You should always map the way you want to, and you don't need to justify that to anyone except yourself!

To an extent, yes. At this scale, they don't need to be substantial necessarily, but long straight lines, and those arcing curves (those between Mounts Haymish and Beck, under the Gongodur banner, and northwest from Middleham) look artificial. They'd be fine as canals; not so much as natural rivers.

I think this is accentuated, for me at least, because many of the road lines have more natural-looking small curves and slight changes of direction along them than some of the rivers.

Actually, looking closer at the roads, that long curving line between Tuncaster to the Jolly Hedgehog clips the foot of one of the smaller peaks on the western side of the Wirbel Mountains (about opposite the Dhegburim Mines), so might be tweaked a little to avoid it, since the rest is in the broad valley there otherwise.

You could perhaps try Avalon Quest, Cagliostro or one of the Mason Serif fonts as an alternative to Copperplate (they're all fine for Atlas use).

The river lines seem a little too regular presently, which is accentuated where the kingdom border lies alongside them, leading to some unlikely sharp corner angles in places that look unnatural as well, including the non-river angle NW of Mt Feynon.

The shading effect to highlight the kingdom looks good. It might work better if you were showing the entire kingdom on this map, as it looks a little strange to have the border heading off two map edges, suggesting this is only one small part of a much larger area. The title scroll so close to the right map edge also implies this.

In case Remy doesn't spot this, from the original post way back on Page 1: The competition ends October 1st 2024, 12:00 UTC.

So that's 20 full days as I type this, plus a bit (the exact amount depending on how UTC = Greenwich Mean Time correlates with your local clock time).

Thanks very much folks!

I explained how I'd arrived at this in the first post here earlier, and also why I'd opted to draw it this way (which is also why I've been sticking with a B&W style for all these maps too).

The essential points though, extracted from that linked topic, are that the style is the OSR Dungeon one from Annual 97, and that: The dot-shaded look was achieved first by laying down a base smooth polygon using the "Stones" fill texture, and then adding random selections from the two "Gravel" symbols over that on a separate sheet, all placed by hand, which allowed variable densities of such shading nearer the outer wall lines, and within the design, where rock pillars had been left in the Mirror Maze section particularly. The Stones texture had to be rescaled in the drawing to better fit the size of the Gravel symbol dots, which was pretty straightforward, and the whole does give quite a nice hand-drawn-like look to the shading.

Naturally, all I did here was to repeat that for this map. This time, I did get to play around with some of those textures for a genuine bit of the outside, as well as some plants, on the ledge to reach the front doors, however.