I could scarcely let the name pass without comment!

Wasn't familiar with this, but checking around online, I gather Savage Seas was originally a series of linked adventures published in Dragon magazine in 2006-2007 for D&D. It's taken a lot of digging around, but I think the blurry map of the Sea Wyvern you mentioned, and which seems to be that shown online in places, was originally published as a loose poster-sized map in Dungeon #141, so was presumably much clearer that way. Sadly, I don't have a copy of the magazine to confirm, however!

It looks as if there were other ship plans published for some of the other vessels encountered during this campaign, judging by what I chanced-upon online (as low-res images, or simply from comments made), and I did come across what seemed to be an online conversion of the whole campaign to Pathfinder as well, but that seemed to have few images overall - aside from a blurry Sea Wyvern drawing, much as I imagine you were working from.

Nice-looking drawings, by the way!

In Egypt, as also in Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq), the man-made thing for irrigation started very early on, so telling what's truly "natural" is no longer really possible. You get a similar effect in the deserts near both places modernly where there's been a rare, heavy rainfall recently; there's a sudden explosion of greenery and flowers in a concentrated area where the rain happened, and the immediate vicinity of the run-off, surrounded by the usual "barren" waste. It lasts for at most a few weeks, and then it all dies-off, and vanishes.

I think "chook" originated with some dialects of English. "Chuck" is a term of endearment still used in parts of northern England, for instance, which derives from the same source, as a variant on "chick" as an abbreviation for "chicken", or from "chick" as being a young chicken. Online sources seem to cover only the modern Australian option as in-use still, however.

And here was me thinking "duck down" was an urgent warning...

Well, technically, it was a Scot, James Watt, who advocated a standardised international decimal system of scientific measurements in 1783, and what we now recognise as the whole series of SI units, sometimes colloquially referred to as the "metric system", was the product of a great many people in various parts of the world over many years from the 18th to 20th centuries, with numerous variant definitions even for the metre during that time. What's now considered that metric system, the formal international adoption of the SI units in fact, didn't happen until 1960, and that Système International continues to evolve.

Sadly, there isn't a suitable metric definition for such pedantry though ??

So, here are my submissions for this 500th map and anniversary contest, The Summer Palace of the Winter Queen. For the contest, these should be considered as a single entry, incidentally; I'm not trying to "stuff the ballot box" with a multiple series of maps here ?!

There's a WIP thread elsewhere on the Forum which gives more details on this set, and the construction process in places, and if all goes to plan, I should be adding higher-res versions of all twelve maps to the Gallery once I've finished this post here. Never done that before, however, so we shall see!

As there is an additional pair of detailing note files to accompany these maps for their final Atlas versions, as well as the usual Atlas submission notes to provide for Remy, I'll send the full set of FCWs, PDF and text files to @Monsen as a separate private e-mail. The FCW files are though included below, following the rules of this contest.

Note that Palaces 5, 6 & 7 come in two versions, the vanilla B&W ones and those with a blue screen superimposed.

Whew!?