Basic Information
Located in a remote corner of the Amazon Basin, Maple White Land is an enormous plateau rising out of the jungle, where dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures survive, cut off from the outside world. It is described in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, and is the inspiration and the model for all succeeding "Lost World" stories.
The plateau was discovered by an American artist and explorer named Maple White. He died shortly after returning from the plateau but his journal was found by the noted biologist, anthropologist and crank George Edward Challenger, who eventually led an expedition to the plateau.
The plateau is described as a formation of red basaltic cliffs up to a thousand feet in height. The top of the plateau is covered in jungle and inhabited by a variety of creatures long thought extinct, including pterodactyls, iguanodons and megalosaurus. One side of the plateau is inhabited by a tribe of ape-men who appear to be a kind of "missing link". On the other side lives a tribe of human indians who migrated up the plateau at some time in the more recent past and who live in a state of war with the ape-men. A large lake exists in the center of the plateau containing several aquatic species including a fresh-water plesiosaurus. The plateau also contains diamond-bearing deposits of blue clay, which are difficult to access because they lie just where the pterodactyls like to nest.
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Game and Story Use
- Maple White Land could make a good setting for a Late Victorian or Pulp Era adventure
- It could also serve as a model for similar "Lost World" settings.