Although some outhouses and latrines are closed systems, some connect to canal drains in Level 2 of the town’s sewers. Stormwater drains from Level 1 help keep things flowing, but water from the town’s aqueducts is needed to supplement during dry weather. This level has wider walkways to make it easier for maintenance workers to address blockages and other problems.

Waste from here flows through chutes to Level 3.

Still to come: I may add some of the rocky texture to outline the canal drains on this level.

I m so happy Ralf did that video. I learned so much, and it really gave me confidence that I would be able to make my maps the way I want without having to trace coastlines. This is really beautiful. I’m going to have to try out the Pete Fenton style.

Sadness! I look forward to seeing this one next week when the technical issues are resolved.

I would love that! Including more dragon heraldry symbols, if the artist is taking requests.

Here are the new steps, each with their own sheet with a Glow (Outside) with a Strength of 12.5% and a Blur Radius of 2. I didn't add the Glow effect to the lowest step, thinking it would be flush with the plaza, but maybe I should add it. I first tried it was a stone fill that was one shade lighter than the plaza, but I think it looks better one shade darker.

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 Also, bear in mind that some of the oldest videos talk about techniques that are now out of date but the fundamentals are still helpful.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.

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.

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

I've been working on a 1000 x 1000 mile part of western Doriant that I adopted. (This is separate from the elvish town in Verinress Arl, Artemisia, that I adopted for the 1000th map contest.) I know that new maps for the Atlas aren't being accepted until October, but that's perfect because it will give me a chance to do more detailed maps of specific settlements and points of interest at the same time.

I previously posted about this map in a previous thread, but I've decided to rename it, so I'm starting a new thread.

If it's okay, I would like to rename this the "Gold Coast," a regional term for an area so named because of the sandy beaches and tawny dried coastal grasses in the summer. It's an area that encompasses a region that includes a predominantly human kingdom of Vacuria, the inland human kingdom of Travi, a small elven kingdom to the north called Enía (a constitutional monarchy with a hereditary monarch and an elected Assembly), and a small dwarven kingdom in the southern mountains called the Kingdom of Gongodûr.

I still want to create a Borders drawing tool to draw the borders of each kingdom, but for now, this is what I have:

I have discovered that naming things is one of my bigger challenges. For several years, I've been maintaining a list on my phone of fantasy RPG character names, some of which could just as easily be used as place names. I also tried an old trick I used for naming gods in different pantheons in my campaign world: pick a language available on Google Translate and then look up words to find something tweakable for the god. (For a Thor-like god, for example, I might look up words for thunder, lightning, storms, etc. to find a word that could be modified a little to be a name.) And I also found a Wikipedia list of small towns in England and tweaked them (like changing the suffix from -ford to -port). And there are also a whole lot of patterns: a river that flows from a mountain may take its name from the mountain, and the village beside the river might as well.

Questions:

1. What did I miss that should be named?
2. Do you have any changes to recommend for fonts, font colors, or sheet effects on text labels?
3. Any other thoughts?

Here are some zoomed-in views to make it easier to see. In the future, would be better to post the larger map in my galleries so that folks can zoom in?