. Deserts are freezing over and the north pole is melting.
The island in Backyard Football 2006.

Western Animation

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.)
- I suppose it's still absurd, but I always assumed that it was due to nearly continual warfare occurring around the city.
Transformers Animated has a volcano on an island in the middle of Lake Erie.
- Volcano in the middle of a lake, you say? Not unheard of. Although that's a case of a volcano collapsing in on itself, a lake forming, and a new cone growing in.
You know how there's always snow on the ground in South Park? When they went to Nebraska the snow gave way to green fields, with the boundary being exactly at the Colorado-Nebraska state line.
- Or was the state line being placed exactly on the snow-grass boundary?

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