When I started thinking about this, because all my previous Community Atlas mapping has involved a degree of random design, I started looking at random snowflake creation systems online. This is one design I made from the Misha Studios site run by Misha Heesakkers for instance:

However, this generates only an SVG file if you're using Chrome or Firefox, which is not ideal.

Another interesting site, Snowflake Generator by Fabian Kober creates fractal, fully adjustable, PNG download files, such as this:

While these are fascinatingly wonderful - and the fractal versions can be incredibly intricate - they're also perfectly symmetrical, which wasn't really what I wanted, so I started searching for images of real snowflakes online. There are a lot of these! However, when I struck upon the many nicely contrasty black and white photos by Wilson Bentley (1865-1931; Wikipedia link), I decided to make my selections for this project chiefly from those. Wikimedia Commons has a lot of options, for instance.

I thought it might be useful to give the two image generators here though, as they may be useful for those wanting to create symmetrical snowflake design mazes or labyrinths, for example.

For the random element in the maps, I opted to stick with that being primarily in where the palace can appear, and in what form.

The basic premise for this set of maps is that of a wandering sub-surface palace, which is occupied by/part of a powerful humanoid creature, possibly a deity (nobody's very sure). The palace magically shifts elsewhere every day, and changes its form at the same time. It is composed entirely of ice, and has the shape of a gigantic snowflake. It can only appear in an iceberg, in pack ice, an ice cap, or a glacier, or in a huge snow-cloud high in the air. There is always only a single entrance on the surface, surrounded by delicately intricate ice-sculptures of summer flowers and foliage (yes, even in the cloud); the rest of the palace is buried and completely hidden at all times (again, yes, even in the cloud!). The palace fits within an area at most roughly 600 feet by 500 feet, though its size changes from day to day.

My idea is to prepare a location map showing ten potential places the palace may appear, thus giving a simple random option of where it may be using a 1D10 roll. Another 1D10 roll will give the form and size the palace has that day, so I'm working towards having ten different versions of the palace map. The following map is an early version of the locations map, to give an idea of what I'm meaning:

For this, I've basically reworked Shessar's beautiful world map into a very simplified version using one of Monsen's recent blog posts about representing subtly inset features on CC3+ maps. The numbered snowflake symbols (Wingdings font letter "T"s) indicate the potential palace locations. These are not going to be defined more precisely than this, so if the random roll comes up twice the same for two separate days, this just means the palace has moved, but not beyond the general area indicated - so "6" again means it's still somewhere in southern Ezrute, for example. It'll be up to the GM to decide exactly where in the general areas the palace actually is. This is not the final version, which will be a bit larger, and have more information; I've adjusted a couple of the markers since this version was prepared as well.

The 1 & 9 markers are for icebergs/pack ice somewhere on the great northern and southern oceans; the 2 & 10 ones are for the aerial snow-cloud versions, which will be found exclusively somewhere high above those same two oceans.

The palace and its occupier are intended to be things that might be useful to find for very esoteric information, but which are nearly impossible to guarantee locating at all quickly, even by those who know of their existence. I thought this might be an interesting addition for Nibirum more generally.

Sue's Banners & Seals have been released into the wild now - all looking great, as expected!

Very well done Sue, and Ralf of course, for setting it all up - complete with varicolor seal designs.

Might have been nice to have had a graphic showing all the seal options in one place in the PDF Mapping Guide, as there are a lot there - standard letters, runes and blanks, aside from the pictorial designs shown earlier in this topic. I'd recommend copying Sue's graphic here and using it for reference if you're likely to be using the seals a lot to help out.

Yes. Click in the box at the top of your CC3+ screen that has "W:" in it (to the right of the colour box). This calls up the Line Width Settings pane, and you can adjust the width of any line you're about to draw to whatever you need. The actual width is in Map Units (so miles or kilometres for an overland map, feet or metres for most other types).

Ithaqua does tend to be more an overland deity in the tales, but maybe a cult of worshippers with a near-deity-like offspring as their central focus for a subterranean setting?