I know not everyone likes to provide typed notes to go with their Atlas maps, and that's fair enough. However, and partly I suppose because I've been designing RPG scenarios with both maps and written descriptions since I first discovered the original D&D booklets, it's something I like to do. I find moreover that both facets work together to create more detailed settings overall. So it wasn't a huge surprise that when I began typing-up my notes for this map yesterday, I started realising I'd missed something in the floorplans.

So, a bit of extra drawing, moving things around and so forth, beyond what I was anticipating in my comments here earlier, and now we have this version - normal first, then with the secret cave below:

Most of the changes are along the top row of drawings, with a few "missing teeth" scattered across the roofs now, and adding the chimney stacks, but they're mainly in the central plan, where we have an entire Loft and a new access door from the South Tower now. The Loft doesn't extend right out to the edge of the tiled roof, because I wanted to show only where access is practical - often just as a crawlspace - for creatures the size and form of a typical adult human, something that'll be explained in the notes.

Further tweaking is still required of course, and I'm sure I'll spot other things that need adjusting before this is done, aside from finishing-off typing in the notes. That got sidetracked when I decided I needed to add the Loft! Plus this is already the third iteration of how the Loft should look, as things developed and changed along the way. "Color Key" is your friend when suddenly deciding you need a major rejig of this sort, is all I can say!

Not sci-fi, since they were all done for the Nibirum Community Atlas, which is all fantasy mapping, but they were done in the general style of planetary-system mapping, so may still be of interest. However, I did a series of maps for said Atlas back in 2018 - Forum thread here, Nibirum Solar System start page here, with a sample map to give you an idea, just for the inner planets:

All these maps are also in my Forum Gallery here.

This is the link for the Cartographer's Annual issue JimP mentioned, although as you'll see, that's intended primarily for drawing a randomly-created night sky as seen from a specific planet.

However, you could use the same procedure as in that Annual issue to construct a random basis for your galactic-scale star systems map. That was done using the Symbols In Area command. Resident mapping expert here Remy Monsen presented this as the last of his 52-week Command of the Week series of written tutorials that ran throughout 2017. You can find that article on the Forum here.

Of course, all that would do would be to place an appropriate number and type of symbol randomly over whatever area of your map you'd chosen. It would then be up to you to decide what the details were for each system (though by using different symbols, and assigning types of detail for each symbol on a separate key list, you could make a start on that process).

Symbols In Area is a useful tool in many respects, because you can vary all the random parameters as much as you like, and by drawing different areas, you can add different populations of symbols to different places. For instance, if you wanted a greater density of star systems in one place than another - along a galactic arm, say - you could just draw a suitable polygon shape wherever you wanted the arm to be, and then add a selection (or selections) of symbols to that area alone.

GM's Day today seemed an apt moment for another progress update for this project, which is continuing, if having been somewhat interrupted at times by external events since my previous post. In the interim, the handwritten notes for the place have reached area 168 now!

However, today's notes focus on the re-explored parts of Dendorlig Hall, which, as mentioned earlier, comprise areas 50-66, 93-110 and 143-146. These have been allocated the same red numbering colour as the reoccupied "Village" section (areas 1-49), as also discussed before, while the unexplored bulk of the underground complex has been numbered in black. This illustration shows the south corner of the map, covering all the "red" areas now, as well as the nearby "black" ones (and remember, south is now towards the top right corner of this map as viewed here, north towards the bottom left; the Water Temple area, 17, in the top right corner, handily provides a reminder of the cardinal directions with its arrowhead-shaped sub-chambers).

Note that only the red numbers have been adjusted to better fit their locations on this image so far. I've been amending the number-placements beyond this only as I've been typing-up the notes, as well as making occasional amendments to the room layouts, and that type-up still lags considerably behind the hand-scrawled descriptions, by about 70 areas currently.

Next here are the extracted notes as a PDF for just the re-explored zone. In the final full PDF and text notes, it's intended they'll follow along directly after the "Village" notes that I posted here last time, and will then continue into the unexplored parts as well (so you may need to re-read parts of last time's PDF to get these new notes to make sense; or what sense they may make at this stage, anyway...):

As before, these are just the draft notes, and haven't been fully checked as yet, so may be subject to changes later, but they will give some ideas as to what's been happening.

From the original map alone, it's long been clear that some areas of variable shapes, sizes and connections, have mutual links or locations that suggest a main purpose or function - that's what prompted the whole reoccupied "Village" concept initially, for example. From that base, it's followed naturally that the Hall area, far from being a random dungeon (even if that's how it began!), was really an underground town or city-sized settlement originally, and one which had been expanded and adapted at different times. Hence we have places such as the Arena (66, whose ancillary rooms extend into the unexplored zone as well) and the Stone Garden (143) from the latest PDF notes. Elsewhere, there is already a former nightclub-like entertainment venue, with a separate dance-hall/plaza, a communal swimming pool, a royal palace, and the royal tombs, with other features noted for possible inclusion that are still to be emplaced subsequently. Some of these have been inspired by the random Wizardawn room descriptions; sometimes those descriptions have dovetailed beautifully into what I'd decided the areas were to be, without first checking the notes (which always raises a smile), although much remains to be finally defined.

More when I know what it is!

Hex 005, Ljungby Village. There is no established pattern for settlement maps in the official Shadowdark supplements as yet. Individual buildings and small groups of structures tend to be shown on maps identical to those used for subterranean areas, without illustrating the broader regions beyond them. Naturally though, in selecting something suitable for the Atlas, I was going to stick with a black-and-white style, and selected the Annual 100 Black & White Towns option as suitable for all these smaller settlements.

The Shadowdark main rules do provide random systems for generating settlements and places of interest therein however, including the general layout for roads and districts, which is what I used for all the settlements here, although because I'd already mapped the surrounding region, some adjustments and additions were needed. These systems don't provide details on population size or the number of non-interesting buildings, so for those, I turned to an old standby, my trusty, if slightly worn, "Village Book 1" from Judges Guild back in 1978, as this has mechanics to generate numbers of shops, etc., based on a randomly-rolled population size. I simply back-calculated a rough population size based on the points of interest already chosen, which allowed me to estimate a number of additional properties for each place.

I ran into a few difficulties with the chosen mapping style, as the Grass and Road Dirt bitmap fills come out very weak and faint (the Road Dirt one especially), and are scarcely visible on an image of the map, despite experiments in adjusting the settings. The alternative road tools use the Road Stone fill, which is somewhat harsh. As I wanted the roads to look more like tracks here, I compromised on something that could be seen on the final image OK, if still looking a bit too "stony", by adding a Transparency effect to fade the lines down, without using the original Edge Fade, Inner effect, as that seemed to be part of the problem making the Road Dirt fill effectively invisible.

Symbols for the buildings needed tweaking to get them to reasonable sizes (the standard size for some is fine for sheds and similar, but a bit too small for houses), and the typical problem with a number of the "City" styles cropped up, in that houses drawn using the drawing tool stand out far better on the map than those from the symbol catalogue. I simply drew the buildings that needed highlighting with the drawing tool, saving the symbols for everything else. Chimneys were added by-hand, helping to indicate occupied properties (sheds and barns were left without). The area is about 69 degrees South latitude after all, so no chimneys was never an option!

This style uses the AquilineTwo font as standard. However, I found this wasn't clear enough to properly read the labels, so switched to Primitive in all cases here, which meant amending two of the symbols as well, the scalebar and the compass indicator, to switch fonts. With luck, this all should mean the subsequent maps are a little easier to achieve.

And so to Ljungby itself:

One advantage with using Transparency on the road fills, is it makes the ford on the Swirl River look more "ford-like". I also chose to add the series of small plots in the lower right corner as the start of the nearer farmlands, and to represent small-holdings used by the villagers. There are a few sheds and barns scattered about there as well. I found adding sheds nearer the village proper started to make it feel too cluttered, with the scatter of trees and shrubs. Adding some sketchy contour line symbols north of the river helped indicate the land was rising that way, for all these need to be placed as free from other map features as possible, or they quickly become lost - hence why there isn't another south of the river. The eye's natural tendency to fill-in gaps helps the illusion here.

The other significant additions beyond what randomness had provided included the mill, with the miller promoted also to be village mayor. There's a dodgy bakery (which rumour has it may be the source of the rat problems north of the river...), so I felt a mill would be useful as well. The Market Place was a bit too blank, so it received a Toll Booth for collecting tolls from the market traders, and a well for arriving draught animals.

Only nine more to go!

It's pretty much standard practice in a lot of real-world cross-sectional mapping to vary the line direction like this, often to follow a specific passageway, or series of linked passages and caves. The purpose of the cross-section is to provide useful detail that's not so easy to identify on the plan-view map, so any line that works best to show that is appropriate.

Indeed, if you take a look at the PDF mapping guide for CA7, Caves and Caverns, this is exactly what Ralf (I think?) did in drawing the sample cross-section for that cave using the modern cave mapping style.

Sometimes, it may even be helpful to use more than one such cross-section.

Looking at the cross-section on your first map above here, while it's interesting, in pointing out how variable the levels are in different parts of the cave system, it's not all that helpful, since it implies other parts of the caves may be at similarly variant levels, without indicating what those may be.

In some cases this may be of merely academic interest, where caves aren't directly linked to one another and are some considerable horizontal distance apart, for example. However, where the passages and adjoining caves are at different vertical levels, it can be much more important - i.e. if a passage enters in the ceiling of the next cave, say.

It may also be useful to add some cross-sections of individual passage segments next to the area on the main plan view too. For instance, there are a couple of clear choke-points towards the SE end of the narrow, SE passageway. This suggests they're more or less impassable, yet there's a mapped cave beyond them, so there must be a way through, if perhaps only a crawl-space. A cross-section of just the choke-points on that passage next to the narrowest parts would help clarify that.

Which brings us to the last map in this group, covering the eight "ways":

While the seven streets were constructed randomly from the simple system I'd devised and used previously, the railway needed some further adaptations, reducing the angles turns and junctions could have, and such like. In drawing the final maps, I kept the roads deliberately free from as much obstruction as possible (vegetation and the proximity of the properties along each), since the essence of Travelling Places relates to movement. In the accompanying notes, I've suggested GMs should allow speedier normal movement when using any of these routes, as long as the party sticks to the way itself. And naturally, there are oddities. Such as the large, complex building shapes along Candlemaker Row, where sadly, I fear the giant standing candelabra that light this route at night will be barely visible, and likely unidentifiable, at the Forum's resolution on the above maps. So let's try this view instead:

That weird loop in Stave Lane came from the construction process alone, which was a pleasantly amusing surprise when I plotted-out what the dice had rolled for the first time, especially as it made Stave Lane - a name yielding expectations of being straight and direct - one of the most convoluted of Embra's mapped streets!

Heisenberg Terrace, naturally, isn't always there, while the bazaar in Cat Hall is run by a humanoid feline, Shrew Dinger... Go-By Street is easily missed too, without care (aside from being a test for people's knowledge of fantasy literature; a good spot to place The Genuine Magic Shop, perhaps - despite its different author). The literary origins of Everon Road's name might be an easier test though.

As for Runaway Railway, aside from the real-world city of Edinburgh (very loosely the inspiration for some of Embra's place-names, as well as its actual name) being a major railway centre in Scotland, it also has the surviving remnants of a far earlier horse-drawn passenger rail-line, the "Innocent Railway", so I felt I had to include a railway of some sort in Embra. It's obviously short and simple, though as with everything else in Embra, its size can be as deceptive as GMs require. Rather than get bogged-down in detailing the line's operation, I chose to have the rolling stock run by the magical forces of electrickery (see Wyvern Citadel on this, if necessary). Conveniently, the featured text - and remember, these things were chosen randomly! - involved lightning flashes, which made that decision very easy.

A little quicker this time, as the second Barrow map, for the Barrow of the Noble Jewels, had already had much of its layout prepared in advance through last time's "Emerald Guardians" one. This is its "normal" view:

While this is the view with the non-Nibirum passageways revealed:

There was a degree of copying and pasting of items over from "Emerald Guardians" here, including where things had changed since the base map for all three of these designs was laid-out, although I retained the original non-Nibirum wall-line colouring here, as not needing to add the pneumatic tube lines for this map. The Ceiling Lamps are still present in this drawing though. While I did consider moving some about, that really didn't make any sense, as they shed light over a limited area, and with only 20 Lamps to play with, that had already restricted the options in the previous map anyway. I did try to make the exterior sliver on the far left map edge look a little different, and I changed up the look of the railings around the lower level pit in area C, as here, they're meant to be floor-to-ceiling glass or crystal panes, with metal frames, isolating the lower level from the upper walkway completely.

In terms of the contents, most derived from Numenera again, with items and inhabitants both randomly chosen and distributed, although the identical Mysterion makes another appearance, something which, while unstated, gives GMs the opportunity to make things still more weird for visitors from Nibirum who have already met this character previously. There are curious others here as well, including a couple of sort-of, yet not undead, "ghosts", and a superstitious Human Crafter of technology (he's living in a haunted workshop, as he believes it, after all!). Possibly the deadliest creatures are three living-steel spiders, whose web-strands are essentially monomolecular steel threads. They've been set up so opening the door into the chamber they're in will slice off part of the metal door without slowing it, as a warning...

If you'd like to know more, this is the current iteration of the PDF (still subject to final checking and possible revision at this stage):

One more of these identical dungeon layouts to come!

The next, fifth, group of Embra's "Places" is the Hilly Places of Interest, linked from the highlighted "Official Guide" map's inner circle segment:

Quite a packed link-map this time, with six individual mapped places to show, as well as the condensed "Streets", even if just four such routeways had to be set-up on one map this time.

Two neat knotwork designs reworked from the Dover Clip-Art "Celtic Borders on Layout Grids" book provided the focal elements in the map frame design here, once rotated, with a simple linear connecting outline to help highlight them, the curved piece and triangle's slope hinting at upland places at least, although another of the figurative Dover book designs, an eagle, was used on the other "Hilly" maps in this set as a further concession to upstanding terrain.

Continuing the circuit of villages brings us to Embra - Winterise, on the southeastern side:

A neat little village on the road, that seems curiously separated from the narrow River Clack here, with its mysterious bridge that no track leads to, and some equally mysterious ruins atop Gargam Hill. This time, the properties are all of only a single-storey each: