Seong Gi-hun is a divorced gambler in Seoul, broke and in debt. A smiling stranger offers him a game of ddakji on a subway platform, and soon he is playing children's games for his life. The arena is fiction: the games were built as sets at the Daejeon Expo Science Park and later dismantled, and the island exteriors come from Seongapdo, a private island that cannot be visited.
Everything around the arena is real — the market, the corner shop, the amusement park, the airport — and this route follows those places in story order, from a schoolyard in the first episode to a park where the Salesman starts recruiting again.
Russia's best-loved bogatyr was a peasant's son who could not walk until he was 33. Then he set out for Kiev, defended a city, killed a whistling monster in the forest and became the chief hero of Prince Vladimir's court.
The route follows the epic songs known as byliny, from his village near Murom to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, where the relics of a real monk, Ilya Pechersky, are said by some to be the hero's. Legend and history are marked apart: the pins show where tradition puts the story, not proof that it happened.
Sleeping Dogs sends an undercover cop into the Sun On Yee triad across a compact Hong Kong built from four real Island districts. The designers photographed the city for a week and then bent it to fit the story.
This route visits the four districts in turn, starting with Aberdeen, where the story opens. Pins mark whole districts, not mission sites: no source ties a specific mission to a street.
Mafia II is set in Empire Bay, a city that never existed but borrows from six real American ones. This route follows Vito's story from Sicily in 1943 to the 1951 war between mob families and the Triads.
Only Sicily and a New York City stand-in are pinned; the sources tie no mission to a real place, so the remaining story stops stay unpinned.
Red Dead Redemption 2 follows the Van der Linde gang in 1899 across five invented U.S. states, with Saint Denis built on New Orleans and Guarma reached on a ship bound for Cuba.
This route follows the main story from Blackwater to Saint Denis and an island beyond. Pins mark only places the sources name; the rest stay unpinned and keep their place in the sequence.
In 1805 the frigate HMS Surprise is hammered by a French privateer off Brazil, and her captain will not go home. The chase runs south round Cape Horn to the Galápagos, with a ship's surgeon who only wants to look at birds.
The route follows the film's voyage, then the places where it was actually made: a giant tank in Mexico and the replica ship in San Diego. It covers the 2003 film, not Patrick O'Brian's novels, and the sea stops are left unpinned.
Ragnar Lothbrok goes from farmer to king in History's Vikings, a series that sprints through more than a century of Viking Age history and the sagas. This route follows the places of its events in story order, setting what the show does against what history and the sagas say. The series itself was filmed in Ireland.
From a raid on Lindisfarne to Paris under siege, a snake pit near York, a Mediterranean raid, a colony in Iceland and a court in Kiev and a voyage west, with the fictional village of Kattegat left unpinned.
Every Far Cry game drops you into a country that does not exist, and almost every one was built from a real place. The developers camped on the savanna, sent a team to Nepal, spent two weeks in Montana and a month in Cuba.
This route follows the series in release order, one stop per game. Pins mark whole countries or regions, not scenes: they show where each fictional setting came from, and one entry has no sourced real model.
A dumped teenager from Ohio crosses Europe to find his German pen pal: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Berlin and finally the Vatican. The joke is that nearly all of it was shot in one city, Prague, apart from a single beach scene in Rostock.
Each stop pairs the story city with the real place that played it, so you can see where the fiction and the film set part ways. Story cities are approximate; the Prague filming spots are exact.
In 1939 the Austrian climber Heinrich Harrer went to the Himalaya, and the war turned the trip into a walk to Lhasa. Harrer's memoir Seven Years in Tibet follows his escape from a British camp in India and his walk to Lhasa, where he became tutor to the 14th Dalai Lama.
This route covers six places from Nanga Parbat to the Potala Palace. The 1997 film was shot largely in Argentina, not Tibet, so none of its sets are stops here.
Hoenn is a world of volcanoes, islands and sea routes, and the games' own region is based on Kyushu, the south-western main island of Japan. Fans and reference writers have matched its towns and landmarks to real places across the island and the seas around it.
This route follows the story from Littleroot Town to the Sealed Chamber and sets each stop beside the place it is said to resemble. The region is inspired by Kyushu, not copied from it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
Netflix's Continent was built from a patchwork of real places: a Hungarian fort, a village museum, a former monastery, Canary Islands coasts and a ruined Polish castle.
This route follows season one's shoot from October 2018 to May 2019: Cintra and Marnadal in Hungary, Aretuza and Ciri's desert in the Canary Islands, and Sodden Hill at Ogrodzieniec in Poland. Filming spots only; the Continent itself is invented.
Port Royal and Tortuga were built on a quiet St Vincent bay, Cannibal Island is Dominican rainforest, and a private Bahamian cay sits behind a famous duel.
This route follows the shoots from St Vincent in 2002 through Dominica in 2005 to Grand Bahama, where the ships were filmed in a hurricane season. Most pins mark areas, not exact sets; the sets themselves were built and taken down.
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, goes looking for the secret of immortality. This route follows the epic from its city to the Cedar Forest and the flood hero's home, then to the Nineveh library where the tablets were found.
The poem's places are legend and the tablets' places are archaeology; each stop says which, and which pins are only candidates. The Iraqi sites are not visitor destinations.
The boy born on the Onon River became the ruler of the largest land empire in history. This route follows him from the steppe camps of Khentii, through the war that began at a border town in Kazakhstan, to the siege of Samarkand and a death in the middle of a campaign.
The sources disagree on his birth year, his birthplace and his grave. Where the Secret History of the Mongols gives a legend and other sources give the record, the stops say which is which.
Homer's Trojan War on the map: Mycenae, Aulis, where the fleet waited, the hill of Hisarlik, now identified with Troy, and the Scamander plain, then Pylos and Ithaca from the Odyssey. Each stop is told from Homer, with archaeology kept apart.
The route follows the epic from the fleet at Aulis to the plain of the Scamander, then the Odyssey's road home via Pylos and Ithaca. Many identifications here are traditional or disputed, and the pins show it.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453, from Rumeli Hisarı on the Bosphorus and the chain across the Golden Horn to Galata hill and Hagia Sophia. Mehmed II's huge cannons and ships hauled over land took the city on 29 May.
This route follows the siege in order: the fortress on the Bosphorus, the chain across the Golden Horn and the ships that bypassed it, the land-wall gates, and Hagia Sophia. Exact positions of some events are not recorded, so several pins are approximate.
Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and then went back to Maryland about 13 times, bringing out some 70 people. Her work depended on a chain of Quakers, free Black ministers and abolitionists who hid and moved people north.
The route follows that chain from the Eastern Shore through Wilmington and Philadelphia to Niagara and Salem Chapel in St. Catharines, then to her farm at Auburn. Real routes were kept secret, so most pins are approximate.
On 18 June 1937 three Soviet airmen took off from Moscow in a single-engine plane and landed in Washington State more than 63 hours later, having flown over the North Pole. It was the first non-stop flight from the Soviet Union to the United States.
The route follows the crew from the airfield near Shchyolkovo to the landing at Pearson Field, then to the general's table, the White House and the monument that still stands by the runway. The path over the Arctic is shown only as a symbolic pin.
At 21, Jack London sailed north in July 1897 to join the Klondike gold rush. He came home without gold but with scurvy and the stories that made his name: The Call of the Wild, "To Build a Fire" and more.
This route follows him from the beach at Dyea over the Chilkoot Pass, down the lakes and rapids of the Yukon, through a winter at the Stewart River to Dawson City, where his cabin still stands.
Hemingway wrote his last great novella in Cuba, about a fisherman and one enormous marlin. The places around it are real: the hotel room where he first lived, the bar he loved, the house where he wrote, and the fishing village next door.
This route follows the writer's Cuba from Old Havana to the harbour of Cojímar, where the Pilar was moored. The novella itself is under copyright, so the story is kept to its outline.
The German Fairy Tale Route runs from Hanau, where the Brothers Grimm were born, to Sababurg, nicknamed Sleeping Beauty Castle, the Pied Piper's Hamelin and the Musicians' Statue in Bremen. The brothers grew up poor, studied law and became librarians.
The route follows the Fairy Tale Route from Hanau, where they were born, through the places they lived and worked, to Sleeping Beauty's castle and the Pied Piper's Hamelin, ending in Bremen with the animals' statue. The tale places are traditional associations, not the Grimms' own claims.
Finland's national epic was gathered, not invented: a country doctor named Elias Lönnrot walked into the forests of Karelia and wrote down what the old singers recited.
The route follows his collecting trips from 1832 to 1834, from Viena Karelia to his home at Kajaani and the first draft at Kuhmo, then visits three places the runes name: the Imatra rapids, the island of Saari and the Kemi river. The poem's geography is loose, so the last two pins are marked as guesses.
A boy born in Eisleben becomes a monk, a professor and the man who defied an emperor. Along the way he vows in a thunderstorm, challenges the church over indulgences, is spirited away in disguise and ends his life where it began.
The route follows Luther through seven places in Germany: his birth house, the Erfurt monastery, the Wittenberg church doors, the Diet of Worms, the Wartburg, his Wittenberg home and the house where he died. The Worms pin is approximate, and the Castle Church doors story is tradition.
