GM's Island

There's a place within the game where GM characters hang out, that players can't or at least aren't supposed to be able to get to. The current one is in the northwest, in the vicinity of Teldrassil, and is apparently positioned in the midst of unmapped territory so that you can't get there without a terms-of-service-violating exploit. But before that one went in, there was a GM's island way in the south of Kalimdor, on an island south of the Tanaris desert zone. A couple years back, before Burning Crusade, it got freshened up for use as part of the long quest chain involved in getting the stuff to open the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj. Some of you no doubt saw it then, but I didn't.

This evening I was puttering around with Spiderheart, my night elf death knight, helping a friend leveling up her paladin. Suddenly she commented that I might very well be able to get to the old GM Island. I thought it over and decided she was probably right. Death knights get a spell called Path of Frost that lets them walk and ride across water at regular speed, and like all death knights, Spider's got a nice fast mount as default equipment. So I turned her mount's head south. She rode out of the safe shallows into the deep-sea area where fatigue starts accumulating. But she wasn't more than halfway to the threshold for drowning damage when she crossed into the shallows around what proved to be the northern half of a pair of islands:

The island is low and sandy, with flanking high ridges. In the interior are some buildings of gnomish design:

The islands aren't quite empty, though. There are pirates:

Between the islands there's a derrick of goblin design:

The south island has some goblin-style buildings:

And here's the view heading north, with the Tanaris mainland off in the distance: