Well, I was going to make a twist of Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") phrased more like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"):
A secret grand design is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The truth is...just a clumsy attempt to recreate from a much bigger parent map that was itself derived from a much, much bigger parent map.
This is the parent map I took it from (Gongodûr is in the lower right):
And this is the section parent map that this whole 1,000 x 1,000 mile section comes from:
When I downloaded the FCW for the parent map, it said there were green mountains there, which I took to mean vegetation-covered hills and small mountains.
So no real grand design, just an over-exuberance in trying to add more detail from the parent map and slip in some mapping/adventure hooks.
It can be difficult sometimes to tell what a much larger area map is really showing when you start to drill down to try and provide more detail. I often look at things like symbol titles and fill/drawing tool names where there aren't more detailed map notes (and I discovered at least one earlier Atlas map where the map notes were hidden off to one side of the map - by quite some distance, and on a hidden layer; I assume this was before things were standardised to have the text-file map notes attached separately, and as a PDF in many cases).
In the end, it's best to design what seems interesting to you that doesn't contradict whatever was shown on the larger regional map, which pretty much seems to be what you have done!
Comments
Well, I was going to make a twist of Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") phrased more like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"):
A secret grand design is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The truth is...just a clumsy attempt to recreate from a much bigger parent map that was itself derived from a much, much bigger parent map.
This is the parent map I took it from (Gongodûr is in the lower right):
And this is the section parent map that this whole 1,000 x 1,000 mile section comes from:
When I downloaded the FCW for the parent map, it said there were green mountains there, which I took to mean vegetation-covered hills and small mountains.
So no real grand design, just an over-exuberance in trying to add more detail from the parent map and slip in some mapping/adventure hooks.
It can be difficult sometimes to tell what a much larger area map is really showing when you start to drill down to try and provide more detail. I often look at things like symbol titles and fill/drawing tool names where there aren't more detailed map notes (and I discovered at least one earlier Atlas map where the map notes were hidden off to one side of the map - by quite some distance, and on a hidden layer; I assume this was before things were standardised to have the text-file map notes attached separately, and as a PDF in many cases).
In the end, it's best to design what seems interesting to you that doesn't contradict whatever was shown on the larger regional map, which pretty much seems to be what you have done!