It's not just the quantity of maps that impresses, but what a range of styles, shapes and appearances the different maps have, even on this "thumbnail" image. The Community Atlas Project really has become a great showcase for what CC3+ is capable of when folks set their imaginations loose with it!

Not even going to ask how much time and effort Remy needed to make this montage!

So, a particular "well done" to Remy, reiterated for every one of our mappers too (including our absent friends).

This seems highly apt, given the long and difficult journey that has only very recently started to give us the physical world of Dolmenwood out in this reality! Indeed, when I saw your first post here, I thought that was where you were going with this topic 😊.

[Dolmenwood's a highly-detailed RPG and world-setting, published by Necrotic Gnome, as I know we're not all RPGers here. It's very dependent upon magical dolmens, standing stones, magical ley-lines and such like. And of course, it also has grimalkins, fey-cat-folk, as player-characters (amongst many other things)!]

And, because this is the most recent of your topics to be updated here RS, a quick "well done" on having a second Cartographer's Annual showcasing your maps this year, with this month's issue just out!

You don't need to invoke hag magic for the warmth. Think Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms, which is in a not dissimilar northern location - subterranean volcanic heat can help here too. And/Or you could have the seas warmed by the volcanic offshore island on the regional map's edge, with likely more undersea volcanism nearby as well. Warmer seas in a colder climate will give plenty of surface fogs and mists, so all nicely humid, dank and dark (fogs often lift into very low clouds that artificially darken the days, for instance), so also ideal hag territory!

Exactly!

I don't think it really matters what kind of top-down style you choose - even if the settlements are just dots, the pictorial representation shows what's actually there, which is really the point in many respects. The actual region map would really be too small to show pictures of the settlements to scale, so the drawing shows those at the expense of "unrealistic" scenery and scaling instead.

Many of the pictorial styles we routinely use in CC3+ are already a compromise between accurate images and true scaling anyway. Ricko's shown masterfully and repeatedly what can be achieved by ignoring scaling entirely, and going for a purely pictorial representations using those images!