One of things I enjoyed about Piers Anthony's Xanth (as a teenager) was it being a punny geographical version of florida and its features. Even had me looking up maps of florida to pinpoint where they were in the story a couple times. It also had a time-period element where people from random time periods (from our world) might enter into the same Xanth lifetime/lifespan. That weaving of real world geography and time-periods together within the punny world of Xanth was creatively interesting for me.