I could not hit "Oh my Lord, yes" faster. I am planning to create an underwater civilization down the road, and having a sea style and marine cities style would be perfect. Especially if they are also compatible with the two Marine Dungeons from the annuals.

I used the Marine Dungeons as the base template for my Greco-Roman temple, which inspired me to then incorporate a fountain (or reflecting pool) in the temple and an anemone pool in the nearby botanical garden. In the future, it will also be the template I'll use when I design my Roman-style baths. (The baths are going to need an aqueduct to supply water to it, and will deposit wastewater into the sewers, so I am very much looking forward to tomorrow's annual.) The Marine Dungeons are super versatile and any future annuals that piggyback on them would be welcome indeed.

That’s beautiful!

no, I haven’t figured out how it will all piece together. I think it works well with Sue’s other styles — Marine Dungeons, Forest Trails, Creepy Crypts… But I really have to experiment and see.

This is a different approach than what you’re asking about, but possibly with the same end result: Remy did two tutorials showing how to construct rail tracks: Martian Mines and the Silver Mine.

Here are two samples with the full range of Solid Bitmaps 10 through 90, plus a solid black polygon. The first is Sue's first suggestion and the second adds her second tip.

Edge Fade, Inner - Edge Width 2.5, Inner Opacity 80, Outer Opacity 25

Edge Fade, Inner - Edge Width 2.5, Inner Opacity 80, Outer Opacity 25 plus Glow Radius bumped to 0.5

I think bumping the Glow radius to 0.5 is nice. And these are working nicely, so I don't think I will try importing other water fills to see if any of them work. I'm leaning towards Solid 90 because for my poor eyes at least, I really have to zoom in on the pure solid one to see the stonework behind the water.

Thank you for your help, Sue! Looking forward to plotting out my main city's sanitation system over the next few weeks. Sewers make for such great adventure options -- emergency exits when you're being besieged, or for plotting out heists. I imagine a lot of crime lords dump a lot of evidence (and bodies) in the sewers...

There were already separate threads seeking advice on the Parchment Maps and Jerion Shading approaches. I wanted to share a little about my technique for the Mike Schley style, including things that I would do differently next time.

I wanted to have some contours consistent with the other maps, so I opened the Jerion export and copied one of the contour areas onto the Schley map, just where the Jerion contour colors started to turn brown (I think around 5,000 or 7,000 feet in elevation). Playing with a technique that Ralf showed in the Jeriod shading demo, I moved that contour to a contour sheet and changed the fill to the Solid 10 fill. I added Edge Fade, Inner and Transparency effects to that sheet. I then created a second contour sheet with the same effects, and did the same thing with a somewhat higher elevation (I think it was around 11,000 feet in elevation). That worked well. I liked how it gave shading and depth without being too intense like a bevel effect would have done.

Here's what I did next that I would do differently next time. First, I look an even higher level of elevation and did the same thing. But instead of putting it on a contours sheet with a Solid 10 fill, I put it on a Land Features Hills Background sheet and changed it to the Hills Background fill style. I also added a Transparency effect to that sheet. And then I did the same with an even higher elevation, putting it on a Land Features Mountain Background and changing the fill style to the Mountain Background fill. At this point, the file got massively big. I think it had a lot of nodes to contend with. Next time I try this approach, I might still do the two Solid 10 contour imports, but instead of also importing contour lines for the hills and mountains, I will draw them on using a JPG image of the original export as a rough guide for where to draw them.

Here are a few zoomed in maps in the Jerion shading style:

Welcome!

For me, I learned the most from the video tutorials.

I spent years (off and on) trying to teach myself with the PDF manuals before I started to watch the videos. Joe Sweeney’s “Parrot Island” video made things click for me and set me on my way.

I would recommend going through the Learning CC3+ videos as well as Joe Sweeney and Josh Plunkett’s series that go through the process. Then the Campaign Cartographer Concepts and Quickies. The Live videos are great and I learn something new with every single one, but I’d get the basics down with the other videos first. (You may get up to speed faster than I did and might end up skipping around.) Also, bear in mind that some of the oldest videos talk about techniques that are now out of date but the fundamentals are still helpful.

I agree with Kertis. I don’t think the mountains need to pop. The beauty in this map is in its subtlety. It’s lovely. You could slightly darken them if you wanted, but I think they would well as they are.

Ralf did a Live video where he designed crenellations using a line style. (Has some odd effects when drawing circular crenellations on a round tower, though.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnjFECIl7ZU

Ever since the Parchment Cities annual came out in February, I've been wanting to create a map of old San Francisco, California -- the city where I live and was born, and where generations of my ancestors were from.

I wanted to find a reference map for 1895, because by that point, six of my eight grandparents were living here by then. (Two moved here no later than the late 1860s, one moved here in 1884, two others moved from different parts of France in the early 1890s, meeting and marrying in San Francisco.) Unfortunately, the images I found were poor-quality JPGs that would have been a challenge to draw the coastline correctly. (The coastline changed significantly after the famous earthquake in 1906 that burned a huge swath of the City. In rebuilding the City, a lot of the rubble was tossed into the bay, changing the coastline and becoming landfill that newer buildings were built on top of.

Once I made peace with not finding a good 19th century source map, it become much easier to hunt down good quality SVG images on Wikimedia Commons that I could convert into a DXF file with CloudConvert. That made doing the coastline much easier.

I will still have to do the streets and blocks using JPG reference images, as my source map included elevation changes rather than streets. To make it a little easier, I decided to focus on the northeast corner of the city, the downtown Financial District. I thought about doing my own neighborhood but it's in the middle of the City, three miles to the east of the ocean, and three miles southwest from the bay, so I wouldn't have gotten any of the lovely coastline.

Anyway, here's what I have so far. The streets will take a lot more time.