Patchwork Map



"I've always said, the best thing about dwelling in the desert caves is the easy access to the lush rainforest."

- Mike Nelson, Riff Trax of Battlefield Earth

In the real world, the landscape is determined by a complex combination of climate and geography. Deserts, for instance, are usually created because a mountain or valley blocks rain clouds from being blown over it (known as a "rain shadow"). Tundra has to be at the right elevation and temperature to remain frozen. Rivers have to source their water from somewhere (usually from the same moutains which stopped those rain clouds from reaching the desert). Swamps are generally located in low-lying areas where the water collects rather than draining out.

Not so in the world of fictional geography, where you can have a vast jungle next to a desert with nothing separating them and no reason why the two should have different geological features aside from an invisible line. You'll also have swamps on mountain tops and caves full of ice slightly below a sunny surface.

Particularly notable in video games, which try to pack in a variety of environments in a relatively small space, especially because of the ease of doing it, especially in early games, a quick Palette Swap will turn green grass into yellow sand, white snow, blue water, and red lava without a hitch. Also tends to happen to maps of Magical Lands. Which somewhat makes sense - everything's possible with enough magic, let alone divine intervention. May be excused by Gameplay and Story Segregation; a game with 12 levels that all are grasslands would be boring. In addition, may be Hand Waved by saying that the game is not to scale with the world it's depicting; that invisible line between the jungle and the desert in the game may be described as several miles of mixed terrain in the tie-in novel.

Something of an extreme opposite form of the Single Biome Planet. See also Hailfire Peaks. Also note that the sea is typically off to one side.

Anime and Manga

 * The Digital Worlds of the Digimon franchise are almost always portrayed as this (the big exception being that of Digimon Tamers, which had a very different structure).
 * Fridge Brilliance when you think about how this is exactly what should be expected in a digital universe.
 * Seeing as the Digital World is after all digital, it may very well have gotten its strange geography from video games.
 * On Grand Line, there're 4 different kinds of islands - Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter Islands. Obviously, that (partly) explains the ridiculously unpredictable weather changes. It also causes that Drum/Sakura Kingdom and Alabasta Kingdom to be neighbour countries.
 * Played straight with
 * At the end of every episode of A Piece of Phantasmagoria we see the titular planet, which is portrayed this way. Observe. Justified on that the place is intended to be a Dream Land.

Comic Books
""Its weird spin and egg-yolk sun give it those turn-on-a-dime climate changes, one right on top of the other.""
 * Madcap, nicknamed "the crazy moon", from the Firefly spin-off comic Float Out. Wash uses the wet-to-cold-to-hot environmental changes to take out a pursuing ship.


 * Justified with Battleworld, from the Marvel Comics crossover The Secret Wars. It was literally cobbled together by landmasses from different planets, including one from Earth.
 * The Green Lantern storyline Mosaic featured something similar when a renegade Guardian of the Universe stole parts of a bunch of different planets and pasted them to Oa. (They eventually all got sent home.)
 * Turned Up to Eleven by the creators of Grim Jack, in which the city of Cynosure consists of a more-or-less stable central region surrounded by areas -- "dimensions"—that phase in and out of contact with the central dimension at irregular intervals, so that the composition, size and shape of the city is always changing. A map of the city was published in one issue, with instructions to cut it up along the "dimensional" boundaries shown, then toss the pieces into the air: at some point in their "flight", the dimensions would be in exact correspondence to what the city looked like at one instant in its history (which point and instant was not specified).

Fan Works

 * A minor example in With Strings Attached is the Poison Swamp in Goblin Valley; John immediately pegs it as artificial, noting that the land should have been much too dry for a swamp.

Film

 * 10,000 B.C. changed from (for example) freezing mountains to humid swamps with little transition.
 * The film Return to Oz features the Deadly Desert being right smack-dab next to a thick lush forest. This is a carry-over from the original Oz books by L. Frank Baum, which offers up perhaps both the original and definitive example of this trope: The land of Oz is a more-or-less perfect rectangle, filled cheek-and-jowl with every known and unknown variety of bizarre landscape and surrounded on all sides by wide expanses of desert. Baum should also be considered a patron saint of Continuity Drift, but in one of the books he established that a passing Wizard (Or Rather Fairy Queen) Did It.
 * Wicked gives Oz a far, far more realistic landscape, incredibly using only existing continuity to make it into an equivalent of 1930s Earth, right down to the general geographic locations of the regions/continents, which became counterparts. Gillikin is Europe, Munchkinland is (roughly) Asia, Quadling Country is Africa and the Vinkus is North America (specifically, the Native Americans of the Great Plains).
 * Alternately, one could view the Oz in Wicked as a counterpart to the United States, with urban, forest-filled Gillikin as the Northeast; agricultural Munchkinland as the Midwest; swampy Quadling Country as the South (more specifically, the Mississippi Delta and Florida Everglades regions); and the barren Vinkus as the Mountain West. Even Oz residents' opinions of certain regions mirror American regional stereotypes. Quadlings are seen as filthy and uneducated. Gillikin is where the best universities are and the Gillkinese come off as snobbish. The Vinkus is seen as wild and untamed, and something of a wasteland... etc.
 * Appears in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The planet in question had recently been created with unstable technology, which made for interesting climate patterns.
 * In the novelizations, the scientists behind Genesis had apparently been competing to see just how improbable they could make the geography by hand-designing things Just So. Although that code was supposed to have been removed...
 * In the comedy Caveman, one character gets swept by a river that is situated in an arid prehistoric landscape and ends up in a "Nearby Ice Age".
 * The titular Zootopia is created just this way, with a tundra-like area sandwiched between a jungle-like and a desertic one. It's justified as it was intentionally planned that way, to make up the most of its space and resources.

Literature
""Have you actually looked at this thing properly? I mean, come on! The rivers just appear out of nowhere! You can't have a desert smack bang right next to a forest! Who drew this stupid thing?""
 * In the SF novel Midnight at the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker, the surface of the Well World is divided into regular hexagons, each featuring its own environment, often startlingly different from its neighbors in climate, biome, atmosphere, gravity, or even achievable tech level, with no apparent separating mechanism other than force walls that just about anyone can shove through without noticing. Justified Trope as the construction of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
 * Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle has rivers having no source and going nowhere, as well as rivers running in weird directions in relation to the mountains. This recap of The Movie sums it up nicely:


 * Referenced in The Discworld Mapp, when Stephen Briggs quotes Pratchett as describing traditional fantasy novel mapmaking as "putting the wiggly river through the pointy mountains," before adding that when he showed Pratchett the first draft (which was indeed drawn that way), he got the response "Do you know what a rain shadow is?" and a brief lecture on climatology.
 * J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth has, among other things, a gigantic forest where there should be a desert, and at least one river whose path makes no sense topographically. Granted, the world was created by the Ainur and shaped by a series of global catastrophes, but there's nothing there to imply that the normal rules of climate shouldn't be taking place, especially in the Third and Fourth Ages when the world has become a round planet and the influence of the Ainur and other magical beings has dramatically decreased. At the same time, though, it is perhaps Justified Trope in areas like Lothlórien, Mordor, and Valinor that are controlled by powerful magical beings.
 * The Atlas of Middle-earth subjects it to a climatic analysis and takes into account regions such as Lorien and Mordor as being "subject to the influence of Secondary World powers".
 * If the west side of the Misty Mountains is moist enough (as the name implies) and the mountains aren't too tall, there should be plenty of rainfall left to support a forest in the east. Compare the situation with the Scandinavian Mountains, the mountain range implied to be what the Misty Mountains are called in the present day. Also, not every area with trees is marked on the map, only significant old-growth forests. The east side of the Misty Mountains was once one continuous forest, but almost all of it was cut down by human settlers. During the time of the story Mirkwood is undergoing the same process.
 * The route of Anduin is also a lot more explainable if you think about what Europe might have been like in the mythical past when, among other things, the sea levels were lower, such that the shallow Baltic Sea didn't exist.
 * In the Everworld novels, the world was created by the mythological gods of our world, with each pantheon having its own territory. So African gods would create an area of Everworld that resembles sub-Saharan Africa, and Norse gods one that resembles Scandanavia, and if the cold, forested mountains instantly give way to hot, arid grassland, who cares? This is one of many bizarre, illogical characteristics of the universe that the characters Lampshade Hanging by saying, "Welcome to Everworld."
 * In Arthur C. Clarke's A Time Odyssey trilogy, planets in pocket universe have mismatch of terrains brought from different times in the history as a museum.
 * In The Neverending Story, a desert reaches right up to a forest. It is revealed that a magic talking lion causes everywhere near him to be a desert, but it returns to normal when he's not nearby.
 * At another point, it's explicitly mentioned that it's indeed possible in Phantasia that an icy area borders a hot desert. It's Phantasia, after all. In fact, drawing a map would be impossible even if the country wasn't infinite - it's written that the borders between lands aren't always even determinable.
 * In Clive Barker's Weaveworld, the odd bits and pieces of terrain incorporated into the Fugue were stuck together in a frantic rush, creating literal patchwork geography.
 * In Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince trilogy, a major river has its source on one side of a group of mountains, flows up through them, and empties out in a bay on the other side. Yay, gravity!
 * This can happen in real life, if the river is older than the mountains it flows through; it cuts through them as they rise, creating a water gap. This can also happen in stream capture, where two streams erode towards their sources and one captures the other. Which isn't to say that that's what Rawn was thinking of when she drew this map...
 * Occurs in Suzanne Collin's Underland Chronicles: In the Underland there are plains, jungles, maze-like tunnels, small seas, arable land and desolate areas all with about one or two hundred miles of each other, and no transitions.
 * Explained in Wheel of Time by the Breaking of the World, as insane (and insanely powerful) male Aes Sedai altered the landscape as they saw fit. However, given how long ago that was, this can't quite explain why there is still a massive lake in the mountains above Baerlon (surrounded by much higher peaks, nonetheless) which feeds several large rivers and has nothing draining into it.
 * Lampshaded by David Eddings in The Rivan Codex, where he states that because he's not a geographer or climatologist, the map of his world is probably geologically impossible. At least it's not as blatant as some of the examples here.
 * Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams takes place in a world where technology is advanced enough that every rich kid can design his own little world. Most of them try for patchwork maps. The main character is a scholar studying what happens on the borders between the patches, when the physical realities of these constructed worlds start to act. These borders are the titular implied spaces.
 * The Inferno in the Divine Comedy is made of this trope. A burning plain (to punish sodomites and usurers) is right next to a forest (to punish suicides). The center of hell is apparently a frozen lake. Sort of justified, since it is hell, after all.

Machinima

 * Parodied in Red vs. Blue: "The Burning Plains are next to the Freezing Plains? I bet there's some pretty wet plains in between." And it turns out there are some pretty wet plains in between, since after going through the burning plains, but before the freezing plains, they cross a swamp. OK, so it's not exactly a plain, but still, Caboose got something right!

Tabletop Games

 * The Known World/Mystara setting for Dungeons & Dragons placed its Fantasy Arabs directly on the southern border of its Fantasy Vikings. (A Wizard Did It.)
 * Settlers of Catan is played on a map made of hexagonal tiles, each tile depicting exactly one biome (mountains, hills, forests, pastures, grainfields, and desert); the map is laid out randomly at the beginning of each game. Thus, it more or less runs on this trope.
 * Even better, if you look at the odds, the desert is most likely to appear in a coastal region. It's a 12/19 chance (63%) that the desert appears right next to the sea. Oh, and this is all on a single island.
 * You just gotta love those rivers in the Dungeons & Dragons setting Greyhawk. They start at the northern shore, and wind their way south to the bay.
 * D&D setting Eberron has the continent of Xendrik, which works like this explicitly, with such occurrences as sweltering deserts abutting arctic tundra. A Wizard Did It, in that it's all caused by a magical cataclysm in the continent's past.
 * Happens in Khorvaire too. Consider Karnnath and The Mror Holds, who have weather like northern Europe or Canada, with lots of snow. Slightly East of them are Lazhaar Principalities, with a Caribbean-like weather and palm trees. Must be a really warm ocean. Regalport (the main Pirate town in a tropical weather) is further north than Frostmantle and Rekkenmark, both of whom are described as cold. So warm ocean indeed. Similarly, Breland is supposed to be a tropical, rainy country, but most of the neighboring lands are depicted as temperate. Khorvaire also has rivers that start nowhere and occasionally go nowhere, and lakes alone in the middle of nowhere.
 * Planescape has the ultimate example in Limbo, the Plane of pure Chaos, where pieces of the plane randomly and seamlessly shift between being completely dominated by one element or another.
 * Legend of the Five Rings is horrible about this trope. Rivers go any which way (including uphill), cities and whole geographic features are outright misplaced onto the wrong ends of the Empire because the mapmakers weren't paying attention, and to top it all off, it's an execution-worthy offense to question the actual in-game mapmakers that could be enforced if the gamemaster feels like being strict over it. It's not really justified by "the spirits" either, because unless specifically asked they don't do weird stuff like that (they're lazy).
 * The Magic of Rokugan supplement, when discussing what makes an Imperial road instead of a plain old road, mentions many roads that are on no maps are actually forgotten Imperial roads to the point and there's too many such roads for anyone to sort out which aren't Imperial roads. This leads to an implication the maps are horrifically wrong and nobody is allowed to question them.
 * Fully justified in the Ravenloft setting for Dungeons & Dragons. The Land of Mists is composed of artificial landmasses created and sustained by mysterious Dark Powers. Each landmass is separate from the others and bordered by the Mists, in which they drift. The Core (the largest) has a truly patchwork appearance, because each subregion is a "domain" specifically formed to imprison an individual darklord, and its geography and climate has far more to do with that darklord's culture and personal issues than reality. For example, the domain of Lamordia has a far colder and more wintry climate than its neighbors, and the tropical island of Markovia is less than two hundred miles off the coast. The shape of rivers is even more bizarre, as some rivers literally flow into or out of nowhere, apparently emanating from the Mists themselves. There is also a massive hole (the Shadow Rift) cut straight out of the middle of the Core where other domains used to be (they got relocated during a plane-wide cataclysm).
 * In one fan-created variant of Magic: The Gathering, you shuffle basic lands into a "board", start out with one creature, and the lands on boards where your creatures are can be tapped for mana. This results in Urza's Saga plains (in Serra's cloud world) being next to...anything. And islands being surrounded by land. It gets weirder if you add nonbasic lands.
 * Creation in Exalted goes with having four major climate forms (desert and volcano, ocean, tundra and glaciers, plains and forests and jungles) and simply confining them to each of the cardinal directions (with the central island continent being largely mountainous). Justified by the fact that things like climate and geography are controlled entirely by gods, as well as by the fact that Creation was designed by beings with some pretty odd ideas about how a world should work.

Toys

 * Bionicle's islands of Mata Nui and Voya Nui suffer from this, as each has volcanic, icy, desert, and forest/jungle regions pushing up against each other. On Voya Nui, a couple characters actually note that the forested "green belt" doesn't make sense and they hazard a guess as to why it thrives (there's a Mask of Life nearby; they think it's leeching energy and promoting growth), but we're never given an official explanation for it.
 * Mata Nui is ultimately justified when it's revealed that That's No Island.
 * This is also Lampshaded by Nuju in one of the novelizations, when he is at a loss to explain the ice mountain.

Video Games

 * In World of Warcraft, this is justified and enforced. It is justified in that the world was forged by god-like creators: an entire continent was blasted to smithereens to form three smaller ones, and magic plagues/life-giving trees/Eldritch Abominations all contribute to weird design. That and the fact that it does need to be patchworked for game design.
 * Extremely evident in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The world is cleanly divided into four totally different environments. A Giant Did It. Four Giants, to be exact.
 * Spirit Tracks does much the same, but partly averts it with the snow realm by having it gradually change from "snow everywhere" to "it looks sort of cold" as you get close to the border.
 * Whoever designs the map for the Zelda games clearly has no idea how rivers work. They do normally start high and end low, which is better than a lot of examples on this page, but they do all kinds of crazy stuff on the way. The worst offender is probably Twilight Princess, where two rivers cross.
 * Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess have the lush-lake-near-a-desert thing just as bad, if not worse.
 * This in OOT may be somewhat justified in that Zora River (whose water is at least vaguely implied to be somewhat magical in some way, or at least magically generated) empties into Lake Hylia, which is right next to Gerudo Desert. However, the two are separated by what look to be mountains. This would be justified if Lake Hylia would be desert if not for the water emptying into it.
 * Four Swords Adventures. The image and caption at the top of the page highlights the fact that a desert and snowy region are right next door. This is justified in that the snowy region has been in an endless winter due to . The ending even shows what it looks like after thawing out.
 * Links Awakening also has some crazy map parts. Most of the island is single-biome woods and mountains, but some levels feature volcanic activity that's nowhere else on the map. Also a mini desert next to a swamp and the friggin ocean.
 * Ragnarok Online suffers quite a bit from this; Ragnarok Wisdom comments on it.
 * Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas somehow manages to get around this one by placing the desert and the forest in different land masses.
 * Not surprising, since it's based on California (notice the redwoods?) and Arizona, which really do look like that.
 * Fire Emblem (well the 3 GBA games at least) does this slightly differently, where forest and other terrain types are spread out in a ridiculously random way.
 * Final Fantasy XII has the Phon Coast - a beach map with a very obvious ocean - which is somehow at the top of a mountain.
 * Jungle next to tundra.
 * Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was an even greater offender; the world is divided into four climate zones of identical size, one representing each of the four classical elements, by a pair of planet-spanning mountain ranges that run directly along the equator and the prime meridian.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics Advance even lets you make up your own map by placing different regions on the map. The sequel on the other hand does a surprisingly good job at averting it.
 * The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind contains wasteland area terribly close to plains and forests, usually separated a single line of mountains. The north-eastern most part of the map contains the only gradual transition from one to the other. Blamed on a combination of the eruption of the volcano Red Mountain that dominated the island-region of Vvardenfell and . There's also the fact that the game world is hugely compressed, meaning that there could be a transition—it's just too small to spot.
 * Averted in the next installment, Oblivion, where it was mostly just meadows and forests, with snowy mountains to the north.
 * Note, though, that it still counts in-game: Cyrodiil is on the equator, and is surrounded on most sides by steaming jungles and swamps. It was in fact supposed to be a tropical rainforest for the first three games, but then a god stepped in and turned it into Ye Olde Fantasy Europe.
 * It's still a rainforest. The term "rainforest" is defined by precipitation and foliage, not temperature. It rains practically every other day in Oblivion.
 * A sort-of example in Skyrim. The terrain ranges from wet conifer forests in the south, to rocky plains further north that look like something out of the movie version of Rohan. As you continue north, the terrain gets swampy, then turns into glaciers. It's also crisscrossed with high, snowy mountain ranges. The "sort-of" is that Bethesda did a much better job with the terrain transitions in Skyrim than they did in Morrowind.
 * Yoshi's Island has a grand total of six biomes (though you only see five in the first game, and we're not counting the final world of the first game which is not apparently on Yoshi's Island), none of which seem to take rain shadows or elevation into account. Some levels in the "desert" world even have highly visible trees in the background!
 * Metroid Prime had swamps, snow, and volcanoes all within a few minutes of each other, but the speed of the elevators probably means they were fairly far apart.
 * The recent impact of the Phazon meteorite (aka the Leviathan), coupled with Phazon radiation, probably have a role in all of this.
 * Justified in Metroid Fusion, as the game takes place on a biological research vessel, and the various environments have been artificially created to support creatures that need a watery area or a fiery area.
 * Just Cause 2 has a greatly varied environment, consisting of arid deserts, snowcapped mountains, lush jungles, open ocean, and the occasional bit of urban sprawl...all contained within a tropical island cluster slightly smaller than Oahu.
 * Video game Civilization IV has a map option called "fantasy world" where the terrain types are strewn about randomly. Any given tile is as likely to contain tundra as forest, desert, etc.
 * Averted somewhat by Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, partly because it has less diverse terrain than its sister Civilization games, and so could put more work into the distinctions it did make. Rain shadows do exist, and it's even possible to create them on purpose by raising terrain. However, while one would expect the fertile Monsoon Jungle to be rainy, it can actually be placed in arbitrarily dry place by the map generator; same with the Great Dunes, which can end up wetter than the Jungle.
 * In Golden Sun and its sequel, the protagonists travel around a world that greatly resembles our own, complete with appropriate cultures and climates. The biggest notable difference is that the whole world is flat.
 * Also Averted Trope by Dwarf Fortress, which pays attention to things like rain shadows and biomes when generating worlds. Generating a new world can take about a quarter of an hour, depending on the size of the world and the number of potential worlds rejected for not having the right terrain distribution. On the other hand, the world generation is very powerful and flexible and you can set parameters that create worlds with glacier, sand desert, swamp, and mountain range all rubbing shoulders. Regions in half the map bursts into flames as soon as the game starts and the other half freezes every living thing dead within a minute are statistically uncommon (you really do have to make the effort) but not otherwise unusual. However, bugs in some versions can cause unusually powerful fluctuations in water temperatures.
 * "Fluctuations" means creatures spontaneously melting on contact with water, if you weren't aware.
 * Also, the average temperature it set for each section, often leading to perfectly square borders were there is and is not snow, rain, etc.
 * Averted in Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom.
 * Hostile Waters takes place entirely on an island chicane (artificial archipelago) located somewhere around New Zealand. The environment varies from hot to frozen over. Justified by the chicane undergoing rapid, hostile (un)terraformation. Especially visible in the last mission.
 * Unavoidable in NationStates. You can make your nation's map as realistic as you like, but you can't really do anything about what the nations next to you do.
 * Justified as a major plot point of Suikoden Tierkreis, starting from the opening scenes where a forest mysteriously appears near your village. Sometime later, a massive savanna pops into existence in the middle of a snow-covered mountain range.
 * An extreme example in the graphic chat/MMO, Furcadia, users can make their own maps (called dreams) that other users can explore, chat, and RP on. Quite a few users have made dreams based on the Warriors series by Erin Hunter. In the books, the four clans of wild cats live in slightly different territories, such as one clan lives in moorland while another lives in a forest. In these fan-made dreams, however, the differences in the territories tend to be very drastic. It is not at all uncommon to find a Warriors dream with a barren desert, murky swamp, snowy tundra, and lush forest all sitting right next to each other with little or no transition in between, made even more drastic by the fact that the area of the dream would probably wind up being only 15 square miles or so in real life.
 * Justified in Endless Frontier . Of course, Nature is soon to start asserting itself, so...
 * Morning Land in Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. It has the wooded Forest Village, next to the beach/oceanic like Pirate Island, which in turn is right next to the volcanous Dino Mountain, which is next to Blizzard Castle (guess). And in the middle, with all the others surrounding it, is Sand Ruin! Circus Park and Giant Palace don't count, seeing as the former isn't in any particular biome, and the latter is in the sky.
 * Simon the Sorcerer. You have a temperate forest right next to a swamp right next to some icy mountains, and so on, and so on, in it's defense, it IS a magical world.
 * In RuneScape the border between desert and grassy fields is a fence, both from the northern and western sides. The western border eventually turns into a river and a sea. The eastern border is a river and a sea all along, and across the river from the northern part of the desert, both to the east and the west, lie separate swamps. Another swamp lies in the corner of the desert, separated from it by a plateau from two sides and bordering with the sea from two other.
 * Isn't helped by that fact that a bright and sunny, almost Mediterranean fishing village (Catherby) is positioned right next to a snow-drenched arctic-esque craggy hill. Might be justified by the altitude, though - if the world wasn't compressed for player convenience (to the point of two longitudinal or latitudinal minutes being the minimum distance a player can travel, doing so in 0.6 seconds at walking pace), the White Wolf Mountain would possibly be quite high and capable of being cold. Ice Mountain is located at the same latitude.
 * Additionally, the very northern reaches of the world are so cold, the player takes all-stat damage. The Ghorrock fortress is located even further north. Squeeze past an ice block into the Wilderness, and without changing latitude, you'll reach a scorched land with surface lava features in seconds.
 * Pokémon provides a near-literal example of this trope. In HeartGold and SoulSilver, you can customize the Safari Zone, allowing you to put any terrain near any other, theoretically allowing fields next to deserts and lakes next to savannahs, etc.
 * Unova, from Pokémon Black/White. Route 4 is essentially a small desert, surrounded by forests, with the transitioning area being about as long as a building.
 * There are other examples throughout the series. For example, in Sinnoh (where the fourth generation takes place), a snowy city is fairly close to a tropical island, and in Hoenn (third generation) there is a rainy route near a desert route.
 * In both the anime and the FireRed/LeafGreen games, there are tropical archipelagos not too far south of the icy Seafoam Islands (or at least, they're implied to be icy, given that that's the only place in Kanto where a lot of Ice-type Pokémon, including Articuno, are found. In Pokémon games in general, the "icy cave/island" which forms the Ice-types' lair tends to come out of pretty much nowhere).
 * That said, we are dealing with Pokémon here - they can shape their environments. Particularly in the case of the legendaries which are responsible for everything from time and space to earth and sea to life itself. If Articuno wants a frozen cave, Articuno damn well gets a frozen cave. See also: the second movie where Fire/Lightning/Ice islands are all close together with very different climates thanks to their respective Pokémon overlords.
 * Dragon Quest VII has a similar zoo, although you don't customize it; you find the plans for each biome.
 * Somewhat deconstructed in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Since the two worlds merged together, the climates have gone insane. Deserts are freezing over and the north pole is melting.
 * The island in Backyard Football 2006.
 * Averted in Lord of the Rings Online here; but when someone else has already done the dirty work, it's a bit easier to pull off.
 * King's Quest V takes place in the land of Serenia, which is mostly forest, but it is bordered by a hot desert to the west and a cold mountain range to the east.
 * Sort of. The mountain is not on top of the forest; it's stated the screen's a few hours later. It's still implausible, but not quite bordered.
 * Done so blatantly in Banjo-Tooie that it almost counts as a lampshading. When Banjo rises to Cloudcuckooland, we see the Isle O' Hags laid out below, with all the disparate levels right next to each other - most significantly the blazing volcano and freezing mountain of Hailfire Peaks.
 * Averted in Diablo II, where there's a specific 'travel gap' between the different Acts - an (unseen and assumed) caravan takes you from the temperate Rogues camp to the desert of Lut Gholein, then an unseen boat takes you from the desert to the jungle of Kurast, then the end of that Act opens a magical portal directly to Hell. If you have the LoD expansion, a helpful angel teleports you directly from Hell to the fifth Act in the snowy mountains.
 * Lampshaded in Paper Mario. While two separate areas being next to each other and having different climates isn't rare, there's one part of the game where a forest borders a gulch, and the sky is lit according to which side of a gate you're on. Goombario's description mentions how it's amazing that the scenery can flip between the two so quickly.
 * Impossible Creatures is set on an island chain called Isla Variatas which manages to contain polar, forested and desert islands.
 * Brutal Legend has about half a mile and a deep chasm between icy mountains and sweltering jungle. Most of the other transitions are better, though.
 * Minecraft can get ridiculous with it's biome generation. In rapid succession, you can walk from a temperate forest, to a tundra, to a sandy desert, to a tropical rainforest (which for some reason, has livestock instead of the normal stuff). Without skipping a beat.
 * Not as obvious, though, as of the 1.8 update. Biomes are much, much bigger now, so it's not as stark. Still, you can see a desert that shares close boundaries with a very large, temperate forest and ocean.
 * Ys is a frequent offender. Ys V has Shifting Sand Land, Jungle Japes, The Lost Woods, Bubblegloop Swamp, and Green Hill Zone(across a Broken Bridge from the desert, no less) all in the same vicinity. In Ys VI, Quatera Island is mostly forested while the adjacent Canaan is mainly grassland, and the latter has barren rocky mountains a stone's throw away from the meadows. Ys II has a Slippy-Slidey Ice World and Lethal Lava Land directly connected to each other.
 * Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair, which has Direct Continuous Levels in parts, goes from Slippy-Slidey Ice World to Shifting Sand Land to Green Hill Zone to Palmtree Panic and back to Slippy-Slidey Ice World in the second half of the game. The Dragon's Trap is also somewhat guilty.
 * The lower areas of Paradise City in Burnout Paradise are tropical and resemble Florida, then there's the geologically implausible California-style mountains with a parody of the Hollywood sign, and temperate forests/vegetation.
 * Halo 3 not only has jungle with Misplaced Vegetation and savanna right next to each other, but Mt. Kilimanjaro is way too close to the Tsavo/Mombasa area. And let's not talk about the rings themselves.
 * An Untitled Story has it's entire world compressed into few hundred screens. As such, there's a snowfield that borders with a sunny town and a grassy (and moonlit) hill without any barriers, or a lava covered factory that borders directly with a water grotto, a grassy plain from above and a tree.
 * Notably averted in Mabinogi. Regions are laid out in a relatively realistic manner. eg. The region of Rano is divided into roughly equal parts; the rolling prairie land of Maiz Plains, the scrubland of Muyu Desert, and the lush, verdant Karu Forest, sitting side by side in that order. However, each region is seperated from its neighbor by a high, almost impassible mountain range that effectively shadows the desert from the moisture laden air to either side of it.
 * Inazuma Eleven GO has a desert area sandwiched between an icy tundra area to its east and a beach/water area to its west. Justified in that they were man-made (the nearby windy valley area even has gigantic fans to create the wind), complete with walls separating them.
 * Kirby's Epic Yarn does this literally. Patch Land is split into several distinct areas, each with its own unique ecosystem and no transitional regions whatsoever.
 * Justified in A Valley Without Wind, where a recent cataclysm has shattered reality and made continents out of "time shards" from different times and places at complete random, so it's entirely possible to have a region of deep Ice Age adjacent to some Lava Flats. Also mentioned are powerful and very hostile forces holding the world together this way; putting one foot across the border of a time shard is fatal (unless you're a Glyphbearer).
 * Very common in most games by Nifflas. The geography tends to change halfway through a screen, indicating a new area.

Webcomics

 * Seen here in The Noob.

Western Animation

 * The city of Ba Sing Se in Avatar: The Last Airbender has a large area of Ghibli Hills between its inner and outer walls, but it appears that just outside the wall is a barren dusty desert. Then again, there's a lake inside the area, so maybe they just have good irrigation, and the walls are higher than some of the clouds. (Not to mention a lot of Earthbenders to create channels, transport fertile soil, etc.)
 * Transformers Animated has a volcano on an island in the middle of Lake Erie.
 * You know how there's always snow on the ground in South Park? When they went to Nebraska the snow gave way to green fields, with the boundary being exactly at the Colorado-Nebraska state line. Or was the state line being placed exactly on the snow-grass boundary?
 * Similarly, there was a Bugs Bunny cartoon where the drab, unpleasant Northern U.S. was separated from the verdant, flowered South precisely at the Mason-Dixon Line.
 * The Flintstones did it in one episode. Rain up until a border.
 * Justified in the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Eye of the Beholder". On the planet Lactra VII the Enterprise crew finds deserts right next to forests, and Mr. Spock comments on how unnatural it is. It's eventually revealed that the alien Lactrans did it to make their planet a giant zoo.
 * Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1,001 Rabbit Tales has a lush jungle near or in the middle of an Arabian desert.

Real Life

 * Can be truth in fiction when the reason for desert/not desert is not obvious. For example there are parts of the world where there is no rain, but copious mist. This condenses on the trees and waters them. However, if all the trees are cut down, the saplings can't take advantage of this and nothing can grow. There are attempts to make artificial rain catchers (sails) to get the trees kick-started again. Such an area could have a forest in one place and a bare desert next to it.
 * Likewise rain forests may be self-sustaining but can be destroyed. For example, the rich soil is continuously used and replaced, thus once the trees are gone the soil is also gone in 2 or 3 years. Farming is abandoned, leaving bare ground that radiates far more heat than the forest ever did, preventing rain. I.e. forest and desert are the only two stable equilibria, and could theoretically be close to each other.
 * Another example occurs with the largely sheltered canyons of, for example, eastern Washington state, which allow you to have a large river running through bone-dry desert/xeric shrubland.
 * The Eastern U.S. has a relatively continuous climate that gradually changes from cold in the north to hot in the south, and from wet in the east to dry in the west. The West is mostly desert, everywhere, except for Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, which are strongly defined by the complex boundaries between forest and desert. You can stand almost anywhere in Silicon Valley and see brown hills on one side and green ones on the other. If you park off I-84 in Oregon you can walk from forest to desert, along a big river flowing sideways through a mountain range. It does happen.
 * New York's Central Park (warning: huge file) has a perfect transition with the cityscape. It's manmade though.
 * Israel. In a country smaller than New Jersey, there are snow-capped mountains, a desert, coral reefs, and the lowest point in the world.
 * This is partially due to the immigrating Jews who made some changes in the scenery, like drying up some swamps to avoid certain diseases (notably malaria in Hadera) and planted trees native to their homelands due to being homesick. A notable example of both was planting eucalyptus trees to drink up the swamp water (though few Jews actually did come from Australia), an attempt that was mostly a failure, as the trees drank water from the ground and not the swamps themselves. (They eventually resorted to using other types of trees.)
 * The Desert of Maine, 40 acres of, well, desert-like landscape surrounded by mixed forest with little brooks. TECHNICALLY it's not an actual desert as much as it is the product of over a century of utter agricultural mismanagement. And technically it's glacial silt, and not sand. It doesn't stop them from having a huge Fiberglas camel on site for photo opportunities.
 * In Australia, parts of South-East Queensland have small pockets of sub-tropical rainforest in water catching hollows and along creek beds in what would be relatively dry eucalypt forests.
 * On a larger scale the Great Dividing Range separates the relatively well watered eastern seaboard from the dry plains that gradually transition into the deserts of the interior. The transition as you go over the range can be fairly abrupt, especially as you go further north.
 * Using the Indus river as a dividing line, Pakistan has lush farmland to the eastern banks (the Punjab), desolate wasteland on the western banks (Balochistan), the sea shore and Mega City of Karachi in the south, and snowcapped mountains in the north (Khyber-Paktunkwha).
 * One of the reasons so many production companies love New Zealand so much is it's large diversity in a relatively small area. You have cities, mountains, beaches, forests, and pretty much everything except desert wedged into a couple of land masses roughly the size of Colorado. Watch a show like Power Rangers (post Ninja Storm) to see just how diverse New Zealand is.