As mentioned in my latest post regarding the Temple of Nidag maps in Alarius, the next maps in this series were going to be visited upon Kumarikandam, somewhere in the Xinxing Region on the great Tiantang Grasslands:

Looking over the extant Atlas mapping for this area showed a number of possibilities, as relatively little had been mapped in more detail here previously; essentially just the settlements of Shinsato and Ylangxi. Having already established, from adapted materials in the Inkwell Ideas book that accompanies the Trailblazer geomorphic dungeon designs I'd be using here, that this was going to be a combined maze and tomb, I wanted somewhere more out of the way to place it, and eventually settled on the Mingjue Ruins, next to the map's top edge:

The various pictorial structures on this Xinxing map are, as so often, overscale, as that orange square outlining my selected place is actually 20 miles per side!

Thus, when zoomed-in to just that area, the ruins stretch almost right across the whole zone, here with the usual numerical grid added, with one-mile squares, so I can randomly place features of interest subsequently:

Preferring to try to work with what this showed, rather than simply reducing the region occupied by the ruins, I decided that something weird must have happened in the past to create the huge areas of dead forest all around that enormous chasm, and which was perhaps associated with why the ruins were here, and so seemingly extensive. Thus rather than all being structural ruins, I instead made the ground across the ruins area especially rough, with low, grassy hills and rockier tors, as well as some genuine old structures, given it's frequently hard to say modernly whether this or that grassy knoll or tor is really a natural feature, or an ancient ruin, without detailed investigation. Being in the tropics too, around 15°S latitude, the grasslands were set as having very tall grasses in season, to help further disguise the nature of the land here.

While I didn't prepare a series of WIP shots while preparing this map, I did a couple of test images to check if the symbol scaling I'd settled upon was working satisfactorily, which give an impression of what had been decided and where, all prepared using Ralf's new Hand-Drawn Fantasy style:

This one was very early in the process, with only a few features, beyond sketching-in much of the existing terrain, but it gives an idea of how I'd opted to lay-out the are-they-aren't-they ruins.

The following image was much further along in the mapping, and was done as a test to check the font sizing and effects as much as anything. The Tomb of General Chengdai, incidentally, is the site for the dungeon map here, hence why it's already been labelled:

A few further tweaks were necessary subsequently, of which perhaps the most major was swapping-out all those brown broken tree-trunk symbols for more of the simpler black-line dead trees, mostly because, having had doubts earlier, I realised it was a bit confusing/distracting for some of the smaller feature symbols. This was so even after I'd added the rest of the labels. Which brings us to the final version of the map:

Options for what the various features were, were determined using random tables found throughout the "Knave" 2nd edition RPG rules, published by Jacob Hurst & Swordfish Islands LLC, with most of the names determined also randomly from tables in the "Nomicon", published by Mythmere Games.

I chose not to add any streams, just ponds, partly to sustain the overall feeling of ruination hereabouts, partly because I felt allowing GMs to add minor brooks wherever might seem interesting, was a better idea. I did add a comment about this in the PDF notes for the Atlas, as well as notes on the various labelled features.

There was one further very late change, following the publication of the latest free Hand-Drawn Fantasy monthly symbols for cliffs, in late January. I toyed momentarily with adding those new cliff symbols along the visible edges of the Canyon, but that proved unworkable, as the mapped edges were already drawn, and the symbols couldn't be easily fitted to them. Instead, I hand-drew some little vertical "cliff-lines" along those same visible edges, which seem to help enhance the existing darker effects shading around the Canyon edges. Many ended-up hidden by the Canyon's label, but at least I know they're there!

With this completed, it was time to head underground (next time)...