Per Quenten's suggestion, I have been playing with the Line Styles for the roads. I didn't try creating a custom one, but I did try some of the other presets, and they didn't really work. I also tried checking the Paper Scale checkbox, and that had weird effects when I zoomed in.

Here's an attempt that sets the roads to be solid and leaves the guided routes as dotted lines. I like that it makes it a bit clearer which ones are actual roads. I will also put it in my WIP gallery to make it easier to zoom in. Thoughts?

I have been looking forward to seeing what you do since you first claimed Elkton.

Also: DD4 things! Squeeee!

Well, I was going to make a twist of Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") phrased more like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"):

A secret grand design is indistinguishable from stupidity.

The truth is...just a clumsy attempt to recreate from a much bigger parent map that was itself derived from a much, much bigger parent map.

This is the parent map I took it from (Gongodûr is in the lower right):

And this is the section parent map that this whole 1,000 x 1,000 mile section comes from:

When I downloaded the FCW for the parent map, it said there were green mountains there, which I took to mean vegetation-covered hills and small mountains.

So no real grand design, just an over-exuberance in trying to add more detail from the parent map and slip in some mapping/adventure hooks.

Here is "Basement 3" for the whole area -- beneath the mansion, the graveyard, and the church. It shows both the municipal sewers as well as secret places carved out of the rock.

Secrets Hidden

The built-out area in the upper left in below the mansion and the rocky outcrop it stands upon. The broken-down part of the sewers, in the upper middle section, are beneath the ruins on the main outdoor map. Whatever destroyed the buildings there also caused damage to the sewers below, damage that has not been fixed. The stairs near the center of the map ascend into the area below Briarheath Tomb, the family tomb in the center of the graveyard. The portions of the sewers that jut out from the main sewer lines are portions that go beneath the houses on the first map.

I still have more furniture and stuff to add, and then I will write up an explanation of everything that is happening in this sophisticated criminal enterprise.

Secrets Revealed

This version shows secret doors and passageways. From the mansion, you can descend through secret passageways and stairs down to a third basement, which has a secret access to the sewers. From the sewers, you can then pass through one of three other secret passageways to another built-out area that includes stairs rising into the area beneath the Briarheath Tomb. You'll recall from earlier in this thread that the area beneath the tomb also includes a secret passageway to the church. That allows those in the know to be able to clandestinely travel between the mansion, the church, and the graveyard, though it requires hiding from sewer maintenance workers when using the sewers to travel between disconnected secret sections.

When the mapping is all done, I am going to write this up like a proper D&D campaign module.

Added in bridge and cliff shadows. Writing up the description, and then I think I'm about ready to convert to Autumn, Spring, and Winter.

Tremendous work -- and C.C.'s second annual this year!

In my Dwarven Mining Village and also the interior for the Temple of Fah, I not only had color key cutouts on so many sheets, I would also often copy the same colored polygon onto multiple sheets to have it cut through multiple sheets to get to a sheet far below. That was necessary when I had a sheet with a bevel effect on top of another sheet with a similarly-colored terrain because I had to add “anti-acne” sheets with a contrasting color in between them. Color key had to cut through all of them.

Added a bit more to the haunted mansion and its environs, including populating the graveyard more and adding some low-hanging fog for atmosphere. I didn't want too much fog, but enough. Let me know whether it works. I can always add a transparency effect to soften it more. Of course, the real test of whether it works will be when I set it to be nighttime.

This is the Mike Schley version. For the water, I used two different shades of his "sludge" water to show that it was muddy. For the shadows under the trees, I copied all of the trees to a "Tree Shadow" layer, used the RGB Matrix effect to turn it grayscale, and then added a transparency effect. The stumps come from Mike Schley's Woodcutter monthly, though I might have gotten the roots portion from Creepy Crypts. I can't remember! The cottage is supposed to be elevated on posts so that it doesn't get flooded during storms.

With Tree Canopy Shown

With Tree Canopy Hidden

No, they’re actually Fog symbols from Creepy Crypts! I had to make them 4 times larger because they’re sized for a dungeon, not a city.