As these "ghostly" comments may indicate, I'd had a few ideas of my own as to what else could have been happening in the area, partly also drawing on what I'd established for the Sussara Region earlier. One thing I was pretty sure of is that Marshmalika had been the first place attacked when the invaders arrived, given the Bay of Aqesh is a logical landing area, away from the open sea, where storms are more likely, and the most inland section of that would be as good a place as any to begin. I also thought it would be interesting to explore why their main headquarters wasn't on the coast any more, or indeed at an obvious communications centre with a reliable freshwater supply (it's the orange triangle on the Banjar province map in my first post above). Hence the ghosts, which the rank-and-file are most unhappy about. And there are oddly large numbers of poisonous scorpions and snakes where the ghosts are too, which were never found in such profusion previously, or indeed still at other parts away from the old inhabited locations.

So to the small town of Marshmalika itself, or more correctly, its abandoned ruins:

While the style's the same Desert Oasis one as before, other than the sea, I've deliberately muted the choice of other colours here to reflect its ruined status, and had quite a bit of fun creating The Pit and the Pentagram (no, not Pendulum 😉). Hopefully, those will be a little clearer on the higher-res version in my Gallery, and of course, clearer still once in the Atlas. I also chose not to have all the nearby features be on, or fully on, the map, to add to that slightly edgy, uncomfortable feeling, while still keeping it usable as a gaming map. I have to say too, I'm impressed by the versatility of this mapping style, so with just this one Annual issue, it's possible to create a vibrant, living settlement (Sussara Village last time) and an abandoned, ruined one here.

When I started rolling the Inkwell dice sets to generate the base maps for this whole project, I made a few decisions in advance. One was that I wouldn't reuse the same dice-face design twice (I just re-rolled any duplicates), and because I wanted to keep the maps fairly small and manageable, that I'd roll randomly between 2 and 4 dice at a time only. I'd then put together the map based on how the dice fell on the table, once slid together into a whole, naturally. For this "Ruins" set map, I just rolled two dice, and the orange rectangle on this image shows what the dice had set-up:

Most of the major features of the settlement, in fact, as that seemed appropriate. The only real change I made here was that the Temple was originally a group of large, partly or wholly ruined buildings, with trees and an open area in the adjoined block to its right. However, the Desert Oasis style comes with its own ruins, including this one, and it seemed a shame not to use it! The expanded areas were a mix of randomly-rolled options, with logical completions and expansions of roads and trails to fit the landscape around the settlement. Other ruined properties further from the centre aren't shown, as already buried by drifting sand, dust and ash, which is explained in the PDF and text files for the final Atlas version, along with what's going on at the various labelled sites. That House of Bones area is an especially unpleasant reminder that the place was invaded by ruthless folk who cared nothing for the local populace, incidentally (so those sensitive to such things should be warned).

I'm not sure if it's been all this thinking about warfare and ghosts, but my next port-of-call is (as randomly decided) to be on Mate Ora, southernmost of the islands in the Nga-Whenuatoto archipelago, a land where the dead walk, apparently. At least it's still in the southern tropics of Nibirum, so decently warm!

EDIT Feb 3: The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted there were missing internal lines in the Pentagram; images have now been corrected!

@Vir: There are a number of problems involved in understanding climate and how it would behave in circumstances for another planet than Earth with its current layout of continental landmasses, sizes and depths of ocean.

One is we don't really understand how Earth's climate works. There are a lot of theories and models, but many of them fall apart if we try to use them to explain the current Earth in any detail, and/or if we try to use them to explain what we understand about the geological past (this latter is a particularly major problem).

Another is that because we don't properly understand how our own planet's climate operates, when we try to use these theories and models to explain another planet's (and this has happened repeatedly in our own Solar System), they don't really work either.

So the further we get away from the current physical situation for Earth, the more guesswork is involved, essentially. (And there's a lot of guesswork involved in explaining the current situation already!)

Ocean depths different to Earth's create particular uncertainties, as it's clear there are things happening in Earth's deeper oceans that have huge effects planet-wide, but we don't really know why they happen. So when trying to look at a planet like this one, where great areas of the ocean are much deeper over far larger areas than Earth's, it gets to the point of either giving up, or just going with whatever you fancy!

Ocean currents, for example, can flow in completely different directions at different depths - a warm current might be flowing over or under a cold current behaving in this way too. Similar things happen in the atmosphere as well, so while that shouldn't be a surprise, it doesn't mean we really know why things are as they are.

If you need a south to north wind (maybe only seasonally), my advice would be simply invent what seems to you a good reason for why it happens, and if that involves something relating to Earth's climate/weather patterns, possibly only vaguely, just invoke that. If anybody's daft enough to question it, then obviously it's because it's also influenced by the planet's magical field!

If you need ideas based on what happens for Earth, I'd suggest taking a look at places online such as already suggested above here for the geological situation for Earth that's similar to your own planet, with things like the estimates for broad-scale current flows. If you can find a good-quality physical atlas showing similar things for either the past or present (which is a useful definition for "good quality"), that will be just as suitable, dependent on what you prefer.

Having tackled its nominal twin Isle of Zariq, it seemed reasonable to follow-up with the other seamount-tip Isle of Zaraq next, set amid the Frigid or Equine Ocean, about 620 km (385 miles) off the northwestern coast of Alarius. 

As with Zariq, I based Zaraq's appearance on another randomly-generated island from the Red Blob Games website, altered where necessary to suit what was needed here. 

Originally, I'd thought of reusing the Mike Schley overland style from the Zariq map, and reworking that map as the base template for this one. However, part of my reason for participating in the Community Atlas project was to experiment and explore different mapping styles. So this time, I went with the Volcanic Islands style from CA88 for April 2014 instead.

Indeed, I'd intended to use this style for the more volcanically-active Zariq map, till I discovered it doesn't have any actual volcanoes in it! My vision for Zaraq was with a longitudinal volcanic fissure or crustal weak line along the island's N-S long axis, which would only occasionally produce significant fresh lava, more commonly just giving frequent minor earthquakes, small eruptions, or exhalations of smoke and gas.

There were a couple of false starts. This island, like Zariq, is tiny, at about 5¼ km (3¼ miles) long, with "peaks" just 60 m (200 ft) high, so scaling the mountains to look right as sharp-featured hills needed some experimenting. Once that was sorted, the map overall was completed in a fraction the time the Zariq one had needed, largely thanks to the simpler vegetation tools in the Volcanic Islands pack.

That extra mountains-as-hills work had its advantages though, as the look of the symbols reminded me a little of the conchoidal fractures shown by the volcanic glass obsidian, so Zaraq and some of its surrounding islets became endowed with scattered obsidian deposits. These are especially common on Star Isle, which glitters even from a distance, when the sunlight hits it just right!

Apart from the usual wealth of invertebrates, most of the island's inhabitants are seabirds, chiefly when breeding. There are some nasty little lizards with a poisonous bite too, notably in the more northerly of the dense, low-growing, thorny "forests" of the main island, along with some still more venomous giant water spiders that lurk among the marshes surrounding the solitary freshwater lake further north, creatures whose range extends into the northern fringes of the forest cover and across Landslip Bay - they can raft over water using surface tension.

Landslip Bay is the only sort-of safe anchorage for ships, where the best shingle landing beaches lie under the looming cliffs along its eastern shore - hence the name, and remembering the "earthquakes" motif... For some extra spice, there are three deserted structures on the main island's eastern flank, whose natures are noted in the map's accompanying PDF and text-file descriptions. The inhabitants and structures were determined by random rolls using an old set of island generating tables, slightly modified, from the Judges Guild tome, "Island Book One" published in 1978, incidentally.

As for why the structures are deserted, well, the perceptive may recall there was a "Deep-Sea Hag" symbol shown in the lower right corner of Errynor Map 01, which might be related. We'll be coming back to her again, especially towards the end of this set of maps...

The remainder of the maps in this Watery Places set are all of the more usual, larger, size, beginning with that for Silverburn:

Those with a good memory may recollect that the Silverburn is one of the two main tributary streams that join the River Clack at Embra. The Silverburn comes in from the north, while the other tributary, the Wadingburn, comes in from the south. Naturally, this map isn't intended to cover the whole course of the Silverburn, but to highlight an area of the city which is known by that name, and through which the Silverburn does run. Indeed to emphasize the name more, I thought it would be interesting to interpret the featured text as meaning there could be some small amounts of metallic silver in the bed of the Burn here, more of which can be discovered by perceptive or lucky characters in the scattered Silver Marshes and parts of the adjoining Silver Common. That concept was allowed to spill out into others of the named map features here, and although the little hamlet isn't labelled as such, it is generally known as Silverburn too, although the substantial inn of Mabon's Rest is adopted as another name for the place by some. The "Mabon" name derives from Celtic folklore, if slightly reinterpreted in the map's accompanying text and PDF notes, so here Mabon is said to be a youthful god, or a young man who became a deity through his great deeds.

As there are actual buildings on this map for the first time in these Watery Places settings, naturally I wanted to add interiors for them. All are single-storeyed, so only one extra toggle is needed for the FCW Atlas version to display them:

The central, main, part of the Palace complex, consists of the Level 1 map(s) above, and the other four earlier "Hive" maps, with suitable amendments:

One major change was the original "Hive" was a single map, with each of the five levels set-up on a separate Layer in that FCW file. Here, each Level is in its own separate FCW file, as that seemed easier to try to keep things properly organised for presenting in the Atlas (although the Level 1 map still works that way, for its variant "Reality" and "Illusion" versions).

As the accompanying descriptive files suggest, the illusory nature of the Palace might be continued for some visitors, as GMs could prefer, throughout an entire visit here. Although no further illusory versions of the maps are provided, the idea is the level maps would be simply inverted, so as to seem that deeper levels below ground were actually higher buildings and towers, with suitable illusory views across the surrounding countryside and neighbouring parts of the Palace. Naturally, none of the locals are deceived by any of this, and now tend to give the place a wide berth, though less because it's really a giant ant colony than because the Queen, while respected as a powerful Faerie creature, isn't the greatest company over any length of time. Plus honey fungus for a meal or two is fine, but not on its own as a regular diet. Unless you're a giant ant, that is.

Which brings us round to the final South Wing, presented as just a single Level. More or less, anyway, as there are a couple of places where the tunnels pass over and under one another, which again helps give a slightly variant appearance to this map. This time, the base layout came from the DF video that actually launched the very first Burrows pieces, as part of their "Dungeons of Doom" KickStarter campaign in June 2017, "Encounter 14: Khri Colony". The Khri are DF's giant insectoid monsters that make such burrows, incidentally. The final amended layout is thus:

A lower height range seemed suitable for the southern side of the Palace complex, given how the surface view sketch was drawn.

So that concludes the extra maps to go with Errynor Map 40, and by the time you read this, I expect I'll be off mapping some far-flung corner of the region or other. Or is it ALL just an illusion...

As mentioned a couple of days ago, aside from the mapping, I've also been pulling together the notes to accompany this set of maps, so for those who might be interested to know more in advance, here are the general comments from the start of that file, as drafted to date.

No one is quite sure who or what the Winter Queen really is. The rare tales mentioning her suggest she may be a deity or an exceptionally powerful, probably immortal, perhaps Faerie, creature. Few such tales give useful details on her nature, though many cultures in the higher northern and southern latitudes of Nibirum preserve variants or fragments of the stories, where the Queen has numerous alternative, typically apotropaic, local titles. It is clear she is thought to possess great magic, much exceptionally obscure knowledge, and a considerable burden. Humanoid in form, she appears as very tall (around 8 or 9 feet high; 2.4 to 2.7 metres), dressed in a long, hooded robe, with piercing blue eyes, bearing a long white staff or crook taller than she is, and an air of great sadness. Her clothing and physical features are said to alter subtly from one day to the next.

She cannot leave the Palace, and has no control over where it goes, as the Palace moves magically, and instantly, once a day to a new location. It is said to be never in exactly the same place twice, but its location is always in an icy, remote, spot, concealed below the surface. Its solitary entrance, while small and hard to find, has no door (there are no doors throughout the Palace), and can be recognised by the profusion of perfect representations of summer flowers and foliage all around it, made of crystal-quality ice. This summer array of perfect specimens is astonishingly beautiful, all of which objects are very fragile. Damaging any is a swift way to raise the Winter Queen's ire, something the tales strongly warn against.

Wherever the Palace alights and for fifty miles around (eighty kilometres), the weather worsens and turns wintry, if it was not winter when it landed. Sometimes, it settles in the clouds, where it stirs them to winter storms, pouring hail and snow down to the surface beneath in icy gales. Even then, the Palace remains deeply hidden by the clouds, for all it still has its ice-flower-surrounded single entrance.

While some tales allude to it, one reality about the Palace is that the souls of all who have died recently in the frozen places of the world, and all those who have died from cold elsewhere, must pass through it on their way from wherever they were to wherever they may be going. A few may linger in the Palace for a time, and some may become temporary guests or servants of the Winter Queen. The Queen has no control over which may stay or move on immediately, however. She frequently converses with those passing through even so, from which much of her secret knowledge derives. Occasional tales may hint disparagingly that the Queen is merely running a ferry service for the recently deceased.

The Palace changes its form whenever it moves, never the same twice, though always in plan-view having the shape of a gigantic snowflake, with walls, floor and ceiling composed entirely of solid, if at least slightly translucent, crystal-like ice. This is always beautiful, with glittering facets like gems that reflect light on or just within the solid ice surfaces. Somehow, light palely manages to illuminate the whole interior with a soft radiance, no matter how deeply buried the Palace may appear to be. At times, rainbow-coloured beams, arcs and spots may be seen, like haloes in the outdoor sky that are created by refraction of sunlight through tiny hexagonal ice-crystals in thin, high-altitude, clouds. Sometimes such light effects may become dazzlingly bright briefly. The ice walls, floors and ceilings reflect light as well, which in places can take on a mirror-quality surface. Such mirrors can allow glimpses of past or future events and places, memories left by the passing spirits, perhaps. The Winter Queen does have some control over such light, vision, visionary and illusory effects within the Palace.

Queen and Palace are so inseparable because in essence, they are parts of the same thing. Many of the Queen's "servants" are actually living ice-constructs which appear from, and can return into, the inner ice surfaces of the Palace as required, thus too are simply another element of this whole being.

Further progress now, with the contours mostly mapped-in, except for the highest peaks. I felt it was growing less easy to separate the upper contours, so experimented with some colouring alternatives. The range of fill-colour options in this style is very limited, so that meant trying out some effects as well, including one or two I've only rarely tested previously. Naturally, everything remains in flux at this stage. However, this option seemed satisfactory, using a combination of an RGB Matrix Process, retaining the Glow to highlight the contour's edge, and a Blend Mode using the Phoenix setting:

As should be obvious enough, I've also hugely toned-down the contour-edge Glows since my previous post, when I was still trying to get the contour shapes right, and being able to quickly identify which was which was more important. The "woodcut look" of earlier has its attractions, and has been used to good effect in other maps presented on the Forum over the years. It seemed much too strident for the Worthington style's subtle colouring at this scale though.

Whilst blundering about among the effects, I chanced to find there was an inactive Texturize effect on the whole map. Turning it on did nothing obvious, even when I changed its settings. When I looked closer at what file it was reaching for though, the reason became obvious, as the file it was trying to find was located at D:\Programme\ProFantasy\CC3\Filters\Images\CA91 Texture.png. The correct file location for a standard CC3+ installation should be C:\ProgramData\ProFantasy\CC3Plus\Filters\Images\CA91 Texture.png. So I changed that, with this result (without altering any of the default settings):

While quite subtle, especially at this res, it does create a somewhat different appearance, as might be expected, rather like watercolour paper. I do like how it softens everything, even if I'm not sure if it'll stay to the end of the mapping at this point. While mapping, it'll have to stay off for best clarity (as it affects EVERYTHING in the drawing, of course, including the bitmap version I'm copying-in details from).

Further exploration showed a possible reason why this global effect had been turned off (and perhaps forgotten, given the non-standard file-path), as there's also a TEXTURE sheet, which has a Transparency effect, set to 70% opacity by default, and another copy of the texture PNG on it. This is right at the top of the list of sheets (actually, of course, at the bottom in the Drawing Sheets and Effects pane), so it affects the entire map and its frame. Naturally, this is why the whole map looks quite misty, and a little faded. I ran a series of experiments with both the global effect setting and this TEXTURE sheet on or off (hidden or shown for the sheet), though I'm undecided as to which is preferable still. I suspect I'll need to see how the finished map looks before making a final decision. The contours alone probably aren't enough to judge by at present.

All of which lengthy fiddling about only left enough time to add the highest mountain peaks, with a further colour change, this time making use of the CA91 Ice bitmap fill for a suitable pale topping. With whole-map texturing and the texture sheet visible:

and with just the texture sheet shown:

Without the global texturing is certainly clearer. As noted above though, have to see how I feel about it another day 😊.

Having spent much of 2020 preparing detailed maps and descriptions that often took weeks at a time to complete for the Community Atlas, it seemed worthwhile to tackle a less involved map at this stage, for one of the smaller projects I'd long had in mind as part of Errynor Map 01. There, it had the prosaic label of merely "Cave 8", the lair for a giant octopus set among the Peak Corals:

However, for some time, I'd intended to make it a little more than simply an animal lair. Indeed my earlier planning for the maps to add detail to this Map 01 area had included others of the cave lairs elsewhere on it too. As time passed, I'd discarded that prospect as liable to become too similar, either because I'd end up frequently drawing small cave maps, or because I'd be struggling to make each one somehow unique. So this map ended up with a concentration of elements from some of those "cancelled" maps:

As the lair is set among the Peak Corals, it's not quite a "traditional" cave, as much of its entrance area especially has formed over time from gaps in the build-up of dead coral and other debris which has since solidified, with collapses and modifications by the more mobile creatures living on the reefs and within the cave system, along with the effects of nearby sea-bed gas escapes. Hence I decided not to use a mask to hide the outer edges of the walls here, and just let the shadow Effect from them fall where it might onto the normal Background Sheet, as a reminder the "walls" may not be really so defining as they might seem.

The inner parts of the cavern become increasingly weird. Despite being very far from land, in extremely deep water, and where the usual sea-floor rock is the typical once-molten black basalt, much of the cave floor is that of a very ancient, fossilised, swampy land surface, including numerous substantial fossil tree stumps. Once around the sharp angle, those with normal colour vision will be aware of a green light emanating from further north (north is to the right here for once). The origin of this glow is an even more ancient meteorite, embedded in the fossil swamp from when it was still a living swamp. It shines green, and is Not Entirely A Good Thing, shall we say. Its non-visual effects have led to the giant octopus that lairs here becoming tougher, longer-lived, more intelligent, and - as the substantial treasure hoard might suggest - far more acquisitive than others of its ilk. Much of its time, when not out hunting, is spent gazing contemplatively at the meteorite.

Much of the map was created from normal DD3 assets drawn over a random design from the Curufea's Random Cave Map Generator website, with a few tweaks. I did though add a couple of extras from the Mike Schley overland style - the octopus illustration and the compass rose - and labelled the whole using the Mason Serif Bold font that comes with CC3+. Before starting, I'd intended to use a lighting Effect for the meteorite's glow, but soon realised this would be impractical for the map to be useful as a GM's aid, so elected instead to use a simpler fading-glow look for the affected area, using sightlines drawn from the meteorite to establish where the "shadowed" parts of the inner cavern would be.

I added hand-sketched "tree-ring" lines to the tops of the DD3 stalagmites that were repurposed as fossil tree stumps, having already opted for the cooled lava fill texture to stand for the fossil swamp cave floor. The living coral masses outside the cave on the sea-bed were DD3 fungi and trees, including varicolor options, with added glow and transparency Effects to make them less fungal-floral. The overall look was chosen as deliberately near-greyscale and relatively dark, given the water depth here at over 750 metres (2,500 ft) is far below the depth to which sunlight can penetrate, in-keeping with my deep undersea mapping conventions, while hinting, with the limited use of colour, that things are also a little different here. And yes, naturally, the shadows are anomalous, despite being what the eye expects!

Along the way, I let myself get a bit distracted, and decided a CA3 portrait of the Winter Queen might be an interesting addition to the map set, with a hint of the SS2 Bitmap A Snow Frozen Lake fill texture for the border design, which thanks to the standard CA3 bevel effect, looks rather like fine marble now:

She's intended to be between 8 and 9 feet tall in (imaginary) reality, 2.4-2.7 metres.