Hey guys, this is my first world map ever, based on rvbomally's 'Sailpunk' basemap. It's an Age of Exploration paleofuture, with some mythpunk thrown in. Hope you enjoy
The year is 1900, more than two hundred years after a very different Age of Exploration came to an end. These days, much of the work force is comprised of homunculi (colloquially known as 'muncs'), foot-high humans grown in jars. This tiny race of manmade laborers are noted for their lack of hair and nails, their translucent skin, and their distinct, unpleasant odour, thought to be a result of the complex alchemical substances involved in their creation. Homunculi are completely sterile, and age at a faster rate than their womb-born counterparts, rarely living past the twenty-year mark. The muncs have very little in the way of human rights (old-fashioned games such as 'kick the munc' and 'munc tossing' remain popular to this day) - little surprise perhaps that there have been so many homunculus uprisings in the last few years, and as a result, they are slowly being phased out in favour of the much more efficient - not to mention far less rebellious - clockwork automatons (or 'tommies'). Notably, a number of businesses refuse to profit from homunculus labour - not out of any concern for their treatment or well-being mind, but because are Morally Opposed™ to munc-making, seeing it as playing God.
The oceans are inhabited by ship-sinking krakens (some species of which have tentacles long enough to damage low-flying aircraft) and turtles big enough to be mistaken for islands, something TTL's Polynesians learned the hard way. Mermaids exist, although they're a far cry from the aquatic beauties of nautical lore (being more reminiscent of the Deep Ones than Ariel) and can be found in various scattered schools across the world's oceans, communicating with each other in a series of indecipherable hoots and whistles. Contrary to popular belief, male mermaids do exist, although they are decidedly less intelligent than their female counterparts, and are usually killed, and either fully partially consumed by their partners after mating. Mermaid hunting is increasingly common (the Church's official stance is that the seagoing she-devils do not have souls, meaning that killing them is fair game), and their blood is presently the most popular drug of choice amongst society's upper crust.
Mermaid blood, sometimes known as 'fish juice' is ingested orally, and is usually mixed in with tea or coffee - drinking it with alcohol is not recommended. It is usually harvested from female specimens (with that produced by males generally considered to be of inferior quality). On top of inducing an intense euphoria in humans, mermaid blood is known to hold certain anti-ageing properties, preventing skin from wrinkling and hair from turning grey. Unfortunately, fish juice is also highly addictive, and can lead to a number of nasty side effects. These include (but are not limited to) strong aversion to sunlight, stabbing chest pains, loss of libido, severe obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and delusion (the most commonly reported being an inability to recognize one's own reflection in a mirror). Interestingly, vegetables such as onions (especially garlic) have proven highly effective in treating persons struggling with addiction to mermaid blood.
In recent years, much of western Europe has been devastated by an epidemic of lycanthropy, a strange disease which is common in canine species, and can be transmitted to humans through bites and scratches. Lycanthropy does not kill its human victims, but grotesquely disfigures them both physically and mentally: within 24 hours of exposure, infected persons (known as lycans, colloquially called dogmen) will experience rapid hair growth over their entire bodies, and in the following days, their minds will slowly degrade into a violent, primitive, animal-like state. Although there is no cure for lycanthropy, there is one silver lining to their condition: every full moon, lycans will temporarily regain their mental faculties (usually retaining little memory of their time in their wolf-state). Sadly, in some communities, it is still common practice for lycans to be purged (along with all dogs and wolves) in order to prevent the disease from spreading.
In response to this ongoing plague, the Catholic Church has established a number of settlements known as lycan colonies (also called clabbert houses[1], or lycanthropariums), where the infected are sent to be cared for by Christian monks. Living conditions in lycan colonies are generally fairly poor, although during a full moon, once their sanity has returned, inmates may be bathed and groomed (all that fur gets itchy), receive meals of their choice, have access to reading/writing materials should they request them, and (very occasionally) may be visited by family members. Inmates in lycan houses are segregated by sex, as the dogmen are capable of producing genetically normal offspring (which they are fiercely defensive of). Most lycan colonies are located far away from any populated areas (there have been countless cases of inmates attacking their carers in their wolf-state and escaping into the wild, sometimes even joining packs).
Just as early New World cartographers speculated, California is of course an island, formerly inhabited to a race of hairy, nine-foot humanoids. Known variously as the Ape-Men, Sasquatch, Nephilim, and Bigfoots[2], these nocturnal carnivores once numbered in their tens of thousands, and lived a peaceful, nomadic existence. The Ape-Men were the first ones to domesticate the jackalope, which they (and later Europeans) used as beasts of burden. Sadly, following the arrival of the first Spanish colonists, the Ape-Men were entirely wiped out by human diseases, although if the rumours are to be believed, a small number of survivors may exist in the Californian forests, far away from the gold-rich human cities.
Lying at the bottom of the world is the partially-frozen land mass of Antipodia, which has been depicted on world maps long before its shores were first sighted by European sailors in the early seventeenth century. Historically, Antipodia has been known by a variety of names, including Pymland, New Arkham, and (most commonly), Terra Australis. Being than twice the size of Africa, Antipodia is the world's largest continent, and was settled by humans roughly forty thousand years ago. The continent is host to a vast array of weird flora and fauna, such as vampiric trees (used by some native tribes for sacrificial purposes, or as a particularly torturous form of execution), venomous dropbears, carnivorous bunyips, and colossal duck-billed platypuses (which have been domesticated for millennia, and are ridden by aboriginals for fast transit across both land and water).
The oldest and most sophisticated culture on Antipodia is the Tsalal Empire, whose territories cover much of the continent (although the European powers have each claimed their share of land). Far from the barbaric savages early explorers were expecting, thd Tsalal's rich culture continues to fascinate European scholars to this day, and their customs, artwork and mythology have been written about extensively by such authors as Chambers and Valdron. The Tsalal refer to their homeland as Tchortcha, from where we get the word tcho-tcho, a name (widely seen as offensive) for someone of Antipodian heritage (the Tsalal, in turn, have been known to refer to Europeans derogatively as tekelilis, literally translated as 'snow-skins'). The Tsalal are renowned for their unique fashion, with their nobility dressing only in the finest, most beautifully woven silks produced by the giant arachnids of the Oriab Isles (without much concern for the painful rash it leaves behind).
For millennia, the Tsalal have been ruled by an absolute monarch known as a hastur, who reigns from the black palace of Leng in the imperial capital city of Tsal which, prior to the onslaught of a devastating epidemic of Poe's Disease (colloquially known as the Red Death), was the most populous city on the globe. The first person to hold the title of hastur was Qarvkeh, a semi-legendary figure who is said to have been born in a village near Lake Hali, where he was abandoned at birth, and raised in the pouch of a sabre-toothed kangaroo, later returning and vanquishing the Tsalal's oldest enemies, the vile yowies, to the Southern Wastes. The mythical hero is sometimes known as the 'King in Yellow' (he is said to have only ever dressed in the one colour in honour of his wife, who died of old age whilst he was still young, and was rarely seen without her favourite yellow flower in her hair). Other hasturs of note include the Nekmut the Mayfly (who suffered a fatal epileptic attack mere hours into his reign), Noscrot the Eunuch (received this unique epithet following his castration at the hands of a jealous lover), and Zadmig the Wicked (a brutal tyrant who died from hysterical laughter at the sight of a servant child being eaten alive by a royal dingo).
A surprisingly small number of hasturs have been murdered throughout the Empire's long history - perhaps the most notable of whom was the illegitimate king known Kelraf the Imposter, who ascended to the throne by masquerading as the son of the late Tcharu the Lame (his reign lasted fifteen years, only ending when he accidentally confessed his true identity after drinking too much mushroom wine from the plains of Iuggoth, and was later executed). The Tsalal people revere penguins as the ancient Egyptians did cats (indeed, their religion claims that when the Earth was young, before the sun had been created, a penguin god that sat upon the planet as if it were its own egg, thus keeping it warm). They are also renowned for their architectural prowess, constructing such wonders as so-called 'Sphinx of the South', an immense black statue of a mythical creature known as a wahtefuq (a monster which has the head of a kangaroo, the body of a sealion, the wings of an albatross, and a snake for a tongue).
In the last century, the Tsalal Empire has opened up trade routes with all major European powers, selling itchy spidersilk, yummy red yams, and the mysterious plant known as kaddatha (known to outsiders as dreamweed), a narcotic rivaling mermaid blood in terms of popularity. When smoked, kaddatha causes the user to fall into a deep sleep, from which they will be unable to awaken from until its effects have worn off. In this state, the user will experience extremely vivid dreams which they have total control over, allowing them to live out their every fantasy in a safe environment. Although kaddatha is not physically addictive, taking it regularly is not recommended - smoking the drug too often has been known to result in the user losing control of their dreamstate, often with frightening results, and while dreamweed users cannot come to any physical harm while sleep, the pain they feel in these dreams will seem very real indeed. There have been cases of kaddatha smokers experiencing intense nightmares from which they cannot awaken even months or years after they have used the drug, and stories are told of sailors too terrified to sleep, ultimately dying of exhaustion.
Footnotes
[1] Named for St. Clabbert of Ireland, patron saint of those afflicted with lycanthropy.
[2] This name derives from the tribal chieftain Big-Foot, who was the first Ape-Man to make contact with Spanish explorers.