Antibor is my far-future Antarctic D&D setting. I'm currently working on turning it into a fully keyed (hex/point)crawl.
Background
Maps of Antarctica sans ice pop up regularly on fantasy mapping & worldbuilding forums. I saw one a long time ago and became attached to the idea of filling the Antarctic tabula rasa with a fantasy setting of my own invention. Eventually, I went to grad school and studied GIS and finally had the technical skills necessary to create realistic maps for myself. One of my first non-school-related projects was to create a hexcrawl map of Antarctica with 148,000 6-mile hexes.
I ended up using one small region of the map as the setting for a Worlds Without Number campaign I ran for some friends in 2023. Then in January 2024 I was aimlessly browsing the purple OSR discord on a day when people were sharing large hex maps they'd created or acquired. I shared my hexmap and for some reason decided to commit to keying it over the course of the following year. I've been plugging away at it since.
Goals
My aim is to make a detailed and aesthetically pleasing map of Antibor along with a key (in the form of a PDF that could be printed via Lulu) that contains at least 10,000 brief but unique entries. I want a weighty tome that makes a satisfying thwump when landing on the table.
Obviously, the expansive scale limits how much detail I can add to each hex/PoI. I'm still working out exactly how to proceed, but I expect the result will be something like Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa or Luke Gearing's Pariah hexcrawl -- minimalistic but conceptually dense.
Lastly, Antibor is ultimately just a creative outlet -- I'm an inveterate dabbler and this provides my idiosyncratic forays into cartography, writing, drawing, typography, & procedural generation with a loose unity. I have no intention of marketing this and I'm certain I would be unsuccessful if I did, but I do intend to post it for free (or possibly PWYW) once I have something worth sharing.
The Setting
Antibior is a science fantasy setting in the vein of the Dying Earth genre defined by the works of Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, and Gene Wolfe. Beyond that, most of the setting details remain in flux. I'm not really interested in reproducing particular tropes, emulating a genre, mimicking a historical era or limiting to myself to a particular style or feel.
Some aspects of the setting that have remained mostly consistent:
- Antibor has a warmer, wetter version of Antarctica's IRL weather patterns. The coastal regions range from subtropical jungle & savannah to temperate and Mediterranean climates with chaparral and forest. The interior of the continent is steppe and cold desert.
- The Southern Ocean is hot and stormy, basically off-limits to oceanic navigation.
- The dominant religion on Antibor is a syncretic religion based around 22 archetypal deities. The deities are ranked, with the highest being the BOUNDLESS COSMOS, encompassing everything below it. In this way, the faith subsumes both monotheism and polytheism.
- The South Pole is called Idraluna (a name learned in a dream) and is believed by common folk to be the center of the cosmos.
- There are three main cultural groups: Autochthons, who have lived on the Irð since time immemorial, Alabastrines, who were exiled here from astral fiefdoms, and Aldebrati, who were once the slaves of an extinct alien species.
Development Logs