Since Jim already hijacked his own thread by mentioning Lord of the Rings and maps, and knowing several others here are fans of such things too, I'd recommend also taking a look at the new second edition "The One Ring" RPG, recently published by Free League Publishing, as the artwork and maps for that are simply gorgeous. The main rulebook has two endpaper maps of Eriador, the primary setting for this new version of the game, while the Starter Set has two poster maps, printed back to back, again of Eriador, but a more artistic vision than in the rules, and the most detailed map of The Shire I can ever recall seeing. Both the poster maps give a hat-tip in style to the great Pauline Baynes, who did the original poster map for LotR, in collaboration with JRR Tolkien himself, and which included roundels with scenes of specific, key, places around the edge. Both the Eriador and Shire poster maps have those as well. The Starter Set descriptive book on The Shire includes further B&W maps of segments of the Shire area, while the main rulebook has detailed maps of segments of the Eriador map in its text when discussing specific places.

I've struggled to find good-quality images for these online, unfortunately, to demonstrate what they look like, but this blog review has some very low-res versions of the Starter Set poster maps, while this one has some better res versions of just The Shire side, but largely hidden behind other stuff from the set. The second linked site does though have some shots of the books that come in the set, showing the artwork standard, and one of the segments of the Shire maps.

Intriguingly, only one of the Eriador maps has a scale on it - and that purely using a superimposed 20-mile hex grid (only shown on one of the rulebook endpaper maps). The Shire map has a scale, but only in leagues, which is, of course, rather vague too, as there is no standard definition of a league!

I think the only cloud in this style comes with a volcano attached, which isn't entirely helpful 😉🌋

At least it's possible to draw effective cloud shapes fairly easily in it though, as you've demonstrated!

It's a good looking drawing.

Maybe a bit too pristine in places on the worn paths, but that's likely by choice for this scene, I appreciate.

I might have been tempted to add a snowflake design indented into the snow somewhere - maybe for the dot on the "i" instead of the tree there, for all they can be a bit tricky to draw.

Also, the shadows from the bare trees seem too heavy. I know this is how the effects generate shadows, by looking not at what the symbol is, but what its physical edges are only. They really don't look right for these leafless trees though.

That really threw me off on the night scenes especially, as at first I couldn't work out why certain bits of the scene were darker than others. The pale lower left corner still looks odd though (light source is where?), even after that, and the bird looks weird in the night scene as well.

Gotta feel for those deer too - frozen to their respective spots by day and night, poor souls. Deer, deer... 😉

Should be roughly mid-Jurassic Pangaea break-up period around 175 million years ago, Jim.

Not so sure about the climatic zones, assuming that is meant to be high-latitude ice and narrow desert belts in the lower mid-latitudes. Evidence suggests little ice and a warmer planet overall around this time, with a much smaller temperature gradient between the equator and the poles than we currently find. Arid areas may not have been quite so belt-like as this drawing suggests, though possibly more extensive in some places than others.

Be interesting to know what the sources for this map were, certainly, as new ideas about paleoclimates are always surfacing, so my knowledge may be out of date already!

Thanks for the additional information on your map @NZgunner - much appreciated!

It's so difficult to be sure what the palaeoclimates were for specific periods in the past, as the evidence is commonly very incomplete, and needs a lot of extrapolation. There are suggestions for what may have been happening in certain areas at more specific times though, so if you wanted to tie down to a specific 175 Mya date, it might be worth checking through the available literature.

It's not certain that modern climatic zones and effects are necessarily a suitable model to copy for the geologic past, unfortunately. There's evidence for a lot more free carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than modernly at times in the Jurassic, for instance, partly hence the somewhat warmer temperatures than today too, in all probability, and the apparent lack of major glaciated regions.

The CSUAC trees are part of the free third-party resources you can download and install for use with CC3+. The process is not straightforward, however. If you want to try, you can find the links on this Forum information topic.

This of course is the kind of thing you have to do if you don't want to run your RPGs in the default setting the game comes with (it's Eriador, the OTHER side of the Misty Mountains for those who don't have TOR 2e) 😉

Didn't somebody shoot Smaug already though? 😉🎯

You can create snowy hills and mountains in this style simply by choosing a suitable colour for the varicolor symbols. There is an Ice fill and an Icefield drawing tool already with CA95, so you'll just need to match the hills and mountains with that. You may need to adjust the bitmap fill scaling too, so the patterning doesn't get lost at this sort of world-level map size.

Part of the problem may be the Alyssa Faden style isn't well-suited to world-size maps, so the default scaling is set against that. As the PDF notes with CA95 note, "Alyssa's style is a great one to depict small to medium level overland maps. For very large maps, the beautiful detail of the symbols might get lost a bit." Doesn't mean you can't do it, and it will probably suit the cartoony look of the original map you'd linked to with its over-sized symbols, just that you have more effort to put in for it to work how you'd like!

Yeah, I have my spam folder on automatic view all the time, so it's definitely not appeared here still.

Regardless of any individual requests, this is clearly something rather more major concerning the Newsletter. It's fine for folks in the know who visit the Forum regularly to work out what's happening, but there must be many more who don't - if a Newsletter doesn't arrive, how'd they know?