I agree with Monsen, on both counts - Mercator Historical was THE reason I bought the first Annual, and diversity of options for everything else (as well as thinking beyond simply mapping styles sometimes, in discussions of mapping tools, for instance).

Something I wanted to do, and which remains in-progress, is trying out different styles from the main programs and the Annuals in preparing maps both for myself and especially the Community Atlas project. It's easy to fall into a pattern of familiarity with styles that feel comfortable, and not look beyond those, which is something I'd prefer to avoid. Luckily, the options in the Annual issues provide a large pool of options to explore ?

Thanks very much Jim!

As promised when I posted about The Cliff map, this is the first of the additional maps to accompany it, covering the Isle of Zariq, the surfaced tip of the huge seamount of the same name in the Frigid or Equine Ocean, some 750 km (470 miles) off the NW Alarius coast of Errynor.

I realise this may come as a shock, compared with many of my previous Atlas contributions, but there's just one version of this island's map!

In-keeping with the element of chance employed to a greater or lesser extent in all my previous Atlas items however, the original base map was generated randomly, using the island generator on the Red Blob Games website. The final map has been reworked to some extent to better fit with what was intended here, though not by much.

The terrain symbols and some names are a little misleading (deliberately), as a quick check of the scales will show the entire island is only circa 4½ km (2¾ miles) in its largest dimension. The terrain is craggy and volcanic, as the surface sits on the main seamount's vent (it extends to the eastern offshore Tooth & Claw Reefs, so is partly underwater). The highest peak however, Lodestone Mountain, rises only 100 m (330 ft) above sea level. Smokes, mists and minor eruptions, including of geysers, are common features. The vegetation cover is generally stunted and windblown. Most of it produces plentiful seeds or berry-like fruits, as it was chiefly brought here by seabirds.

Indeed, seabirds are the main obvious living creatures for newcomers to the place, and those mainly during their spring-summer breeding seasons. There are also many kinds of small insects, arachnids and other invertebrates. There are additional creatures less commonly seen here, as outlined in the map's accompanying PDF and text files, of which perhaps the more intriguing is a tribe of small, blue-scaled, reptilian humanoids, the Kobalts (= D&D's Kobolds), who live in a warren of tunnels beneath Kobalt Mountain. For once, and despite the classic RPG random dungeon design joke from the early days of D&D, that "I just rolled for 40 Kobolds in this broom closet", this was in fact a long-standing decision, not a randomly generated one ?

As Loopysue suggested, this is indeed a too-many-nodes problem, and it's very common when drawing river lines using the fractal drawing tools.

The SIMPLIFY command should help reduce the number of nodes to the point where you don't get these artefacts, but you might also lose much of the naturalistic appearance along the river line, especially if you have to repeat the command on the line more than a couple of times.

I spent ages early on trying to locate and delete the individual problematic nodes, until I discovered said command...

You may find that drawing rivers using a straight or smooth line, rather than a fractal one, means you don't get this problem in the first place, but you will need to add more separate nodes to get a similar organically-natural-looking line for your rivers.

Personally, my preference is for straight lines, since at the scale of most overland maps, you won't notice the line segments as being straight at all, and they're much easier to adjust afterwards, should you need to, than smooth curved lines, because you can see more easily where the nodes are on straight lines, and how the line will change when you move a node, than with the smooth curve, where the node frequently isn't on the line, and where moving it can cause issues for adjacent line segments as well.

In terms of the planet's size and physical features, that's got to be your decision. If you're looking for ideas, I think you're already doing as much as is reasonable, by comparing the appearance to Earth's geological past. Mountain heights and (especially) ocean depths in deeper geological time are the more problematic aspects, the oceans because no oceanic crust is very old, geologically-speaking, which is where looking at other Solar System planets might be useful to get an idea of what the topographic range can be in the absence of large amounts of free water and its concomitant weathering effects (so before such things arrived). Different geologies can mean this isn't an easy comparison, if you're aiming for precision, of course.

Then again, Mount Kerofin in Glorantha was eight miles high (circa 13 km; from sea-level), so again, you pays your money, and... ?