World of Warcraft is an MMORPG built upon a franchise that is nearly 30 years old, and in that time, fans of the world have created art projects and homages to their beloved game. Esben, a tabletop role playing game enthusiast and artist, has recreated the world maps for the three original continents of Azeroth using a mapmaking website called Inkarnate.
Inkarnate is a fantasy map making tool that has been used by tabletop role players, authors, and map enthusiasts to create visualizations of their own worlds, or recreations of well-known existing ones, like Esben has with World of Warcraft’s Azeroth. While the website has a free version, the map maker has a paid subscription with an abundance of useful features to create unique maps like the ones Esben shared.
The maps themselves are excellent recreations of the classic areas of World of Warcraft. While Esben took a number of creative liberties to make the world maps from in-game work for their purposes, the maps are faithful and gorgeous tributes to the pre-Cataclysm areas so many players are familiar with. Each area is rife with details and colors that make them pop far more than the iconic-yet-basic maps found in World of Warcraft.
Esben isn’t the first World of Warcraft fan who has made tabletop role playing maps out of Azeroth using Inkarnate. Reddit user Grazzbek made maps of Elwynn Forest and Durotar for his own games. Unlike Esben’s, which are a more faithful retelling of the zone maps as they appear in World of Warcraft, Grazzbek’s maps take more liberties in an attempt to scale the recreation of the Alliance capital of Stormwind to a more realistic, life-accurate size, complete with new villages and locations.
World of Warcraft fans and tabletop role playing fans are both known for displaying their unique brands of creativity, so it's not hard to see how fans of both could create truly wonderful works like these maps. Likewise, World of Warcraft’s iconic maps make for excellent art projects, as they are incredibly recognizable in their style. The creativity of the fanbase is part of what has given Warcraft such a prolific legacy, despite recent troubles Blizzard has gotten itself in.
Some World of Warcraft fans wonder why someone would go through the trouble of recreating all of Azeroth with new maps when existing ones could do the trick just as well. However, one look at the detail of maps like those created by Esben or Grazzbek is enough to make many World of Warcraft players wish the maps in game had half as much detail, and enough to make table top role players consider running a Dungeons and Dragons game set in Azeroth.
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is available on PC.
Source: Wowhead, Reddit/Grazzbek