To answer some of the questions here, yes these were genuinely used as playing cards back in the day, but they also had an educational aspect, described sometimes as a sort-of early pocket atlas. The full sets included the usual 52 cards, an explanatory extra card, and a title card with a map of England and Wales divided into counties. The cards were among the first maps to show roads. As the sample here shows, they also gave the county dimensions, latitude (they predate the adoption of the Greenwich meridian for longitude in the mid-19th century in Britain) and selected towns' distances from London. It's thought only one complete set of these cards still survives, although there are a few incomplete ones, and more surviving individual cards.

By chance, I came upon an item in the press this week about a playing-card map of the county of Northumberland in England from about 1676, by Robert Morden (well-known British mapmaker of the period), which had been sold at auction. This is an image of the card's face:

This kind of black-and-white period style is one already readily available in CC3+. However, the concept of playing-card county maps like this (apparently, the complete deck included all the counties of England and Wales, and was updated several times over the following century) was new to me, and something that seemed an interesting concept to introduce to fantasy RPG mapping, perhaps.

A suitable template could be created quite easily in CC3+ for a full card deck, and a background fill texture applied before adding the maps and details. The nature of the maps means they wouldn't all need to fit together ultimately, although it would be practical to devise a large, full-country map first, and then cut it into segments to fit to the cards.

The auctioneers' webpage where I found the original image is here, as it also shows the card's plain(-ish!) back. The local press for Northeast England has further details, as the information on this webpage is pretty sparse. I'm never sure if those outside the UK will be able to access the press sites though, so haven't given any links here.

There's a good reason for that. It is!

Free League issued a fresh Kickstarter update for their forthcoming "Mythic Carpathia" setting for the Vaesen RPG earlier today. In that are a couple of images of maps that will be coming in that supplement. Those images are linked to higher-res versions, there are folks here I'm sure who would like to see them. The regional map is truly wonderful to my eyes! The KS link to find the two new maps is here.

Slightly surprised to find the comments earlier suggesting Greyhawk was the first world setting in/around 1979, given that Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting was first published in 1977, along with City State of the Invincible Overlord. I mention these, because they were parts of the first world setting I bought for D&D as soon as they were available in the UK, in 1977-78, and there was nothing else like them for D&D at that time. They really were astonishing products, and expanded my thinking about large-scale settings considerably, and how they could be created and mapped, because of course they had lots of large paper maps! Everything published subsequently that I've seen, while having pros and cons, I've always been mentally comparing their impact on me with what "Wilderlands" had been. Probably unfair, but accurate!