20. Lankhmar
The bizarre and labyrinthine city of Lankhmar is hopelessly corrupt, filled with bizarre drugs, and unceasingly violent. So, it’s pretty much Miami, and we don’t think we’d last as long in Lankhmar as we did at our cousin’s bachelor party, where we got food poisoning from bad plantains and ended up having to drink Pedialyte while he was cheating on his fiance. Anyway, we’d get stabbed to death and robbed here in probably under four hours, tops.
19. The Forgotten Realms
We’ll be direct here. Having to describe the cosmology of the Forgotten Realms will lead to sentences like “Abeir-Toril was one of many worlds that appeared after Ao crafted Realmspace out of the phlogiston,” and we don’t want to put anyone through that, especially ourselves. Let’s just call us dead and move on.
18. Prydain
Prydain is heavily inspired by Welsh mythology, which really makes us wonder what the fuck ancient Welsh people were smoking to come up with a skull-faced antler man with blood-red eyes, and he’s not even the main bad guy. “The Black Cauldron” may have nearly destroyed Disney in the 1980s, but we know Prydain would wreck us pretty damn quickly.
17. Melniboné
Did you hear that? Ten thousand goth nerds just got so excited that they probably split their weird pleather pants. We have to admit, though, that the idea of a fantasy franchise being built around a pasty-white, drug-taking wimp sounds right up our alley. If you were in Melniboné, your soul would already be consumed by a demon sword by now.
16. Ivalice
If we made it to Final Fantasy-land (or Ivalice or whatever), we’d be crushed to death under the weight of a giant sword-gun combo thing, no question. We probably wouldn’t even make it one of those crazy airship things, which would be a bummer, but that’s Final Fantasy for you.
15. Dreamlands
The Dreamlands are an alternate dimension that can only be reached through the process of powerful psychic dreams. Given that this is H.P. Lovecraft that we’re talking about, each dream is more racist than the last and way more obsessed with having sex with fish creatures than can be healthy. We’d get drowned by frog-human hybrids as soon as they realized we might not have an unbroken line of ancestors from some crappy little town in New England.
14. The Four Nations
How long we’d last in the Four Nations really depends on which Nation we ended up in. Water Nation? No sweat, they’re basically hippies. Earth? They mostly seem chill. The Air people don’t even have their own area, so we can just avoid them. Fire Nation? We are fucking dead. Game over, man. Game over.
13. Azeroth
It’s a world of warcraft. Put simply, that means we will pray for death rather than the torture of having to watch the “World of Warcraft” movie again, even if it means that orcs will stick weird pointy things into our bodies for days on end. Especially if it means that, as long as we don’t have to see that Duncan Jones-directed piece of cartoon trash ever again.
12. Wonderland
Sure, this one comes from a children’s book, but have you ever actually read that thing? People are getting their heads chopped off every other minute. You can forget H.P. Lovecraft’s swirling madness, we’d go crazy the first time a cat talked to us and then got all weird about giving us directions. We wouldn’t last 30 minutes there.
11. Pern
This place is chockful of dragons, enough said. Just straight-up too many dragons.
10. The World of the Wheel
This one is an interesting case because even if we get instantaneously slaughtered by Trollocs or Myrddraal or some other unnecessarily cannibalistic fantasy creature, we’ll be reincarnated over and over again. And trust us, we would definitely make a point of being instantaneously slaughtered in this hellhole of a fantasy world.
9. Neverland
Much like Wonderland, you might not think that Neverland is one of the more brutal fantasy worlds to be killed in. Think again: there’s a fucking flying sociopath cutting off people’s limbs, a group of feral children who you just know are five seconds from going “Lord of the Flies,” and the most reasonable people around are pirates. Actual pirates. This place is a nightmare.
8. Middle-Earth
In a world where tiny little weed-smoking dorks are barely able to survive without magical rings or drinking “Ent-draughts” (which sounds very suspicious to us, but moving on), we’d be almost instantaneously dead. This is the ultra-violent world that spawned a whole generation of terrible imitations, so we have to give it some props and admit that Smaug would burn us alive like the little sneaking burglars we are.
7. Warhammer
If you like dark and gritty fantasy worlds, this is the realm for you, and also, you’re a dork. The sheer carnage of this place is pretty over the top, and we estimate that we last minutes at best. Fine. We would not last more than *rolls dice* two player turns.
6. Thra
What do you think those weird lizard-bird Skeksis freaks from “The Dark Crystal” eat? They torture little pod people for fun and basically want to kill everything, so we’re pretty sure we’d be dinner for Emperor SkekSo as soon as we got to Thra. Jim Henson was kind of a weird guy, when you think about it.
5. The Dark Tower
In the best-case scenario for the Dark Tower, all your friends die because of you, you keep losing parts of your body, and the ultimate embodiment of chaos and evil in the multiverse will throw grenades at you. The first time we even lose a toenail, we’re just going to check out and let a demon from the Prime rip us apart to save time.
4. Land of Oz
Are you joking? The merry old land of Oz is so riddled with murder that you literally cannot even arrive there without smashing someone to death. The crazy thing about this place, though, is that no one permanently dies, so even if you get torn into tiny little pieces by lions, tigers, and/or bears, you’ll still be alive, feeling it. 0/10, Oz.
3. Osten Ard
Osten Ard is like Middle-Earth if Tolkien had any interest in women whatsoever and world-building that didn’t involve imagery that Nazis could easily appropriate. Just like Middle-Earth, it’s also a place where, if you’re not a secret prince or Elf-King or something, you will be cannon fodder for endless wars between the landed gentry. We’re goners, for sure.
2. Westeros
This should not be a surprise. Once you get past Jason Momoa and the copious nudity, there is nothing in Westeros but constant murder. Seriously, this place is murder central. It’s like no one in this world has ever had a hobby, but all they know how to do is stab and sexually assault one another. It really sucks that it’s probably the most realistic world on this list.
1. Narnia
Didn’t see that coming, did you? Narnia seems like a beautiful and magical place, but we have not lived a life in the imitation of Christ and all his works, so we’re pretty positive that Aslan would not give a fuck if we lived or died. Maybe we’d get to eat some weird taffy from the 18th century first, but we would be strangled by Mr. Tumnus before we made it 10 feet into the woods.