It's maybe a little surprising nobody's done an RPG supplement on this setting; pretty well everything else seems to have been done, after all!

The rivers don't look too bad to me (remembering too I'm looking at the very sketchy, small, line illustrations in the actual novels as a nonexistent comparison with your work of art here!). You could maybe add a relatively bright Outer Glow Effect to make them stand out a little more, but that will affect the points they meet the seas too, if they're the usual lines on top of the land and sea Sheets in the Sheets stack. You could make the river lines brighter instead, and perhaps add a green Outer Glow to the lines, different to the colour of the land surface, again to help them "shine" a little more.

Well this is a blast from the past! My copy's a 1976 vintage UK paperback edition, though I'd read it the previous year when a guy at my wargames and D&D group loaned me his copy. Hence I went out and bought my own later! I think the first US edition was earlier though (Wikipedia gives 1973).

It looks as if you've used the map from the later 1983 second volume, "The Unforsaken Hiero" though, as that has a bit more information than the Hiero's Journey one (Otwah League is Otwah Estates in Journey too, for instance - though the Journey Glossary calls it the Otwah League instead - and there's only one Blue Desert marked, not the two you have, as shown in Unforsaken). D'alwah was also only an area by the coast in Journey, but in Unforsaken, it's both a settlement "Capitol of D'alwah", and an area. Kalina seems to be marked as just another area by the coast in both books, and both also have another near-coastal area above = northeast of D'alwah, Chespek. The ocean offshore might be labelled as Lantik Sea (weirdly, both maps show it as Lantik Ocean, but both Glossaries call it Lantik Sea!) too.

Great to know you're going to be off adventuring here soon. I know Journey was one of the favourite books for discussion repeatedly with some members of my college D&D Soc back in the early '80s, and I still have a great fondness for it, though it's many years since I last read either volume.

@OverCriticalHit - Never thought of this. Yes that would work better. Like many things with CC3+, there are usually multiple ways to do tasks, and if you find one that works for you, you tend to stick with it, even if it's not the most efficient option!

"Spectacular failure" is simply another rung on the learning curve ladder. I have many such rungs...

One minor point. If this is intended for use with D&D, it's actually White Dragons that are associated with frost, cold and ice. Blue Dragons are arid waste and desert dwellers. But that is only D&D.

Contests here seem to me as much an opportunity to experiment within parameters we might not ordinarily set ourselves otherwise, as anything else. And learning's all part of that. The snow caves look interesting; impressed by their fractal extent and complexity! Not sure they quite connect with the room maze, but appreciate that might be deliberate, given the red number "1" by the double doors.

I like the off-axis room-maze too, but maybe the numbers might be set upright? That could emphasize the off-kilter nature more, though they're perfectly legible as-is.

Jim, there are currently 138 volcanoes claimed as known beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone. There are strongly suspected areas of volcanic activity beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet as well, but this region has been much less studied overall. The figure of 138 volcanoes is from Wikipedia's Geography of Antarctica page, an order of magnitude that other sources confirm at least. There are also numerous surface volcanoes on and around Antarctica, aside from places such as the famous Mount Erebus.

The map(s) shown here are from the BEDMAP 2 survey project conducted by the British Antarctic Survey in recent years (you can access a much enlarged version of of the first map shown by WeathermanSweden on the linked page). It's also worth reviewing at least the first map (Fig 1) in a paper available for free PDF download via ResearchGate The glacial geomorphology of the Antarctic ice-sheet bed, because this shows both the current coastline (black outline) and the rebounded one Loopysue was talking about (white outline). The latter confirms Antarctica sans ice would indeed be a substantial "new" solid landmass to explore, along with some significant islands of many sizes across much of what's now called West Antarctica.

I keep an eye on a few other places online than this Forum from time to time, and today came across this recent posting on Dyson Logos' blog. It concerns a very long, thin, detailed dungeon map, and you can download a free copy of it from the blog page in its coloured version, as well as a zip file in black-and-white with and without a grid. I've not come across anything quite like this previously.

What occurred to me was that this might be an interesting idea to try using the strip-map technique, highlighted back in May 2009's Cartographer's Annual issue. The nature of the map on Dyson's website would make it difficult to draw something similar using CC3+ as-is, as just being so long, but a chopped-up version like the classic strip map could work quite well.

Long walk for the player characters if the entrance and exit are at the same end, and the big treasure room's at the other, of course!

@Autumn Getty - That's midday = noon on Monday by Greenwich Mean Time = UTC. If you're not in the GMT = UTC time zone, you'll need to convert, of course.

Reading contour maps like this is something of a specialist skill. It often benefits from field experience of walking over the terrain using a suitable map, or looking at an area and picking out features from the map as comparisons. Sometimes, it's very obvious what's too steep because of how close the contour lines are together - closer = steeper, basically.

Some folks are able to look at a contour map and visualise the terrain, and this is something you can teach yourself with practice, though not everyone finds it either possible or very easy to do.

You might find plotting out scale drawings, cross-sections at a right-angle to the contour lines, gives you a better idea of what the topography will really be like.

You might also examine real-world contour maps at an appropriate kind of scale to what you're planning, and look at where, and how, water flows over the landscape. Water always flows downhill, and goes for the easiest route, which often means where there's a steeper gradient.

However, you'd probably find more useful advice by searching online for "interpreting topographic maps", as there are a lot of suitable sites and videos regarding this topic. Good luck!