It's certainly a very beautiful map, and I know well how difficult it is to find a suitable real-world base map from which to draw this region, so I think you've done a splendid job with it!

As Sue said, the seas look a little "double-exposed" currently though.

How historically-accurate were you intending to be with it?

I ask, as ancient Mesopotamia is a particular place of interest for me, especially around the 3rd-2nd millennia BCE, along with the Black Sea and places adjacent around the 2nd-early 1st millennia BCE, and east to what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and western India. They're places I've mapped and studied in some detail previously, and there are points I could make which might be of use, though only if you were wanting it to be more historical.

The river lines are very complex, particularly if you're going for that historical route, and a specific time-frame. The Tigris has pretty much held its course over the millennia, largely thanks to a stonier bed, but the Euphrates has drifted hither and yon across the silts of southern Mesopotamia especially, encouraged by deliberately-dug irrigation canals in places, beginning around the later 4th millennium BCE, for instance.

I know when I started out trying to map parts of this region, something that surprised me was how poorly different published atlas maps compared with one another as regards the modern watercourses, especially for anything other than the major river channels, even in the specialist (i.e. archaeological-historical) literature.

That 22-foot Roman Empire map is the Peutinger Table, aka Tabula Peutingeriana, and the Wikipedia page includes a high-res complete image of the whole - may take a while to load, however, as the full-size JPG is about 15 MB. This is the direct link to that Wikimedia image.

Regarding the free monthly content, there's a new page on the PF website about this here. I'm not sure you can access it from any of the PF website links currently, but it was given on Ralf's recent blog posting about the new Orcish symbols.

From that new webpage:

It does seem that only the current month's set is available as a download directly (just July's content is available from my own registration page today, certainly), but I assume that downloading the full CC3+ package would include June's symbols now. That might become problematic if you forget to download the set one month, but perhaps it's smart enough to realise if you haven't yet downloaded a given month's set after the month ends?

If you've not found anything suitable for cherry blossom trees in an overland mapping style from Sue's suggestions, you might need to try a search for icons or mapping icons online to find something suitable in PNG format (or that you could convert to PNG, so you get a transparent background for the artwork), and either use that, or convert it into a CC3+ symbol using CC3+. A couple of quick Google searches using "oriental tree mapping icons" and "cherry blossom mapping icons" came up with quite a number of artwork options, certainly (all vector artwork, however, and often not in PNG format, but I was only doing a very quick chase-round!).

Thanks for that. It was while watching Ralf having to add multiple clicks to get corners on a drawing tool smooth poly I was prompted to ask, but it's something I've run into repeatedly too when adding a smooth poly outside the map border to ensure the edge effects are properly hidden by the screen. Be nice to have a full set of such options with the smooth poly drawing tools, certainly.

Having spent so much time concentrating on detailing the tiny unsubmerged areas of Errynor Map 01, it seemed about time I plunged down and started providing some sample maps detailing equally parts of the deep ocean's bed. I thought I would start with the Sea Orc/Ketorka cavern village of Aak, and so drew-up that map:

When I began preparing the notes to accompany it however, I realised I needed a second map to show some of the places across the nearby area as well. Thus was born the Aak Hills map:

For orientation, this next map is Errynor Map 01 - The Cliff, showing the seafloor view, with the Aak Hills area ringed in orange:

In terms of the layout designs, the Aak village map originated as another of those Curufea's Random Cave Map Generator website plans I'd used previously for the Kobalt Mountain Caverns on Zariq. As before the chosen suitable layout was dropped-in as the bitmap base for the CC3+ drawing, rotated, amended and added-to in places as required. The map was constructed by hand-tracing over this using the TJ Vandel's OSR Dungeons style from the 2015 Cartographer's Annual, labelled with the Mason Serif Alt Bold font that comes with CC3+. I wanted a more or less black-and-white style as a reminder this setting is in the deep ocean, where there's no daylight, and most vision will be purely monochromatic.

The Aak Hills map was a straightforward adaptation from the pictorial version in The Cliff map, now in close-up. However, its contents beyond the previously-mapped elements were randomly allocated using a variant of my own tables and system that were used to generate the original Errynor base maps' features.

I thought for this map it would be interesting to experiment with the only CC3+ style package designed for mapping seafloor areas, Marine Maps from the 2017 CA. This though is intended for mapping small, near-coastal areas only, so some adaptation and improvisation was needed. Basically, I inverted the usual contour colour scheme in Marine Maps, where dark blue shows the coastal shallows, with white reserved for the deeper places only. On the Aak Hills map, dark blue is used for the normal deep ocean floor level, with increasingly paler blue to white contours (several levels of these, just like in Marine Maps) showing progressively higher areas above that floor. With almost 12,000 feet, 3,660 metres, of seawater above even the highest peak shown, by no stretch of the imagination can even these higher white places be classed as "shallows"!

The Marine Maps symbols were repurposed, sometimes with minor additions, and like the Arial font labelling, this created a few problems as I'd added Sheet Effect glows to make things stand out more. The Marine Maps style uses very few Effects overall. What happened? Well, where the Effect-amended black symbols and text lay over the equally black contour lines, those contour lines showed through as breaks in the text letters and symbols. This was, as ever (for me anyway; not my first encounter with this!), easily overcome by simply copying the affected symbols and text onto another Sheet above their original one, but which had no Effects added to it.

After some brief experimentation, I decided to place the anchor "north" pointer and the scale bars on Sheets without Effects, as I found them too distracting otherwise. This "vanilla" appearance is how such labelling would appear using the Marine Maps package ordinarily.

Of course, I had to try out the automated contour-labelling option in Marine Maps as well, where I was delighted to find ANY text could be typed-in per label, not merely numerals. Thus I was able to label the contours clearly in both feet and metres without needing to resort to adding a map key.