Paupus

[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.