I've been taking in a BUNCH of inspiration and my current campaign world is kinda unpolished, yet well used...which makes it hard to insert/modify/polish since continuity is important to players.

My inspiration for this new world comes from the following: World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Stephen Kings Dark Tower series, Rhapsody's Emerald Sword Saga (awesome stuff)...just a mish mash of inspirations that will wipe out and replace my current campaign setting and will START polished and finalized...since there's so much inspirational material mixed with my own imagination I'm hopin git will end up quite original.

So anyway, without just blabbin away...here's the idea.

A world that was previously inhabited by a race of humanoids. Their lives revolved around ritual magic and they discovered through oracle and various other ritual divinations that the world was about to fall apart. The core of the world was overheating and about to cause a world sundering explosion that would obliterate everything.

Realizing that this would end their society they decided to put together all of the elders and powerful ritual magicians in a last ditch effort to reverse the situation...which failed...and served to accellerate the process causing quakes and faultlines across the planet to begin to separate. They gathered themselves into one last ritual and as the planet began to crumble they managed to open up a magical rift where the core of the planet used to be...this rift forced large chunks of the planet outwards from the center, but also created a sort of magical black hole that had an immense amount of gravity, just enough to hold the chunks of the planet in place, floating there.

Only problem was...the damage was already done...Most of the inhabitants of the planet were dead or severely wounded...all of the elders died from the expulsion of so much magical energy. Over the next few years, the planet became uninhabited yet the magical rift core held the large and small chunks of the world hovering in place.

Several hundred years later spelljamming voyagers discovered the planet (spelljammer rules in this campaign don't include crystal spheres and phlogiston though...I keep it simple) and began reinhabiting it and thats where the campaign sits.

Now I know its kinda hokey and the whole sundering process hasn't been really written out to make a lot of sense...I still have to actually do the polishing I mentioned, but the point is I'm startign from scratch so I GET to polish it...

Now to keep this thread on topic with mapping...imagine if you will a global map in perhaps equirectangular projection...but where there would normally be oceans there is instead empty space, with a magical rift at the core...a world thats still spherical, but full of empty space between continents...where there would be beach, there's a drop off and if you fall off, you get sucked into the rift.

What say ye? Any of these ideas stupid? Any ideas need more ideas?