To be honest, the extra water depth across these oceans makes direct comparisons with Earth a lot more difficult, as Earth has never had oceans so deep. Thus setting-up the winds and currents to fit the terrain better is probably no bad thing, as it would be possible to counter-argue just about any points that might be claimed as too unlike Earth.

Thanks very much folks!

Closing-in on the final stages of this project now though, so here's a view of Palace 9:

This was done using the SS2 Bitmap A style. I was rather taken with some of the fill options for this, as you might tell! The background here is the snow fill, but the palace itself was drawn using the Water Green 1 fill, as this just seemed such a rich, icy-looking option to give some real colour to this Palace, as a change from some of the previous ones. Not a great many choices from the symbols, unfortunately, as very few come with a varicolor option to better match the icy theme - just the central throne in the end, though at this resolution, you can barely see it, of course.

I'm going to miss drawing these snowflake patterns, I think, but there's the danger that the more I do, the less interesting they may become, since - as my comments regarding the construction of Palace 8 might indicate - I have developed a pattern for drawing these now, which while useful, isn't necessarily such a good thing, as it discourages exploration and innovation. I have enjoyed seeing the styles that were new to me though. There's so much in the full complement of the CC3+ packages I've never properly explored, so I have been trying to take time during this mapping exercise to go through all the fill styles available in each mapping type I've selected, as well as all the symbol catalogues for each. Probably never going to remember where any of these things are when I next need them, but...

Haven't managed to get the rest of the "Palace Quirks" notes typed-up yet; they'll likely follow after the Palace 10 map. And hopefully a little while after that, I might finally get the set submitted for the Atlas!

I picked up the whole Fafhrd & the Mouser series in the Ace editions of 1970 and thereabouts pretty much as soon as I could find a bookshop in the UK that sold them then, as one of the bigger influences on original D&D. Long time since I read them, but I still have the lot! And all the recent talk on the Forum of these stories I read back in this period brings back all the excitement of that first venture into D&D and RPGs more generally (though I didn't know there'd be plurals back in the mid-70s when I started, of course!).

Not sure about that, Autumn. I do seem to have got a little carried away with this one though!

I want to say "looking good", but I'm not sure that's an appropriate comment, even if the sentiment's right ?