So, here are my submissions for this 500th map and anniversary contest, The Summer Palace of the Winter Queen. For the contest, these should be considered as a single entry, incidentally; I'm not trying to "stuff the ballot box" with a multiple series of maps here ?!

There's a WIP thread elsewhere on the Forum which gives more details on this set, and the construction process in places, and if all goes to plan, I should be adding higher-res versions of all twelve maps to the Gallery once I've finished this post here. Never done that before, however, so we shall see!

As there is an additional pair of detailing note files to accompany these maps for their final Atlas versions, as well as the usual Atlas submission notes to provide for Remy, I'll send the full set of FCWs, PDF and text files to @Monsen as a separate private e-mail. The FCW files are though included below, following the rules of this contest.

Note that Palaces 5, 6 & 7 come in two versions, the vanilla B&W ones and those with a blue screen superimposed.

Whew!?

Those of you who follow the RPG world online will be aware already that all kinds of hell have been breaking loose in recent days, regarding the curious acronym "OGL" and its current and future uses. Those unaware of, or disinterested in, the RPG world - you're very fortunate; DO NOT get involved in this morass!

Consequently, a distraction was obviously in order. So I distracted myself away from my latest Errynor map (not sure that was intentional, however!), and was thinking about another recent suggestion from the online RPG world, with the equally curious acronym "D23". Essentially, the original idea behind this, which I think loosely expands to mean "Dungeon 2023", was to set a personal challenge for anyone interested to design a dungeon room a day throughout 2023, to end up with a 365-room megadungeon for those lasting the course.

As you may imagine, people have approached this with varying degrees of optimism, since trying to persist with this for an entire year is quite an undertaking, particularly given how unpredictable the broader events affecting everyone have been in recent years. Quite a number of folks seem to be giving it a trial-run during January, followed by a "we'll see..." beyond that.

Being no stranger to long-term projects, unfortunately, I learnt about this only on Dec 31st last year, which was a bit late to start planning anything! Several ideas have been mulled over since then though, a couple of which might be of interest to some people here looking for a less challenging way to participate in this project - maybe a small dungeon level a month, say, perhaps using one of the free online random dungeon designer systems to generate suitable base maps, or possibly one or more dungeons containing each a dozen rooms. These could be for contribution to the Community Atlas during the year, though some might need an outdoor area map preparing as well, depending on exactly where they'd be located. I'm sure some of our more active area mappers like Quenten and JimP could suggest some potential locations, for instance, if you can't find somewhere satisfactory yourself.

While this list won't be complete, these are the random dungeon generators I've become familiar with in recent times. I'm sure others here can suggest alternatives:

https://dungen.app/dungen/

https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/

https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon

https://www.d20srd.org/d20/dungeon/

https://osricrpg.com/tools/index.php

This latter site, also known as the "Robe of Useful Items", includes the old Wizardawn content as part of it. Wizardawn, as I've mentioned on the Forum before, is no longer available live online. Instead the OSRIC RPG site has a link letting you download an HTML version of the complete old site, which still works in a browser under Win 10 (at least - not sure about Win 11), though it is a little clunky to set-up. It contains a vast treasury of "Old School" style RPG features and random generators created by various people over many years, however.

So, what have I done? (Or should that be clasping-head-style, "On no; what have I DONE?!") Well, thus far, I decided a sort-of D23 dungeon for Nibirum wouldn't have 365 rooms, but 360, because of course Nibirum's year is 360 days long. So I generated a suitably-sized random dungeon using the Wizardawn system. This creates the map from a large series of old hand-drawn dungeon geomorphs, so comes out a little rough-and-ready, with the sort of imprecisions you might expect. Which I then traced into CC3+, along the way deciding I wasn't going to remove all those imprecisions, so not all the walls are quite straight, or always parallel to the one opposite, or wholly symmetrical, and so forth.

On that "Old School" basis - although personally, I still can't get away from the idea the style's quite new-fangled really (I come from still further away in time with RPGs, after all!) - I went with the Old School Blue Dungeon style from Cartographer's Annual 12. This is a very forgiving drawing style, and uses no effects, so despite the 700-foot-square size of the random dungeon, it only took a few days to put together, a bit at a time:

This is still work-in-progress, as even at this blurry scale, I'm sure you can spot some elements that need adjusting. I know I can! And if not, I've uploaded a larger version to my Gallery! Plus, I may want to add or amend details in places subsequently, once the content description is finalised. A symbol key will need adding as well, I suspect. Luckily, the Wizardawn set-up generates a vast amount of text data as well as random maps - albeit the description only has the same number of labelled rooms, and isn't fitted to whatever the random dungeon design plan looks like, so it takes some work to knock that into a shape that makes sense. Which may be where the "2023" facet comes in here!

That's all to come, but for now, it would be helpful if someone could point me towards a place on Nibirum where such a substantial dungeon might be situated. I'd thought about adding it to the existing Community Atlas megadungeon there, but as it's a megadungeon in itself already, that seemed counterproductive. Ideally, I'd like to place it somewhere that already has a suitable overland map at a small enough scale to show where a dungeon entrance could be, and while it's not firmly fixed, the original was chosen for "Mountains" as the nearby outdoor terrain during generation. It would be nice too to set it on a continent/landmass on Nibirum I've not mapped in before - so EXCLUDING Alarius, Kentoria, Ezrute and Peredur ideally (this is not a hard-and-fast rule, however).

There is an exterior entrance in a large cave towards the top right of the map (area 1), which has a heavily-walled military keep-like structure (3), and an external wall with a double door (the north wall of 2), and while I'd imagine the entire structure is no longer used by the people who originally constructed it, or not for the purpose it was first intended, at least, that may be something to bear in mind when looking for suitable sites on Nibirum for this to go.

More details to follow, if all goes to plan.

This is my somewhat unexpected entry for this contest; unexpected as when it was announced I was, and indeed remain, deeply involved with the next part of my Nibirum mapping project for the Community Atlas. As explained elsewhere on the Forum though, once you start having ideas it's difficult to escape their implications...

So, here we have Merry Old Christmas Town, sort-of British-style:

I've added a higher-res version to my Gallery as well, albeit this one's not come out too badly at the usual Forum maximum size, as the style seems to cope quite well with increased anti-aliasing without becoming too large.

Just to clarify, this was prepared using ONLY CC3+; there's been no post-processing of any kind.

Feels slightly weird not to be submitting the map for the Community Atlas as well for once!

After completing Queen Mica's Scintillant Palace for the Community Atlas, I'd intended to move straight on to the next Errynor 250 x 200 mile map. However, it transpired that Remy was going to be busy with end-of-academic-year items through most of July, so I held-off submitting the Palace maps for a while, and ran into some problems myself. Thus I ended up distracted away from mapping for the Atlas for a time, and somehow found myself concentrating on the city of Providence in Rhode Island, as portrayed in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft from the 1920s and 1930s.

There's an astonishing amount of freely-available information to be found about many places online these days, and a project really just for my own interest in identifying some of the locations mentioned in a couple of Lovecraft's tales, soon grew out of hand rather, as these things do, and it became possible to find more and more seemingly obscure spots on older maps of the city, with information from numerous blogs and websites online, and even two quite recent hardcopy "Annotated Lovecraft" volumes edited by Leslie S. Klinger (formally, "The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft", 2014, and "The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham", 2019, both published by the Liveright Publishing Corporation).

Of course, mappers must map, so it wasn't long before I wanted to try drawing some of these findings out in CC3+. After toying with half a dozen possible mapping styles from various of the Cartographer's Annuals, it was perhaps inevitable I would finally select the Cthulhu City style from December 2017, CA132. The choice was complicated by the facts that I needed both a substantial number of rail lines, and some means of indicating the city's topography. While the former don't feature in the Lovecraft stories at all, they're a very dominant presence in the maps from the 1920s and 1930s, although curiously, the Cthulhu City package doesn't have any tools for drawing rail lines (for all there is an illustrative rail station symbol). The topography is, however, a constant presence in both the tales and on the maps - not least as one of the main roads, Meeting Street, is actually broken in one place where the hillside is too steep, the road ends, and transforms in mid-street into a set of steps instead! Again though, "Cthulhu City" offers no assistance in this respect either.

Luckily, both can be accommodated very easily by simple lines of different colours with maps of this general appearance, and as I'd sourced an excellent map from 1935 by the Geological Survey of the US Department of the Interior, which had a complete street and railroad map superimposed on a 10-foot-contour topographic map, that was always going to be my starting place.

To keep things manageable and as clear as possible, the area involved had to be carefully chosen, and a couple of outlying places of potential interest had to be dropped quite soon in the process as impractically distant from the majority of important sites. Finally though, I arrived at:

Naturally, this assumes viewers will have a degree of familiarity with the Lovecraft tales in question, namely "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "From Beyond", "The Haunter of the Dark" and "The Shunned House", plus one spot which is not derived from Lovecraft, the Milton Hotel in central Providence near City Hall, which came instead from the published "Call of Cthulhu" RPG scenario "The Shadow Over Providence". There's a little more information and commentary in this accompanying PDF though, which may help:

I've also added a higher-res version of the map to my Gallery, and the FCW file is below, should anyone wish to make use of this for their own "Call of Cthulhu" RPG-related activities. It does need the Hamburger Heaven font that comes with CA132, Arial from a standard Windows 10 installation, and the free Copperplate Gothic Light font to view properly:

The next map in the set of 250 x 200 mile areas from "my" corner of Alarius is now ready for the Atlas. It's the one in the lowest left corner of the Errynor region, Map 33:

This map choice was part of the ongoing process of gradually introducing fresh major elements to each new early map. Having completed the corner maps for the deep waters far offshore (Map 01, top left) and the area furthest from the sea (Map 40, lowest right), it seemed logical to proceed with a coastal and shallower water map this time. While Map 8 (top right) includes those aspects, it also has the extra feature of an ice sheet which conceals part of the underlying coastal terrain. Map 33 then more or less chose itself.

The final Atlas FCW map will have toggles to show various viewing options, as usual. Starting with the sea surface view, the first image below has the full map with scales, keys and so forth, while the second is just a close-up of the map, where hopefully more of the labels can be read still at the typical Forum resolution (the map views have been added at a somewhat higher res in my Gallery too):

Labels for the illustrated overland creatures and sea creatures & features can be turned-off independently using more of the FCW file's toggles, as they can make things a bit cluttered, especially when viewing something like this overlay of the latitude and polar auroral lines:

As this image demonstrates, we're in the southernmost part of Errynor, between roughly latitudes 44½° and 47½° North (in the extreme map corners), and that the area is almost all south of Nibirum's Polar Auroral Zone. The aurora can be seen still, and its magical influence detected, across the mapped area, though with a lower frequency than within much of the Zone itself.

Then there are the undersea water column and seabed views, again with two images of each to illustrate the separate map keys as laid-out, and more of just the map's detail. The land creatures are not shown on these:

After setting-up the map template and importing the image files I'd be needing to trace-in all the prepared details, my primary concern was resolving the appearance of the two inshore undersea water-depth contours, something I'd not done before. The deepest sliver of the seabed here, furthest offshore, is that below 100 metres water depth, and the look of that, the region between the 100m and 200m depth contours, had been decided already for the map showing the limits of Deep-Sea Hag Aunty MacKassa's domain, across the junction of Maps 1, 2, 9 & 10. These two new shallow-water contours though took days to complete, after a lengthy battle with the complex RGB Matrix Process in combination with the Adjust Hue/Saturation Sheet Effects, and a few more, ultimately unsatisfactory, ideas that were finally discarded.

A further struggle was getting those three isolated low seamounts, Mount Pleasant, Nereia and Shoaland, to still stand out sufficiently among the kelp and other symbols overlying them. Actually, even getting them to be visible with NO symbols over them proved remarkably difficult, because for all the 30m boundary is clear at the edge of its broad strip off the coast, in smaller patches, that definition is quickly lost. However, those small seamounts are meant to have steep, cliff-like sides, not a gradual slope down, so adding the dark edge glow to them seemed justifiable, and made them stand out against the 30-100m water contour band's colouring better, albeit adjusting that "cliff" colouring and size took almost more time than resolving the colouring of the two inshore depth contour bands!

Among the preparations for the map ahead of time was how places were to be named on the land and sea surface view. This was to be using a minor variant of Old English for the local overland dialect of the "Common Tongue". Some of the terms will be likely obvious enough, simply with different spellings and pronunciations - "Sae" is clearly "Sea", for instance, and "Byht" = "Bight". Others may be less-so, such as "Thyrs" meaning either "Giant" or "Demon" depending on context, or "Slaep", which means both "Miry" and "Slippery". The PDF notes accompanying the map will explain more, with translations for all such names.

As for what's meant to be going on here on land and at sea, well there's a quite complex interweaving of activities, mostly associated with the map's resources of coal and mercury (locally "kwikusiolfor", quicksilver in translation, hence Siolforland = Silverland), mining and shipping both out as trade commodities, with the problems of distance and what might also want to seize the goods, or the humanoids and creatures doing the transporting, along the way. The exports are going primarily to the Goblyn Realm of Arkant to the north, a journey of about 900 km, 550 miles, by sea, or at least 650 km, 400 miles, by road. Some also pass east over land to and through the Spiney Ridge Mountains, which start around 550 km, 350 miles, away, over rather poorer roads and even more hazardous lands.

The PDF again has more details, including about the local Orcs, the Siolforfolk, who gain their wild magical abilities from being able to tolerate the presence of mercury without problems or side effects, and the difficulties of the ongoing civil war in the undersea Kachayan (or Sea Devil) Veshn Province. Oh, and there's a Gold Dragon with a fascination for the activities of humanoids across this region.

Incidentally, for anyone peering at the land place-names and wondering how they originated, or those who might be thinking one or two seem vaguely familiar, it's a distinct possibility most derived from real-world place-names in the former coalfield areas of Northeast England (many of which also have modern names determined by their Old English originals)...

In the series of small dungeon maps I've been drawing this year in my sort-of Dungeon24 project, the next was the first rolled-up using the Explorer set of Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph Dice designs. The Explorer set is one of the earlier in the Dungeonmorph range, so it doesn't have an accompanying descriptive book. As I'd been having some discussions with a few folks about the whole Dungeon24 concept on the Arcane Library Discord (Arcane Library is the publisher of the new Shadowdark RPG) just before starting this map, I thought it might be fun to use the numerous random tables in the Shadowdark rulebook to generate the contents for it.

Shadowdark greatly encourages making things as unique as possible - so creatures might get unusual abilities or quirks, and perhaps as importantly, their own motivations, all of which helps encourage role-playing, of course. That process was fascinating, and, with a little bit of tweaking here and there, is how the dungeon became "The Mirror Maze of the Shrouded King". It has quite a selection of undead creatures within.

I'd also randomly decided earlier that it would be placed somewhere in the Godtagel area of northeastern Peredur:

Peredur's one of the Atlas continents that's been quite heavily mapped in places so far, so I was hopeful I'd not be needing to prepare an extra area map as well this time. After quite a search (as indeed, a lot of spots have maps here already), I found somewhere that seemed vaguely suitable, a delightful spot by the name of Lich Land:

When I drilled down into the map for this area, I had a few problems finding somewhere suitable to choose, as while the pictorial drawing style used for the Lich Land map has its own charms, it has a tendency too to sometimes present the places on it as very over-sized for the map scale, which makes finding somewhere a small dungeon map can be dropped-in rather difficult. In the end, I went with what seemed the least-worst option, if not wholly ideal, a blank spot in some mountains where luckily nothing else had been sited. To give some impression of the scale of the whole mapped area, the orange square that marks my selected location is one mile per side:

Shadowdark makes use of clear, black-and-white, hand-drawn maps with dot-shading for where the solid rock is in subterranean areas. That was definitely something I wanted to try for this dungeon map, although none of the available black-and-white styles for CC3+ really quite capture that look, especially for the shading.

What I decided upon was the OSR Dungeon style from Annual 97, as although many of the floor and rock-shading textures in that are too densely-packed with lines to fit this concept, there were other features from it I thought would work to give a closer approximation to the cleaner Shadowdark map look. And this is what I came up with:

The dot-shaded look was achieved first by laying down a base smooth polygon using the "Stones" fill texture, and then adding random selections from the two "Gravel" symbols over that on a separate sheet, all placed by hand, which allowed variable densities of such shading nearer the outer wall lines, and within the design, where rock pillars had been left in the Mirror Maze section particularly. The Stones texture had to be rescaled in the drawing to better fit the size of the Gravel symbol dots, which was pretty straightforward, and the whole does give quite a nice hand-drawn-like look to the shading.

I did experiment briefly with the Fill with Symbols and Symbols in Area commands, which often can take a lot of effort to get right. However, they both would have added many extra symbols to the map, most of which would have gone unseen as hidden below the floors, to give a similar density pattern. This way, I only had to add enough symbols to "spray-paint" those areas that needed it, and had far better control over the final appearance.

The thin grid squares on the clear floor is another deliberate choice, as this is a regular feature of Shadowdark maps, hand-drawn lines that provide a - usually - ten-foot grid scaling, while still looking somewhat like a flagstone floor texture, with occasional extra small marks suggestive of little bits of floor debris. There are some "Floor Tiles" textures in the OSR Dungeon style that have a similar look, although when scaled-up enough to give 10-foot squares, their lines look too thick, and the textures' highest resolution isn't sufficient to get a neatly clear appearance at that increased scaling level, unfortunately. Thus I simply made do with a standard 10-foot grid set above a plain, untextured floor polygon. It is a little unfortunate this'll be hidden on the Atlas images, as it's really part of the drawing, though at least it will be available for those with access to the FCW file, as well as on the Forum here.

I did need to add a compass pointer from the CA 160 Inked Dungeon set, as the OSR style doesn't have one, and even that had to have its letter-marker replaced, as the original font in the symbol jarred with the Primitive font from the 2015 OSR Annual. That just took a simple edit of the symbol to accomplish for this map only, however.

The Maze from the Inkwell dice design, of course, is what drew me to the Lich Land map, and I sort-of reused the "Trapped Soul" area-map concept from Lich Land in the Mirror Maze idea here, making it the reason so many variant undead are to be found in the Tomb Chamber; basically, they can't get out because of the Mirror Maze. There are hints in the map legend as to what Shadowdark is capable of helping to create, such as the "Muttering Lich" and "Radiant Holy Wight". Plus I added a few ideas of my own, generated because of what had already come up randomly, thus the Tomb Chamber contains the folk, now as undead, from the Shrouded King's formerly living inner court circle.

Normally, I'd just set-up descriptive text and PDF files to go into the Atlas to accompany the map. However, because this was created with heavy use of Shadowdark elements, I prepared a variant PDF that has the usual write-up, plus rules-specific notes on the creatures that aren't identical to the standard versions, monetary values for the treasures, and a couple of other items for those wanting to reuse it for Shadowdark games. I'll be adding that to the Arcane Library Discord in due course, but for those who aren't on there who might find it useful, this is a copy of the file:

Next time, I'll be staying in Peredur to find a spot to place the second "Explorer" dice dungeon, down in the southern region, somewhere in Haddmark...

This map was another "two-dice-only" design from the Inkwell Ideas "Delver" set, thus similar in size and proportions to the Oracle Temple one previously on Kraken Island in the Forlorn Archipelago. One novel aspect on this occasion was I found a convenient area map in the Serkbergen region of Peredur into which I could place it, which was unusual in this project so far! This was just as well, since Peredur's quite large anyway, and the Serkbergen map covers a substantial chunk of its southwest.

If you peer closely at the orange outline square near the top right on the Serkbergen map image, you'll see where I was aiming towards. A closer view:

That's the area covered by the Ermite Cave map, and as luck had it, there were some interesting unlabelled mountain spire features near the middle of that map I could simply drop my little dungeon map into:

So I did!

I've mentioned before that ideas for what the contents for each of these maps will be come from various places, typically a combination of what the diced map designs look like, any descriptions available from the accompanying Inkwell Ideas books, a range of random tables from various sources, and where the map will be located on Nibirum. Here, it was the influence of the high southerly location (within Nibirum's Antarctic Circle, roughly 71°S latitude), coupled with the name of Vaettir Tower about eight miles south of the Mine. Having picked-up a copy of Free League's "Vaesen" RPG last year, and a copy of the illustrated book by Johan Egerkrans that inspired it, also called "Vaesen", I knew what "Vaettir" meant from Scandinavian folklore, so I thought that source would be a good place to look for further thoughts. A couple of ideas came from the Inkwell book too - including having undead creatures out for revenge in what's marked as "Cells" on the map, and the dangerous state of some of the caves, although the risky look of the caves on the dice designs had already indicated this latter point as of some significance. I flipped through the Egerkrans book, and settled on the Mine Guardian Spirit, or Gruvrå, as the main actor in this place, although unfortunately, this is one of the creatures in that book which didn't make the cut into the Vaesen RPG (or hasn't so far). So I simply elaborated on what was said about her in the folklore tome instead. A couple of random rolls on tables from Monte Cook Games' "The Weird" - creating a gem-studded, tattooed Golem with a horned cat's head - and everything started to fall into place!

What I came up with, detailed in the map notes for the Atlas, as ever, is an old Dwarf Mine that ended up abandoned, and which was then expanded and altered by a group of inventors and alchemists determined to create a "better" Golem, using body parts from captured humanoids, possibly making them a variant kind of magical undead in the process (hence the need for a secret lair). After the Mine was abandoned, the Gruvrå's attention went elsewhere in her realm (which I decided would encompass all those interestingly spire-like mountains arcing away towards the Myconid Realm on the area map), so it was only sometime later she returned to the old Mine. Horrified at what she found there, she destroyed the Laboratory and Workshop, and drove out or killed the perpetrators. It's really easy to anger a Gruvrå if you fail to show one the proper respect. However, she didn't understand the undead creatures, so just left them, and the last Golem as well. Plus of course, she now keeps a closer watch on this old Mine than she used to.

I also felt I needed a CA3 portrait of the Lady in question, now named as Igrid, thus creating a thumbnail that could be added to the map, as the perceptive among you will have realised already! This is the full portrait, which was heavily influenced by the Egerkrans drawing:

The keys and bats came from the old vector CA, since CA3 doesn't include such features. I might have added a lamp too, but neither version of CA has one of those, sadly. The bats I decided are essentially merely small aspects of the Lady, able to flit about quickly, to help keep her better informed of events in her realm. They're not "real" bats beyond that. If she appears in a black dress, that's a sure warning of impending death for someone; grey like this is her normal attire. I decided against providing that change as an option in the Atlas map though. Seemed a bit too grim.

In case anyone's unsure, the Mine map was drawn using the SS4 Mike Schley Dungeons set. I've used this before, though not for a long while, and thought it would work nicely for the somewhat dangerous, partly collapsed layout here, as it has such a fine collection of rubble and rockfall markers, aside from other features. Thanks to the Gruvrå's colouring being very greyscale overall, I did want a more washed-out, aged and worn look to the map as well, so this all just seemed to work ideally for that impression. I also wanted it to be a little off-kilter, so you'll notice the squared areas don't quite fit to the grid lines. That's quite deliberate, and isn't simply a means to annoy those using the map in VTTs - that's just an added bonus 😉!

For the next map in this sort-of Dungeon24 set, I'm being randomly guided back to Alarius, and this time quite close to my "usual" territory there, as it's to go on the adjoining North Central Alarius map...

As mentioned recently in another Forum topic, the next of my 40 250 x 200 mile maps detailing the Errynor area of NW Alarius on Nibirum is now ready for submission to the Community Atlas. Despite becoming "distracted" into preparing more additional maps for the first Errynor map than I'd expected initially, Map 01 - The Cliff, I decided to continue with the next one in the order I'd originally intended, by switching right across the map to its opposite, lower right, corner:

Beyond that though, much of the pattern for the mapping - using the Herwin Wielink style, some Cartographer's Annual 62 Geometry varicolor symbols, the Cagliostro (from the 2017 CA), Candara and Gabriola fonts, the latter both from standard Win 10 installations - had been set already by Map 01. There were though some differences. This time, I'd be mapping the most landlocked area in Errynor, not one that was almost entirely under the sea. While that simplified the number of different map views I'd need to create, because - clue in the title "Faerie Land" - I wanted to illustrate the effects of the two overlapping realms, the Mortal one and that of Faerie, it didn't reduce them to zero.

The initial layout was fairly straightforward, and largely involved hand-copying the details from the Errynor map area above into the template for this new map, with additional items from the hand-drawn original as discussed in the "Construction" topic. There things rather stalled though, as I realised I needed to work out details on what the Faerie influence areas were going to look like and exactly where they were going to be. Plus I also suddenly had lots of features that clearly would benefit from being named.

The Faerie areas were relatively easily worked out by simply hand sketching some ideas on a tracing-paper overlay to the original squared-paper map, and I already had some feature names from my decades-long work with earlier versions of Errynor that could be reused.

However, you know me and my fondness for random design mechanisms... One of the early Judges Guild printed works I got was their "Village Book 1" tome, from 1978, and in that is a system for generating random village names. Up to 368,000 of them! The names will work perfectly well for other sorts of places too, with the addition of terms such as "Wood", "Forest", "Marsh", "River", "Brook", etc. So I rolled up a long list of possible names. Each series of rolls generates a two-part name, prefix and suffix, effectively, though you can add more parts to vary things from time to time too. Not every combination works well, as you might imagine, but the names can be subtly altered, or only one part used, or merely used as inspiration. I was pleasantly surprised to find most were actually very suitable for what I wanted; some that seemed obvious, some a little odd, some that could be humorous, some a warning, many intriguingly evocative, much like looking at a map of real-world places in fact. So here we have Map 40, complete with place names:

And a close-up of just the NE corner to show a bit better detail at the usual Forum resolution:

If all goes to plan, there should be a toggle in the Atlas FCW version to allow access to the latitude lines, and an arc indicating the southern limit of Nibirum's polar auroral zone, too:

That slightly offset-from-the-corner compass rose is to allow for the numerous creature markers and labels in that corner, as elsewhere across the map, to be shown (again, another Atlas version toggle is intended to allow these to be displayed or hidden):

Which looks rather messy at this resolution, so another close-up may help, this time over in the NW map corner:

Plus of course, there needs to be a map key as well:

The areas where the Faerie realm overlaps most strongly with that of the Mortal plane can be shown via a further pair of toggles to indicate the core areas, and the maximum extent of the overlap on a few special nights each year. The following images are of those whole-map core areas and a close-up of the separated patches west of the great Faerie Run river, followed by the line of the maximum Faerie overlap extent:

These can be shown combined with any of the other toggleable map overlays, and for anyone concerned at the lack of a scale, that's because to try to improve the resolution, I've shown just the map rectangle here till now. This is how the map really looks:

The complete layout is then this:

The Atlas will also have a 23-page PDF, and a text version, with its accompanying detailed notes, explaining a little more about the settlements and the significance of some of the creatures and resources.

I haven't quite finished with Map 40 yet either, as the River Clack valley with the great Faerie city of Embra (see the first of the detail maps above, the NE corner one, for these locations) is to receive some further mapping in the Atlas shortly too.

This map details the subterranean lair of the blue-scaled Kobalt tribe - essentially D&D's Kobolds - in the central uplands of the Isle of Zariq. 

As commonly with my Community Atlas mapping, I opted for a random aspect, here regarding the layout of the caverns, which came from the Curufea's Random Cave Map Generator website. This online system creates its maps from electronic versions of tiles from the huge array of those drawn some years ago by artist Ed Bourelle of SkeletonKey Games (DriveThru RPG link). I like SkeletonKey's earlier tiles, as they have an appealing clarity, and allow the construction of more varied layouts and settings in a consistent style than just about any other set of printable tiles I've come across. The Curufea system shows you exactly which tiles from which set have been used should you need to rebuild the layout as actual printed tiles, plus the PDF images in the original files can be copied and pasted into other programs to set up a GM's map showing precisely what the final layout will look like. In my pre-CC days, this was a real boon!

For this map, I decided to try some large-area random options, and saved one of those that looked especially promising for what I needed. 

Of course, this random map ends up square, while the nature of the tiles means there will be several unconnected segments shown for almost all such layouts. However, by importing this base drawing into the CC3+ template, making several copies of it, rotated and moved around so different segments could be married up in the final version, something closer to what was required was achieved.

The map was always going to be quite complex. Having had a long fascination with kobolds, albeit initially in the form of the British folkloric mining goblins, I've been pleased to see how D&D's miniature draconic humanoid versions have developed under the system's 5th edition, with elements of those folkloric creatures incorporated. In particular, my ideas for this map were heavily influenced by the discussion and kobold lair map in Volo's Guide to Monsters (Wizards of the Coast, 2016, pp. 63-71). So there were to be wriggling, winding tunnels, sometimes crossing each other without linking at different vertical levels below ground, chambers with various functions, and many traps.

As another part of my Community Atlas mapping efforts has been to explore different styles, I opted for the Modern Cave Mapping style from the Caves and Caverns issue of the Cartographer's Annual, CA7 from 2007. Which allowed the creation of the map: 

The layout was scaled and designed to fit to the locations on the Zariq map, as far as such things can be when translating pictorial side-view symbols into physical areas on a top-down plan. Consequently, the whole should be seen as sloping up gradually, if somewhat inconsistently, from the SE (lower right) to NW (upper left). The SE segment, where the entrance is, is set mostly below the "hill" symbol on Zariq, while the bulk of the Caverns lie beneath the "mountain", so the "tower" shown on the mountainside equates with the multi-level rounded cave fitted with a sloping spiral ramp inside at the top left of this map, where the "Tower Guards" symbols are.

While some of the usual Modern Cave Effects were tweaked or changed in places to better suit here, the light brown glow effect for the solid rock was left at its normal level. On a more typical map size, this would make it fade away in the larger enclosed rock areas, and at a shorter relative distance from the outer walls. However, it seemed to work better left like this to me, as it helps to emphasize the narrowness of the tunnels and smallness of the caves. Similarly, the Key labelling was deliberately scaled as larger than necessary to continue that impression. Kobalts are only about a yard/metre tall, and their tunnelling naturally matches their stature. Adding a couple of varicolor Token Treasury symbols made sure nobody might be mistaken about the nature of Kobalts!

The composite method of constructing the final layout where sometimes tiny patches of floor texture had to be added to link passageways, together with larger areas of passage and cave floors to create the illusion of under- and overlying cavern sections, meant the usual method of adding a grid - by copying the entire floor only onto the Hex/Square Grid Layer, and converting the floor fill to a suitably-sized grid - wouldn't work. Or rather it would, but the grid became inconsistent, sometimes with overlaps, across the entire map. After several tries to create a single polygon from these disparate segments, I was still unable to get the whole to work together properly, so opted to cut my losses and simply hand-drew the entire grid instead: 

Yes, it's a three-foot grid. I found a five-foot grid was too difficult to read in the passageways especially, so after a very brief experiment, changed it. As that's a yard, it could be easily restated as a metre-grid instead, though for precision, that's actually closer to 0.9 metres, of course. Well, that was my excuse for not drawing a metric grid as well (that's a h*ll of a lot of lines to draw and trim to entity once...). I did though add the two scales to help in estimating greater distances.

Then I added the traps: 

These were allocated a numerical key whose description, with other details on the Kobalts and their lair, are included in the map's accompanying PDF and text files for the Atlas. The idea is that both the grid and traps will be accessible using toggles in the final Atlas map.

Should you spot a similarity between this map's style and that used for "The Hive" maps I entered for Lorelei's Mapping for Dice competition a year ago, that's partly because they are the same; and yes, my choice for those Hive maps was heavily influenced by having worked on this map some weeks earlier!

If you read through the draft PDF version of my notes on Dendorlig Hall Village, part of the megadungeon/abandoned Gnome city I've been working on this year, which was added to this Forum topic on 18th Feb, you might have spotted I mentioned there a couple of places outside the Hall complex, above ground, including Dendorlig Vale. At the time, I wasn't sure if I'd be mapping that area as well, having already distracted myself far more than I'd intended away from my main focus of mapping the Errynor region in NW Alarius.

This impression wasn't helped by a couple of abortive attempts to design the map during February-March, as although I'd a hand-drawn set of ideas for the area's layout, when it came to the CC3+ mapping, I couldn't get it to look like how I wanted, in the styles I'd thought might work best. There were two main reasons for this. One was that neither of my preferred styles had a complete set of options for the structural features I wanted to add. The other was that the colour palettes involved were rather too close to the Alyssa Faden style, which I'd already used in my earlier Clack Valley map for the Atlas, and I couldn't get past the fact it felt too much like mapping the same place again; daft, of course, as it isn't, but that's what kept tripping me up.

Thus matters rested, and I'd half-decided I probably wouldn't map the Vale area after all, until I saw the brand-new E Prybylski Watercolour style in the just-released CA 196, and realised it would work very nicely for what I wanted! So here it is, still subject to amendments, given the Hall's own mapping remains in-progress only, but I am happy with the overall look now:

It's a very attractive style to my eye, and fits nicely with the somewhat bucolic view I had of the repopulated agricultural lands south of the Hall, peopled by Gnomes and Halflings, hence the names. There's a higher-res version in my Gallery as well, although even at the reduced-size for the Forum, the style seems clear enough already.

Now though, I've got another map to do a write-up for, besides Dendorlig Hall!

So this won't be going into the Atlas immediately, but, and with apologies for the belatedness of the request, @Monsen, could you reserve the Dendorlig Vale area on the Mt Dendorlig Region map in the Atlas for me, please...