Fantasy novelists like Game of Thrones scribe George R.R. Martin spend thousands of pages building intricately detailed worlds, but geographically, these worlds can be hard to understand. Making matters worse is the fact that most fantasy maps look like they were scrawled on the back of a napkin at a ren faire: atmospheric, perhaps, but hard to translate into real-world terms. If only you could just Google Map it.
Here's the next best thing. Reddit user selvag has made a modern, Google Maps-inspired version of the land of Westeros where the Game of Thrones novels (and, by extension, the hit HBO TV series) takes place. And it's amazing how just doing something as simple as translating the fantasy map into a modern day cartographic style makes more sense of it.
One of the problems with Game of Thrones is that it often seems like it takes characters only as long as the plot requires to get from point A to point B. Characters like Arya Stark might take months to get from King's Landing to Harranhall, while another character, like Tywin Lannister, only takes a few days. Having the world of Westeros detailed as a Google Map makes it clearer that the issue is whether or not you take the main roads, or if you go off-the-beaten track. Or, in more GMaps-centric terms, do you let Google take you the most efficient route, or the scenic route?
You can buy a print of Google Maps Westeros on Etsy for $21.
[via Popular Mechanics]