Paupus

I'm going to be posting the various stages my world goes through as I create it for my D&D campaign, hopefully you guys can give me some advice and help as I go along. So far, I've only got the continents and seas. I've decided on the name "Paupus" for my world.

I've run into a bit of a problem, I've gotten the mountain range I wanted done on the northernmost continent (so I can have a desert), but I don't know how to draw a desert on a map like this. It's easy to draw forests, seas, and mountains, but how do you draw a flat expanse of nothing but sand, sand, and more sand (and the occasional sandworms -thinking of drawing a miniature sandworm in the desert, much like you see sea monsters in the ocean on some maps-)? I've tried a bunch of dots, but that looked stupid and made me feel dumber (no offence to anyone who's done that before and is/was happy with it, just me and my opinion :P)

The desert is going to be west (left) of the mountain range, and north of the sea. Btw, should I clip the mountains some in the southern portion? I'm thinking they might bring the desert onto/near the lake's east side, which I don't want.

Are you going to colour it eventually? if so that'll sove your problem real quick, just toss in a place marker for now :)

I like the sandworm idea, that's great. maybe a few cactuses and such or boulders near the southern boundary to help define it. Some dunes perhap? Though that might look too much like regular hills/mountains.. but if you labelled them (White Dunes or summat) that would help the illusion.. Once you name the region it'll help too. I think it's coming along fine.

The desert I'm going for is Arabian themed, no cacti :( It's actually going to be kinda weird, it's Arabain themed, but there are going to be pyramids (old and abandoned...or are they?), although the pyramids are going to be from an older race of jackal people. Maybe having a couple of pyramids on the map might do the trick.

Pyramids would work, or maybe a string of camels?

Crap, I just thought of something:

Is it too far north for a desert of Arabian theme to be? I was thinking it could be a sandy desert on the southern part, but further up north, it gets cold? How would that work? There's going to be an obvious lack of moisture, so nothing would get frozen, so would it just be REALLY cold and sandy? There's obviously going to be ice around the northern edge from the ocean, but I'm not sure how this would impact my desert. Grrr, this is getting complicated...I guess I could make this a map of the KNOWN world, and not the whole one.

I was going to say that you could just put this in the southern hemisphere so that the desert would work out but if you want the polar region in the north then this area would have to be tundra or taiga. I guess that you could make it a grassland like the Midwest of the USA but it's your world after all, do what ya want and say old dead wizards blew something up and scorched the land. :)

Back on the subject of symbolizing it: one possibility is to speckle it with dots to represent sand. Something like in the attached image (heh, it's from the first map I ever made. Never expected to have a use for it).

Edit: And I see you tried it and disliked it. That'll teach me to read carefully

This is what I use for deserts...some dunes and some flat lines. The pyramids and camels ideas are good to reinforce the idea by association.

Here are two copies with the desert, one with the texture, and one without.

1) Did I overdo the symbols?
2) Does it fit?
3) On an unrelated note, do the hills to the south look good?

Any suggestions on what's there?