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!

The water lines problem looks to be one of the classic issues with too many nodes too close together, in this case because the water drawing tool is set to not extend beyond the map border, and as a smooth drawing tool, it will automatically put a pair of "Corners" at the map border to create the straight line there. A Corner is basically three nodes very close together.

A quick check suggests you should be able to solve this by using the "Advanced" button for the water drawing tool, unchecking the "Restrict to map border" box and then save the tool. Then redraw your river, making sure you draw the ends a little way beyond the top and bottom map edges. DO NOT use the "C" = "Corner" option, just add a few nodes and make the ends of the river outside the map border a bit more rounded, with fewer nodes close together. The screen should hide this once you're done (or if not you can use the COLLAR commands to create a new, larger one - use COLLARDEL first to remove the existing screen, and then COLLARAUTO to add a new one - if I've remembered that right).

Hopefully, that'll cure this point at least. Good luck!

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.

The last of the individual Crossing Places maps covers the part of the Twilight Market here, Slateford Market (with a second view below showing just the map, hopefully for a little better clarity at the typical Forum resolution):

That the road layout and market stall placements look like the wings of a butterfly is not accidental. The original Judges Guild map on which this was based only had the layout on one side of the stream. It was though obvious that a simple ink-blot-style mirror image would produce this more pleasing pattern, thus this segment of the Twilight Market was designed with that in mind. Of course there's a watcher at the ford (from the featured text), and some more of the Mike Schley tree-houses, including an aerial tavern in the bough-structure overhanging the River Clack in the Butterfly Tree, "The Tasty Drop" (also a comment on patrons who miss their footing and end up in the Clack below...).

There aren't any actual buildings here however, simply tents, stalls, awnings, wagons and several open-plan covered spots (including a pair of green-tiled, circular bandstands). The thatched buildings in the treetops are intended as living parts of the trees, so aren't real buildings as such. Or that was my excuse for not providing interior layouts for them anyway!

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.

Thanks very much everyone!

And on Quenten's point, the odd thing is the Character Artist portraits take hardly any time at all, by contrast to other types of map.

It is a shame that Character Artist doesn't get the same kind of updates and additions other parts of the CC3+ program suite do; some variant body and face shapes would be interesting, for instance, though I appreciate that would add a lot of extra work, fitting the various costumes and weapons, etc., to such alternate forms. Still, if you don't ask...

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:

Having thus generated the surrounding wilder lands, it was then time to construct the random, geomorphic-dungeon-designed map, as noted earlier, using the OSR Dungeon style from the 2015 Annual, in the manner established for my immediately prior map, again mirroring that used in the Shadowdark supplements. Since the Inkwell Explorer dice are one of the sets for which no written descriptions are available, I'd had to work up some ideas about the content well in advance, so seeds for some could be planted in the regional Whispering Wastes map. One of the random map designs for this layout was a fairly obvious temple structure, albeit with a curiously crystalline-looking central focus:

Having tried a few random rolls on the main Shadowdark tables, I came up with a cult that spoke only in whispers (which of course ultimately developed into the area's name), but nothing that seemed to match the temple's crystal focus. So I turned instead, and rather by-chance, to a free PDF Shadowdark supplement, created by the online Discord community earlier this year, which allows the design of slightly weird mega-dungeons randomly, on-the-fly. This is called "Shadowdome: Thunderdark" (SD:TD), and was used to create a random mega-dungeon, run through by two teams of players in direct competition, at Gary Con 16 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, USA, in March 2024. 

I began with a few random rolls from tables in SD:TD, and stumbled onto several items with a crystalline theme that way. Some quick adaptations to extract other related features, more random rolls and a few deliberate choices, and suddenly the layout became The Crystal Cathedral of the Whispering Wastes, or "Crystal Cathedral" for short:

This was located, hidden away and hard to find, in Lightning Ravine, Hex 1002, with the Outer Doors opening onto a ledge partway down one of the side-canyons in said Ravine. It was rather fun to watch the whole coming together from what was provided by SD:TD, with some expansions and a little adaptation in places.

Ultimately, the process provided a gigantic creature, "The Shimmering", that was living in the crystal, and which had descended from the stars long ago, sinking into the earth and creating a protective crystalline casing for itself. It had set-up a cult of humanoids (The Shimmering Cult) to provide living creatures it can feed upon, turning them into fresh parts of the crystalline features scattered throughout this little complex, with a view to eventually having sufficient power and energy to return to the cosmos. (Freely acknowledging here influence from Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space", and Nigel Kneale's "Quatermass 2", where even the cult acolytes receive a small "mark".) The cultists become transformed into parts of the crystalline structures eventually, gaining extra powers and abilities along the way. Plus parts of the cult can be found in other places in the Whispering Wastes, as the notes for that map, and this one will suggest. Cultists who are always on the lookout for lone travellers and others who seem unlikely to be missed...

Ordinarily, that would have been that, submission ready for the Atlas, and I'd have been moving on to the next small dungeon map in the series, intended for somewhere in the Feralwood Forest of Alarius. However, while I was finalising the notes for both these maps, Remy Monsen dropped-in the 1,000 Atlas Maps Competition. As noted in my first posting here, the Shadowdark hex-mapping system allows the creation of individual sites as well, including settlements, of which there are ten on the hex map, all village or hamlet sized. As I'd already done the basic layout designs for these in preparing the map notes anyway, I decided to try mapping all ten. Whether they'll all be finished before the contest ends is, of course, another matter. I will complete them, if other things allow, regardless of that though.

First village is to come next - Ljungby (Hex 005)!

The first Crossing Place is Fountain Bridge:

This has a small, scattered village on its central island, for which a toggle in the Atlas FCW file should allow the simple interior layouts to be seen (all have just a single storey):

On this somewhat more detailed view, it may be possible to make out that the two bridges seem a little odd - they appear to be translucent. This is not a mistake, as there are no solid, permanent bridges here in fact. Both are literal water-fountain features. The travellers stand atop one of the square stone bridge abutments, and are then catapulted across in a gentle arc by a tremendous pulse of water. They arrive dry and safe a few seconds later on the opposite abutment - unless someone panics, in which case, they may end up getting wet, or even dropping into the river, to be rescued by the omnipresent water faeries, who think such a thing a tremendous joke! Animals - except magical or Faerie types - cannot use the bridges at all, however. Text and PDF files explain a little more, although Eerie Wood and Eerie House remain as mere mysterious names, to be expanded only should GMs wish to do so.