Paupus

[crackerjake]

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.

[Ascension]

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.

[LamilLerran]

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

[Ascension]

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.

[crackerjake]

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?

[Karro]

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.

There are certain general principles on the placement of deserts (plenty of details in your Australia thread). Short answer: cold deserts are certainly possible (the poles are in regions where various effects can cause desertification, and the South Pole, in particular, is an example of a cold desert: precipitation there is very low, but it's so cold that all the water that does exist there is frozen.) That being said, a cold desert is going to have a very different flavor from a warm/hot one, and the culture that arises there is going to be different as well. If you want an Arabian-themed desert culture, I'd look for something a bit closer to the tropics to drop that in.