One of my favourite lunchtime activities is to trawl wikipedia looking at obscure geographic locations. This is not a complicated task. What one does is select a country from looking at a map of the globe (say, Chad), clicking on the ‘Geography’ subheading, and then taking a peek at whatever looks interesting - in this case, I am going to select the Tibesti-Jebel Uweinat montane xeric woodlands, which we then learn is an ‘ecoregion cover[ing] 82,200 square kilometers (31,700 sq mi) in the volcanic Tibesti Mountains of Chad and Libya, and 1932-m peak of Jebel Uweinat on the border of Egypt, Libya, and Sudan’.

We learn that ‘the climate is arid and subtropical, but can reach 0°C at the highest altitudes during the winter’, and while ‘rainfall is irregular’ it is ‘more regular than the surrounding desert, and many of the lower wadis are watered by rain which falls higher up’. It is something of a mountainous oasis for animal and plant life and its wadis have an ‘important role’ in the lifecycle of the locust, as it is where eggs are laid. This makes it the source of locust plagues throughout the Sahara and as far as Europe.

And from a few mouse clicks I now have in my head a lost realm of high mountains, surrounded by desert but sustained by rainfall (even snowfall?) and harbouring all forms of strange life, not to mention (naturally) lost temples and ruins of an ancient civilisation, and weird insect gods that give rise to great plagues. Great place to set a campaign, no?

Socotra is an island in the Indian Ocean, south of Yemen; its geography alone is enough to inspire rabid, hallucinogenic imaginings of fantasy landscapes:

Socotra is riddled with deep caves, many of which contain prehistoric art and petroglyphs, as well as script written in the ‘Indian Brāhmī, South Arabian, Ethiopic, Greek, Palmyrene and Bactrian languages’. The source of the - wait for it - Dragon’s Blood resin, it was a major trading destination in the classical world, visited by the Greeks, Indians, Persians, and so on. Later influxes of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and Arabs, layered on top of the existing, indigenous population (perhaps descended from the mysterious Oldowan culture) can be readily imagined to have produced a complex polyglot and multicultural society on the coasts - clustering around a mysterious, ancient, relatively untouched interior, dominated by strange monsters, lost tribes, isolated ruins, and so on....

The Lençóis Maranhenses National Park meanwhile is a vast area of sand dunes, 380,000 acres in size (with 70km of coastline) situated in the far north east of Brazil. Rainfall collects in the dips and hollows between the dunes and forms semi-permanent lakes:

It is no stretch of the imagination at all to imagine this landscape, increased in size and scale, representing a landscape dominated by maritime civilizations semi-isolated from one another by brutally hostile arid desert (itself roamed by dragons and giant sandworms and whatever else one’s heart desires). Or, if one prefers, it could maintain its current size and simply represent what remains after a civilisation has been swept aside by a great flood - with those pools harbouring strange ghosts and submerged ruins (not to mention mysterious and powerful artefacts...).

The Kerguelen Arch, meanwhile, well, what can one say?

Kerguelen itself is one of the most isolated spots on Earth - an archipelago floating about as far away from anywhere else as it is possible to be, marooned in the Southern Ocean. The arch was once an actual arch, but collapsed at some point in the early 20th century:

It is of course entirely natural, but....come on. Is it really?