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You'd think they'd have remembered to map that the first time around.note 
"My wish is to never run out of newly-discovered continents to explore."
— Inscription on Li Li's Coin, World of Warcraft

It's a simple and well received story - the main characters have explored a vast and magical realm, with limitless borders, fantastical races, and did we mention limitless borders?

The book was a hit, a veritable smash, and logic dictates that a new one must be penned. But there's a problem — the plot is resolved already. The Greater-Scope Villain has been destroyed, the tyrant king dethroned, ding-dong the witch is dead. How do you make a new story in this world?

Simple — expand the world.

It shouldn't be that hard. A little Hand Waving, a little Retcon, and people won't notice. Use the same heroes for consistency and you can set the sequel in a neighbouring country in the same Magical Land!

This is effectively a Postscript Season for the series, but trying to create new plots from thin air can create inconsistencies. If four humans were all it took to defeat the White Witch in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, then how did the neighbouring, human-filled kingdoms of Archenland and Calormen not pose a threat for a hundred years?

If a work was meant to be a one-shot story and they have to expand the universe to make a sequel, they effectively have to weld new kingdoms and landmasses onto the world - adding Backstory never even hinted at in the first book. And if you look close enough, you can see the seams. However, a good series will retcon these cleanly, tying back to the original material, so that we don't notice or care. An even better series will have hinted at them in the first book, either to allow for this possibility, or just to satiate the creator's sheer pleasure in world-building.

Of course, this doesn't just apply to Trapped in Another World plots; it applies to any unexpected hit with its own, original setting, even outside the Speculative Fiction genres.

Compare with Remember the New Guy?, which can be this applied to new characters that logically should have been mentioned before in previous works, but suddenly appear and are treated like they have always been there.

See also Retcon, Postscript Season, Apocalypse Not, World Sundering, Planet England. Compare Mythology Gag, where events in the previous works are referenced in the later releases.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • In the second season of Magic Knight Rayearth, it's revealed that the magic separating Cephiro from other countries is now gone. These "countries" are more similar to other planets; and it requires a ship and enormous magic/technology to traverse the gulf in between.
  • They pulled the same stunt in Slayers Try, the third season of Slayers. "The magical barrier" that surrounded the Known World (whose existence wasn't even so much as hinted at in the previous seasons) suddenly vanishes, opening the rest of the world to exploration for the first time in a thousand years. It is broadly hinted at that Our Heroes defeating the Big Bad in the previous season was what brought down the barrier.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
    • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's revealed more realms besides Earth, Mid-childa, and Precia's pocket dimension — although to be fair, the fact that there were other worlds out there was made clear in the first series; we just didn't see them.
    • Force outdid every series yet, by revealing worlds besides Mid-Childa and Earth, which includes the TSAB-administrated core worlds (5 besides Mid-Childa so far) and non-administrated ones. A good portion of the latter are mostly mentioned due to the involvement of the Huckebein.
  • Pokémon: The Series has not only the regions listed in the Video Game entry below, but a few more when the anime ends up taking more time than the release of a game — the most blatant being the Orange Islands, which are visited after the Kanto series but before Johto.
  • The world of Hunter × Hunter parallels Earth, with major cities in the same places and the world map merely flipped with a few of the continents partially rotated. The "outside world" is implied in the Chimera Ants arc to be islands in their version of the Pacific Ocean, outside of the political monolith that rules most of the world. It is revealed in the segue to the next arc to be a land mass that makes the entire Earth-sized world seen so far as relatively small as the Caspian Sea.
  • The story of Fairy Tail takes place primarily in the Kingdom of Fiore, which is located on the continent Ishgar (Ishgar resembles Europe, and Fiore's territory extends throughout its Iberian Peninsula equivalent). The final arc of the series reveals the continent Alakitasia (resembling North America), where the antagonistic Alvarez Empire rules. Meanwhile, the sequel series Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest takes place on a third northern continent called Guiltina.

    Comic Books 
  • Legion of Super-Heroes: In the late '60s, Jim Shooter introduced the Dominators to the title, at the end of a supposed war between them and the United Planets that had never been mentioned before. In fact, it had been previously established that war in general was now unknown. Amazingly enough, this was repeated in the "threeboot". It was stated explicitly at the start that there had been centuries of peace. Then came the Dominators, and then a reference to a "Khund War" in living memory... the latter written by Jim Shooter.
  • The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW) comics add a "South Equestria" region, which is where the Changelings re-established after their banishment from Canterlot.

    Fan Works 
  • What About Witch Queen? adds Tampere Empire, Confederated Realms and Southernmost Lands to the map that so far contained only three city-states and the kingdom of Southern Isles. The latter gets to be described in more detail as well and at one point author gives a fairly clear (although only worded) world map.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Of course, Star Wars is the obvious example from Hollywood. The backstory of the Sith lords is the most egregious example, with numerous Expanded Universe novels putting it farther and farther into the Republic's 25,000+ year Back Story. It was eventually explained / retconned that the Sith the Jedi Council were talking about in The Phantom Menace were actually just one particular Sith Order, and that there have been dozens of different Sith Orders and Empires throughout history, and even a Sith species which is where they get their name from. They were eventually revealed to have first originated from a schism within the very first generation of the Jedi order. And that's just official Sith; a completely unrelated Dark Side empire was already falling into decadent decline after millennia of rule by then.
  • The Matrix Reloaded. The first Matrix film had a much smaller budget, with a relatively simple story. The second and third films had much larger budgets, with The Animatrix as reference material. As a result, there has been some debate as to whether or not the latter two films should be considered "true" sequels.

    Literature 
  • The Lord of Opium: The original book, House of the Scorpion, mentioned that there were other drug dealers that started Opium, it never hinted or mentioned the Dope Confederacy, other nations that serve up drugs to everyone but the US and Aztlán. A major change to the universe is how most of El Patron's workers were eejits, albeit high-functioning ones, which seems to contradict with remarks and statements made in the original book, that suggested only the farm laborers and a few others were the eeijts.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: In the first published book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the chapters taking place in the fantasy world are set entirely in the country of Narnia. The later books in the series expanded the world's geography with other countries to the north and south; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader explores the ocean to the east.
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had a similar expansion in its sequels. The Land of Oz was revealed to be surrounded by a vast desert with magical death-powers that separated it from other similarly fantastic realms. It was one of the few things in the Baum stories that actually retained consistency from one book to the next. And even here, it will only be consistent if we grant it a Retcon. In the first two books, it was implied that the deadly desert was separating Oz from the normal world full of Muggles, and not from other magical lands (many of which appeared in L. Frank Baum’s other fantasy works, creating a Shared Universe on the fantasy continent later named Nonestica).The Wicked Years attempts to justify this by placing Oz in an Alternate Universe, which sometimes could catch dim glimpses of our own ("cities of smoke and glass").
  • The Hobbit wasn't originally part of the same universe as The Silmarillion, which was written first despite being published later. The links were originally Shout Outs, but while the Hobbit's sequel, The Lord of the Rings, was being written, Tolkien decided to put both The Hobbit and its sequel into the Silmarillion's universe. In this process, inconsistencies were introduced; for instance, the One Ring seems a lot more innocent in The Hobbit. Tolkien was at least prudent enough to revise The Hobbit to clean up major inconsistencies — and the "innocence" of the Ring is explained in The Lord of the Rings as Bilbo not telling the whole story because of its evil effects.
  • David Eddings:
    • In The Belgariad, the heroes stick primarily to the Aloria region of the world; countries like Cthol Murgos and the vast Mallorean Empire are only mentioned as where the opposing Redshirt Army comes from, aside from two short excursions into them. In the Malloreon sequel series, the quest sends the heroes all the way across the aforementioned countries — allowing Eddings the chance to lift the Always Chaotic Evil labels off of said country's inhabitants while he's at it.
    • The Elenium is set in the western continent of Eosia, while the Tamuli sequel series moves the action to the previously unmentioned eastern Daresian continent. The In-Universe reason for the expansion is that contact between the two realms was blocked off by the evil Zemoch Empire; with the Empire's fall at the end of The Elenium, trade and diplomatic contact have reopened.
  • Even though the whole thing has been mapped, we've seen less than 50% of the Discworld up close. Terry Pratchett initially said "There are no maps. You can't map a sense of humor", but later retracted said statement and commissioned official maps as the Discworld's setting was more firmly developed to respond more to the rules of plot than the Rule of Funny. The statements are still reprinted in some editions of the Discworld books despite the fact that yes, there are maps. It's interesting that both the Anhk-Morpork and Discworld maps have tonnes of un-used locations that eventually show up — for example, Borogrovia was first seen on the Map. Interestingly also, the first books DID talk about other worlds (such as the one of Tethys the Sea Troll), but these things haven't been really talked about since.
    • The early books carried scraps of information and seemingly throwaway one-line-jokes suggesting there was an Australia-like country on the Discworld but it wasn't all that important for the plot of those books. Come Book Twenty-Two in the series and what do we get... a Discworld Australia. it has been noted that throughout the series there are lots of similar snippets and one-liners suggesting there is a Discworld "South Africa", which is yet to be properly explored. Alas. He Died During Production, but Terry Pratchett's personal assistant did note that at his death, one unfinished novel outline would have explored the Discworld Africa and its working title was The Dark Incontinent. Snippets of Terry's ideas may have been released in the posthumously produced Complete Discworld Atlas.
    • A brief mention is made in Small Gods of a tropical island ravaged by a tsunami and the need for the survivors to have to adapt to new circumstances. This is never explored in the Discworld but it's interesting to note Terry Pratchett later wrote a standalone novel, Nation, which explored this very concept at some length.
  • A number of Dragonlance novels pulled Expansion Pack Races. "Actually, there's also an entire underground kingdom of metal-working elves right beneath all the cities you know about!" Some of these would be integrated into the rest of the setting as it went forward, others would never be mentioned again outside of the book/series that particular author was working on. These races would tend to be "discovered" by the protagonist of the story that first featured them, helping to explain why we the reader haven't encountered them previously, but in at least one case (the Fair Folk in the Defenders of Magic trilogy) very shortly after they're first discovered, other characters refer to them casually as if they've known about them all along.
  • Tales of the Otori: The main trilogy is focused on the Three Kingdoms, which are united under Takeo's rule in the end. The sequel novel The Harsh Cry of the Heron broadens the scope to the Eight Islands, which an ambitious general is in the process of assimilating into The Empire, and takes the main characters to the Imperial capital.
  • Worth the Candle does not actually use the trope - everywhere that appears in the serial is foreshadowed in advance - but does in a meta sense: the Schloss operate by rewriting reality, with the result that a number of the villains - and, in some cases, *continents* - that Uther interacted with during his life suddenly always existed with a plausible excuse for why Uther didn't know about them. Near the end, the GM admits that, in fact, the Schloss were a Retcon themselves, and he was really just writing more adventures for Uther because he didn't want the stories to end, with the Schloss as a doylist way of justifying it. Uther didn't buy it.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The Stargate SG-1 series introduces a vast Backstory (and several thousand planets) not hinted at in the film. The creators of the film had their own backstory in mind, which was elaborated on in spin-off novels, but the series ignored it. Not to mention the fact that after the main immortal godlike alien bad guys of SG-1 got defeated, they decided to piss off immortal, godlike aliens from another galaxy, or that the spin-off series, Atlantis, is set in a third, unique galaxy.
  • Star Trek: Adding new planets and species to a space setting is normal. The problem comes when, for example, you introduce a species/planet and say it was already relevant.
    • For example, the Cardassians in Star Trek: The Next Generation. When they were introduced, the Federation was just supposed to have ended a war with them. A war that would have spanned the early seasons of the show and apparently was not an easy victory (it's repeatedly mentioned that they're "not ready for another war", though that might have something to do with a significant chunk of Starfleet getting blown up at Wolf 359 earlier that year as well, and they made concessions not consistent with an easy victory), yet was never mentioned and did not involve the flagship of the fleet (but did involve the flagship's transporter chief, who was there from the first season).
    • Then there are the Ferengi, who are introduced in Next Gen as a relatively newly-encountered and dangerous species, but by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine they got a complete revamp and are depicted as having been a major economic power in the quadrant for decades.
    • A worse example is Enterprise. At least three major species (Denobulans, Xindi, and Suliban) are introduced in the expansion pack prequel. Since they were never mentioned before, it means at least three species have vanished entirely from the galaxy. Of course, space is a big place, so it could be handwaved that they simply never came up on stories set in later years.
  • The 1990's remake of Land of the Lost had better special effects than the original, but dumbed down a lot of the cool concepts of the original; in particular, it abandoned the idea of the Land being a closed universe which loops on itself (where if you run far enough in one direction, you wind up where you started). The second season, though, which was markedly better written, took advantage of this difference by recognizing that the characters now had an entire planet to explore and didn't need to stay in the same place all the time.

    Multiple Media 
  • BIONICLE was an experimental 2001 LEGO series initially planned as a one-and-done story set on an island, with a pre-planned twist at the end to explain the title, and backup concepts to extend it if need be. When the brand proved to be a hit, the foreshadowed twist was pushed back further and further and the tunnels under the island were explored to explain where new villains came from. This lasted until 2004 with the reveal that there had been an entire world, the Matoran Universe under the island, with dozens of other lands and hundreds of new characters, all of which weren't mentioned before because the island leaders deliberately kept them a secret. This was actually planned for, so the expansion was relatively smooth, though the original story concept and the title's allegorical meaning were stretched thin. Story Team leader Bob Thompson was quoted as saying the Universe Bible had enough material to last at least 20 years — but in practice, the stories were made up on the fly in response to marketing trends and LEGO demands. It took until 2008 for the big mystery set up at the start to be unveiled, and we finally got a comprehensive (if woefully out of scale) map of the Matoran Universe with many unexplored islands. Then, they brought in two new planets and backstories reaching way beyond 100,000 years in the past just to expand the setting even further.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Warhammer 40,000 pulls these to add new races, especially with the Tau and Kroot. Of course, discovering new planets in a large universe is more believable than most of the examples that take place on a single world. Not to mention that sheer size of imperial databases makes it easy to forget about already discovered ones.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • This was done EXTENSIVELY to the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, adding entire new continents from out of nowhere, including Kara-tur and the Utter East.
    • Another example is Zakhara, the setting for the Al-Qadim game that was set in the same world as the Realms, and around about 1992 suddenly materialized to the south of both Faerun and Kara-Tur (and even connected to both by a land-bridge) despite never being referred to before; references to it became strangely fashionable after that point.
    • Also, what was at least slightly more plausible, was introducing Maztica, which was basically the Americas before Columbus, and not located on the same "supercontinent".
    • The setting of Dark Sun was originally provided with a fairly small map covering the Tablelands. Adventure modules, sourcebooks and an Updated Re Release set after the events of The Prism Pentad novels greatly expanded the world map. Justified in that Athas is a Death World Points of Light Setting where travel is quite difficult; the most hospitable routes are to the north and south, which lead to deserts — and to a massive plain of undead-haunted obsidian in the south. Meanwhile, there's the Sea of Silt to the east, and the high, rocky peaks of the Ringing Mountains to the west. Even the expanded map is noted as not representing the whole of Athas by a large margin; "Thri-Kreen of Athas" hints at the existence of a huge and relatively verdant region called the Crimson Savannah under the control of the Tohr-Kreen empire, which only partially appears on the western fringes of the expanded map, whilst the monster writeup for the Dragon of Tyr notes that there are almost assuredly other parts of Athas beyond the Tablelands that may well have their own dragons.
  • Magic: The Gathering has an Expansion Pack Multiverse, where the characters visit a new world almost every year. Many earlier sets took place in Dominaria, a more traditional Expansion Pack World where previously unmentioned regions would suddenly appear in each new set.
    • Special mention goes to Otaria, a small continent in the plane of Dominaria. The previous storyline ended in the plane of Rath being superimposed onto Dominaria, pulling off a worldwide Alien Invasion. The block focused on all of Dominaria's disparate cultures uniting against this common foe, culminating in a set literally called Apocalypse, in which the invaders were fought off at the cost of Dominaria being mostly laid waste. And after the bold defense of the entire plane, the story moved to...a big island that we had somehow not heard of before.

    Video Games 
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link series was set in North Hyrule, a region directly north of where the first game occurred. Death Mountain, located at the extreme north of the map in the first The Legend of Zelda, is now located at the extreme south, and two additional continents come into play.
    • Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages take place in Holodrum and Labrynna, countries bordering Hyrule.
    • Link's Awakening takes place on Koholint Island which turns out to be All Just a Dream.
    • Phantom Hourglass is in some other region of the Great Sea we saw in its predecessor, Wind Waker that is also a parallel world.
    • Spirit Tracks takes place in a totally new Hyrule founded by the Wind Waker/Phantom Hourglass Link and Zelda (aka Tetra) about a hundred years after its foundation.
    • Twilight Princess adds a parallel world of twilight, note , connected to Hyrule only by a mirror, note  which has an otherworldly glow to it filled with the shadowy descendants of dark wizards trapped by the Goddesses. They were the creators of the first set of Plot Coupons in the game, the Fused Shadows. It's also the home of Midna and Zant. Oh, and Hyrule has an icy peak in this game. Wait, what?
    • Majora's Mask is set in Termina, a land in a parallel world to Hyrule with alternate versions of familiar secondary and tertiary characters. The series seems to love alternate universes; no wonder Hyrule could be said to be a Planet England.
    • Subverted in A Link Between Worlds. The game starts in the Hyrule of A Link to the Past, and the map is an almost one-to-one recreation. And then the player is plunged into Lorule, yet another Alternate Hyrule that is not to confused with the Dark World in Link to the Past despite looking practically identical.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom does this to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but vertically instead of horizontally, introducing many new caverns and floating islands to Hyrule, as well as a massive underground region, which spans underneath nearly the entire surface map, known as The Depths.
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout 2 takes place to the north of the events of the previous game. The most northern (AND most significant) locations in the previous game are relegated to Bonus Dungeons at the southern end of the map.
    • Fallout 3 takes place on the east coast, around DC in a region called "The Capital Wasteland".
    • Fallout 3's DLC Operation Anchorage places the player in a simulation of a battle between the US Army and Communist Chinese in Alaska, and The Pitt allows the player to visit the remnants of Pittsburgh. Broken Steel adds a small area south west of DC, and Adams Air Force Base. Point Lookout adds a new, swampy portion on the Maryland coast, and Mothership Zeta is set on an alien spaceship.
    • Fallout: New Vegas runs on the same engine as 3, but is set in the area of Las Vegas, near where the first two games took place. It's been referred to - often favorably - as like a huge expansion to 3.
    • New Vegas's DLC Dead Money takes place at the Sierra Madre casino and the villa surrounding it. Honest Hearts is set in Zion National Park in Utah while Old World Blues takes place in a crater (former mountain)/old world research facility known as the Big MT. The final DLC, Lonesome Road, takes place in an area known as the Divide, which was apparently the site of a old world missile base and the town that sprang up around it that was torn asunder by a cataclysmic event in the Courier's past.
    • Fallout 4 is set in and around and underneath Boston. The Far Harbor DLC moves the action to an island off the coast of Maine, near the real-life town of Bar Harbor.
  • In the sequels to the Pokémon games, it's revealed that Pokémon Red and Blue took place in the region of Kanto, which is just one region within a larger nation. Pokémon Gold and Silver takes place in the region of Johto, just to the west. Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire takes place on Hoenn, an island far to the south, and Pokémon Diamond and Pearl on Sinnoh, far to the north - but they are all encapsulated within the same country, a thinly-veiled approximation of Japan. Pokémon Colosseum, meanwhile, takes place in a different area (Orre), and its sequel, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, adds a new section to the northwest of the region, while keeping most of the original game's locations. XD also adds a seaport, despite the map of Orre in Colosseum depicting Orre as being landlocked.
    • This hasn't created that many inconsistencies, except we're supposed to believe that every three or so years about a hundred "new" Pokémon suddenly arrive to start having always existed. Ruby and Sapphire are implied to take place at the same time as Red and Blue too, which raises further questions, especially in the remakes of the first two games, where the game is restricted to the original 151 Pokémon until the player beats the Elite Four and gains the National Pokédex, at which point the next 235 of them from the second and third generations suddenly come out of the woodwork with no comment or explanation. Also, the rank of Pokémon League Champion in the first games is supposed to be the title of the world's strongest trainer. Then we find out that it's a regional competition. Not international. Not even national. Quite overblown to say being the best Pokémon trainer in a country's single province equates with being the world's best... It's implied in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire that the reason for the inconsistencies is because some of the games depict events within multiple realities.
    • Also, a few regions aren't sure to fit within the country of Gens I-IV - it helps that they're based on Arizona, New York, France, Hawaii, Great Britain, and Iberia in contrast to the Japanese inspiration of the others.
    • In Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, a good few new areas were created, which had supposedly been there the whole time. Also, one place had a rockslide all over it since the last game.
    • A more straight example in Pokémon Sword and Shield, which launched expansion passes containing two locations in addition to Galar: the Isle of Armor and the Crown Tundra. Both sections had their own Legendary Pokemon as well as many returning Pokemon from previous games.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Morrowind's Bloodmoon expansion adds the island of Solstheim to the northwest of Vvardenfell. Solstheim never previously appeared on any of the game-world's maps. This allows Skyrim to avert the trope with its Dragonborn expansion, which revisits Solstheim.
    • A literal expansion pack world occurred in Oblivion: the expansion pack Shivering Isles takes place in the domain of a god of madness, which is almost completely disconnected from the original world. The link is a portal on an island that magically appears in the middle of lake. The game even lampshades the island's sudden appearance.
  • Dragon Quest II reveals that the country of Alefgard is just a small part of the planet. The third game returns to Alefgard being the entire world available again, even if you travel around it in a boat. Though, of course, this could be justified by it being sealed away... and it's not the world you start out on.
  • In a reversal, Ultima I had 4 continents, but became one continent with Ultima III. Much retconning was done to explain this in the later games, with at least one continent still unaccounted for.
  • The first Warcraft game was set on a single continent, home to the kingdom of Azeroth and featured humans and orcs as the only intelligent races. Its sequels added three additional continents (and expanded the original greatly), four other inhabited planets, and no less than two dozen additional races; additionally, the name "Azeroth" somehow came to apply to the entire planet rather than the human kingdom, which was retroactively renamed "Stormwind".
    • Warcraft II: In the first game, we had the one Kingdom, Azeroth. The second game expanded the word "Azeroth" to the entire original continent, which included a region called Khaz Modan, and revealed there was also another continent named Lordaeron to the north of Azeroth. Draenor (later, Outland), the orc homeland, is a debatable example as it was mentioned (not by name) in Warcraft I, but details were scant and irrelevant at the time.
    • Warcraft III: Northrend is a fairly straight example, being a northerly continent that is implied to be a well known, if mostly inhospitable, continent despite not existing before. Kalimdor is also a straight example, being a continent comparable to Azeroth, Khaz Modan, and Lordaeron combined that is established to have been extremely important to the history of the world (and shared its name with a Pangaea-like original continent), but its existence being lost to history (and the existence of everything else being assumed lost to the natives) was a plot point.
    • World of Warcraft has this trope in full swing within the game itself, however within the underlying lore, all new areas existed before being put into this game. It subscribes to the rule that if you can't go there yourself, it's not on the map. Expansion areas include those established by previous games (Outland, Northrend, the Broken Isles), places never visited but mentioned in-game (Pandaria, Argus, Kul Tiras, Zandalar), and places mentioned almost exclusively outside the games but still established (the Shadowlands, the Elemental Planes, various "lost" regions of Azeroth). The closest is Warlords of Draenor taking place on an Alternate Universe version of the orcish homeworld, but even that's closely based on pre-Warcraft I lore.
  • Assassin's Creed:
    • In the 2nd DLC expansion to Assassin's Creed II, "Bonfire of the Vanities", they added a new district to the City of Florence, south of the Arno River.
    • In the DLC expansion for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, "The Da Vinci Disappearance'', a new temple entrance was added in the City of Rome.
    • In the DLC expansion for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, "Freedom Cry", it used a fraction of the Caribbean Sea map from the main game, but added a new city, Port-au-Prince, and a faction not seen in Black Flag, the French Navy.
    • In the DLC expansion for Assassin's Creed: Unity, "Dead Kings", they had Arno go to a new city, Franciade (nowadays' Saint-Denis) and its catacombs for French royalty.
  • EverQuest loves this trope. The game originally had three continents: Antonica, the main continent. Faydwer, to the east, which had the elven, dwarven and gnome homelands. Odus, a tiny island where a human subrace hailed from. Then the first expansion introduced Kunark, a Lost World full of ancient ruins and deadly lizards. The second expansion added Velious, a frozen northern waste with powerful dragons and giants and more dwarves. Most expansions have added a new continent, sets of planes of existence, or vast new stretches to existing continents.
  • Each successive game in the Suikoden series took place in a different region of the world. Averted though in that all these regions, and some bits of their culture, were already mentioned to have existed. Also, some of the events that are set in another region (and another game) are also referenced before the player even plays them, such as Georg Prime's killing of Queen Arshtat, first mentioned in II and occurred in V (due to Anachronic Order of the games).
  • The Squaresoft realm of Ivalice was well prepared for this. In Final Fantasy Tactics the game focused on one country in civil war. Vagrant Story included Shout Outs to Tactics, and then Final Fantasy XII showed Ivalice to also be a region of the world in which the former stories were located. Despite all of this, the world (and the Ivalice region, for that matter) has yet to be seen in its entirety, and FFXII goes to great lengths in mentioning other lands and countries beyond the borders of the game's map. This all worked rather well, geographically speaking. However, the timeline seemed to mystify, at least until the Word of God made itself heard. This was further muddled by Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which featured Ivalice as part of a Trapped in Another World plot based in a fictional version of Ivalice. Its sequel looks set to go even further, transporting its character into Ivalice proper (and therefore expanding true Ivalice yet again).
    • The first expansion of Final Fantasy XI introduced the Hidden Elf Village hometown/island of the Mithra and the third expansion pack introduced a whole foreign continent that had somehow been missed up to this point. There's also the parallel world of Dynamis. The fourth expansion pack used Time Travel to introduce new areas without actually changing the world, by allowing players to travel back in time to the age of the Crystal War and experience key events of the war.
      • That's not even the end of it, there are many more areas in the world that various npc's and item descriptions mention including: The southern continent (where mithra really come from), the far west (which seems to have a culture similar to that of native Americans), the other half of the near east (adventurers aren't allowed to enter the eastern half of Aht Urghan making it impossible to get to any part of the continent that is east of the city), and the far east (the Doomed Hometown of an important npc). Suffice it to say that SE won't run out of expansion fodder anytime soon.
  • Chrono Cross takes place mostly on the El Nido Archipelago, a group of small islands off the coast of Porre, in the same world as Chrono Trigger. The archipelago is not visible in Chrono Trigger (although its Overworld Not to Scale is amazingly simplified, with all of four towns visible on the planet). To be fair, the archipelago didn't actually exist in Chrono Trigger, as a future civilization that found itself in the distant past as a side-effect of the events of the first game terraformed the islands.
  • Lampshaded in Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords, where realms ruled by Bane and Sartek's fellow Horsemen (Band and Sartek are Death and War, respectively) are explicitly mentioned, as well as other elf kingdoms. Being based on the pre-existing Warlords series, which had four games and three spinoffs prior to this, so they didn't have a shortage of locations.
  • In Banjo-Kazooie, aside of the nine worlds that the game lets you explore, the game takes place at Spiral Mountain, which is also home to Gruntilda's Lair. Then in Banjo-Tooie, a digger tunnel was created, expanding the world into the Isle o' Hags, and every main world, unlike the original game and apart from the sky level, is explicitly a region of the overworld. In Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, the Isle o' Hags is once again limited to Spiral Mountain, but the majority of the game takes place in the new Showdown Town and the game-worlds created by the Lord Of Games.
  • The Ace Combat series almost does this in reverse - the geography of the world was revealed early on and has remained relatively consistent, but until the fifth game only one continent, Usea, was actually used, with each new installment simply filling in the blanks. As of Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, one of only three games to take place on a different continent (and the only one for the continent in question, at that) there are still a few countries that haven't even been named, and many more that we know very little about.
  • City of Heroes:
    • The Rogue Isles were added in the 'exphanshalone' pack City of Villains, as a bunch of fictional Caribbean islands. Both cities were eventually consolidated into a single game (granting anyone who purchased one complete access to the other.)
    • The second expansion, Going Rogue, adds Praetoria, a Dystopian Mirror Universe of the main game world rife with Grey-and-Grey Morality. Unlike City of Villains, Going Rogue cannot be played on it's own. Praetorian content only goes up to level 20. The real star of Going Rogue is the Alignment System, which essentially turns Paragon and the Rogue Isles into Expansion Pack Worlds for each other.
  • EVE Online added around 2000 star systems in the Apocrypha expansion. The in-universe explanation is a Negative Space Wedgie that caused wormholes (that lead into the new systems) to appear all around the galaxy.
  • Touhou Project:
    • Generally speaking, each new main game of the series has introduced a new area. Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith is a partial exception, though; Youkai Mountain had been a (single) stage in the previous game and detailed in a databook, but had yet to get any plot focus.
    • Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object is weird here; a third of the game is set in the new area of Makai... which we learn nothing about and are unlikely to ever see again. The real expansion to the world is the temple built in the ending.
    • Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires gives the bosses a fancy mausoleum as their headquarters... which they promptly desert after the main story.
  • Guild Wars added new continents, Cantha and Elona, for its second and third campaignsnote . The fourth instead expanded the original continent.
  • Slime Rancher takes place on a planet called the Far, Far Range, and you can explore several large landmasses. Then Slime Rancher 2 takes place on a chain of islands across the sea.
  • The Super Mario Bros. games, as well as all the RPG spinoffs, at least when it doesn't just seem to rebuild the entire Mushroom Kingdom from scratch, like to suddenly reveal all new countries just across the border from the main area, such as the lands of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, Sarasa Land from Super Mario Land, Mario's own (unexplained in subsequent games) kingdom in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Beanbean Kingdom from Mario & Luigi and Rogueport and the surrounding areas (plus the offscreen adventures of Luigi in the Waffle Kingdom and nearby lands) from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. However, Isle Delfino from Super Mario Sunshine is a plane journey away, so it's presumably not "the next land over", and the Super Mario Galaxy games? Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The final boss of Super Mario Galaxy is even fought at the centre of the universe. Super Mario Odyssey focuses on traveling outside of the Mushroom Kingdom and into different places across the globe.
  • Happens with the Dungeon Siege Expansion Pack Legends of Aranna: The entirety of the expansion pack occurs in a part of Ehb that had not been known about, and features a race thought to be long dead in the multiplayer campaign. Less so with the sequel, Dungeon Siege II, as the original stated that Ehb was formed by the Tenth Legion as they fled the collapse of the Empire of Stars. Subverted in DSII: Broken World as the Second Great Cataclysm at the end of DSII caused massive changes to the land allowing the overall layout to remain the same while still adding new areas to explore.
  • Majesty plays this so straight it's almost a Lampshade Hanging with the aptly-named Northern Expansion Expansion Pack, which reveals a previously inaccessible northern half of the world map. Possibly a subversion, as it's visibly the same world map graphic save for the fact you can now scroll north of the mountain range in the middle of the continent; it's possible that some of the new quests were intended for the original game but cut for time or disk-space reasons.
  • Dragon Age II takes place in the city of Kirkwall, nearby Sundermount and the Wounded Coast. Legacy expands on this with Hawke travelling to a Grey Warden fortress in the Vimmark Mountains, while Mark of the Assassin has Hawke take part in a heist at Chateau-Haine, near the border with Nevarra.
  • While it was clear from the start that there were other worlds (it was a spinoff, after all), Heroes of Might and Magic started out with a single continent, Enroth, and then added another continent in the third game. Then the eight game in the Might and Magic series took place on another previously unmentioned continent on the same world (although one of the regions of the continent had been mentioned before).
  • In Fire Emblem, a new continent and conflicts are established every one or two games.
  • Silent Hill:
  • Final Fantasy XIV is all over the place with the trope before and after 2.0 when the game was remade:
    • The Coerthas region has several areas that were mostly mountainsides and large rolling lush green hills, but after the Calamity happened, the landscape was changed in such a short amount of time that all of Coerthas became a near barren frozen wasteland. Only the Central Highlands were accessible to players while the other parts were sealed off with in-game lore explaining that the other areas were either too devastated to travel safely or there was simply no way to get to those areas. The Heavensward expansion pack reopened the Coerthas Western Highlands which retains most of the physical geography, but just like all the surrounding areas, it's all frozen over. Similarly, other areas like the Black Shroud and Thanalan underwent redesigns post Calamity by either sealing off areas (as was the case for the West Shroud) or making it where a Gravity Barrier would prevent players from going to the old areas, though this was mostly done to condense the maps since one of the major flaws of 1.0 was tons of Cut and Paste Environments. In a way, the reduced amount of areas is an inverse of the trope where the new story reduced the world rather than expanding it.
    • Ishgard is a nation to the far north of Eorzea (a land mass where the game takes place on) that could be seen from the Coerthas Central Highlands since 1.0, but it wasn't accessible due to the nation closing its gates to foreigners while it dealt with its war against dragons. It wasn't until the Heavensward expansion where players were able to access the city of Ishgard for the first time and explore the lands beyond it.
    • The Stormblood expansion pack introduced two areas: the region of Gyr Abania, located to the east of Eorzea and home to the nation of Ala Mhigo, and Othard, a continent located to the Far East of Eorzea, and home to the nation of Doma. In both cases they've already been established as provinces that have long since been conquered by the Garlean Empire, with refugees from both areas showing up in Eorzea as plot points in the 2.x content cycle, though neither was accessible until that expansion, Gyr Abania because the border was cut off by a massive Garlean fortress, Baelsar's Wall, until Ala Mhigan Resistance fighters invaded it and killed most of its garrison, and Doma because of how long the trip would be by boat, both due to Doma being in the Far East and having to deal with both Garlean blockades and a ship's graveyard along the way.
  • The first LittleBigPlanet game made it clear there were only 8 Creators in Craftworld, corresponding to the 8 worlds in the game. Then LittleBigPlanet 2, LittleBigPlanet PSP and LittleBigPlanet Karting added a double digits number of new worlds, followed by LittleBigPlanet PS Vita and LittleBigPlanet 3 adding in two entirely new planets named Carnivalia and Bunkum (respectively) out of nowhere.
  • Super Metroid has Samus return to Zebes from the first game, and apparently there was a whole underground jungle region of Brinstar lying just to the left of the rocky blue Brinstar she originally explored. Likewise, there's Crateria, the Wrecked Ship and Maridia, all of which had no sign of existing in the original (except maybe the title screen in the former's case). The original game's remake, Metroid: Zero Mission, curiously added Crateria, but left out the jungle part of Brinstar, Maridia, and the Wrecked Ship (save for a few rooms that slightly resemble it). It also added Chozodia, a region Samus apparently never bothered to go to in either Super Metroid or the original.
  • The Mafia III DLC "Faster, Baby!" adds Sinclair Parish, Louisiana, a small Southern town west of New Bordeaux where you battle local white supremacists fighting tooth and nail against integration and civil rights.
  • The Outer Wilds DLC, Echoes of the Eye, has The Stranger, a ringworld ship. Justified in-universe in that the ship is permanently cloaked and undetectable in most situations. The Hearthians detected the ship's silhouette from a satellite before the start of the game, but wrote it off as equipment failure.
  • The Trails Series like Suikoden above goes to great lengths to avert this. The first series takes place in Liberl, a small kingdom that borders the empire of Erebonia and the Republic of Calvard. While we don't see Erebonia in person until the third series, it's completely justified as the Sky games take place a decade after the war between the two countries still weighs heavily on local politics and the border security naturally isn't keen on you trying to cross. Nevertheless, we do learn several things about it in the meantime, including the names of several important locations, the state of its politics, and several characters hail from there. In fact, we learn about the Big Bad of those particular games and his goals 7 years before the game that introduces him came out. Meanwhile, there's Crossbell State, the city-state some ways away from Liberl we see glimpses of in a flashback before the second series would explore it. The series' consistency is such that the likely plot points explored in the Calvard Arc can be deduced before the next series has been announced (as of the current edit).
  • Tibia could probably be considered the king of this trope. Ever since the primary continent was finished around the year 2002 or so, the devs have kept adding more and more islands/continents with no signs of stopping. Just compare the game world in 2001, with 2018. Its such an tradition that for the games 20th anniversary. A Youtube video was made just showing of how much the map has expanded over the years.
  • Fable: Following the Big Bad's defeat in the main game, the Lost Chapters expansion introduces a new threat rising in the Grim Up North and adds the lost continent of the Northern Wastes. It's explained as having been isolated from Albion after the fall of the Old Kingdom, since its Portal Network connections were broken and sea travel there is nigh-impossible.
  • In the Ys series, Adol always go on a new adventure on a new continent.
  • The Yo-kai Watch series generally keeps the previous games' maps around while also adding new ones- completely new towns as well as new areas around Springdale.
  • In the Shantae series, the first game takes place in an area around a large lake, with the towns and surrounding fields forming a ring around it. Risky's Revenge actually has a smaller map, limiting the visitable areas from the desert to the forest, although it also lets you visit the coastline of Scuttle Town: Polyp Bay to the west and Mermaid Cliffs to the east. Pirate's Curse takes place mostly in the Forbidden Isles, away from the mainland setting of the previous two games. Half-Genie Hero again takes place in the mainland, but since Shantae is mostly travelling by air, she can visit further parts of the continent. Seven Sirens have Shantae and her friends taking a vacation at Paradise Island, away from the previous locations.
  • Golden Sun: Subverted in that the world is the same size in both games (technically it's actually shrinking, which is what you're trying to prevent), you're just limited to some parts of it (broadly speaking, the equivalents of Europe, continental Asia and North Africa in the first game; India, Australia, Japan, Antarctica and the Americas in the second).
  • Splatoon has the first two games set in the city of Inkopolis. Splatoon 3 expands the world by having the story move to Splatsville, a city in the Splatlands region that is located about 50 miles away from the Greater Inkopolis metropolitan area, which itself is now stated to be in a region called Inkadia.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles:
    • Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Connected: The Future Connected epilogue featured in the Definitive Edition has the story taking place on a previously-unexplored region of the Bionis, that being the Bionis' Shoulder. Despite the rest of the Bionis having been destroyed by that point, the Bionis Shoulder is still kept afloat in the sky due to the High Entia levitation technology.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country: The titular continent Torna is this for 2's Prequel expansion, being a mostly-unexplored region of Alrest only briefly seen in the base game. Justified, as the audience is only shown the corpse of the Tornan titan in 2, which had been killed and sank beneath the Cloud Sea five centuries prior during the expansion's events.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed: The Cent-Omnia Region is a region of Aionios that had been unseen in 3 but now appears in its Prequel expansion, mainly being a combination of Colony 9, Bionis' Leg, Valak Mountain, and Prison Island from the first game, as well as the Kingdom of Tantal and the Cliffs of Morytha from the second game. Justified, as the Cent-Omnia Region ends up being destroyed by Origin dropping on top of it at the end of Future Redeemed, thus explaining its absence centuries later in 3.

    Web Original 
  • New installments of Chaos Fighters take place in entirely new areas or planets.

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