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)!

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.

Probably just me, but the latest image looks like a bunch of lost Daleks trying to find their way home from a country walk 😉

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!

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:

The third of my potentially ten villages from The Whispering Wastes in Peredur is Ivan's Keep:

As previously, there are more details in my WIP Forum topic here, and the FCW and PDF notes files are below, with a higher res version of the map image in my Gallery:

Possibly, though it's quite common to have a heavy plume of smoke above the fire, so you can't see the central flame so well. Chimney fires have a tendency to produce copious amounts of dark smoke, sometimes with embedded sparks, which tends to be more what you'd see, particularly given the chimney itself is relatively tiny compared with the smoke plume. As house chimneys often kink inside, you might not be able to see the blazing soot unless it's near the top of the chimney anyway. From memory, the flames tend to be redder as well, though this is from the perspective of viewing from the side, rather than top-down.

Not sure why you had to use Photoshop for any of this, as from the looks, the whole could have been achieved in CC3+ too. Appreciate that if you're more familiar with Photoshop, that could have been the reason though!

Regardless, nice-looking map. Not keen on the newcomer to town though...

For anyone concerned the Watery Places maps have been quite simple, easy-going, places, let us now move on to the part of the Twilight Market among this group, Wave Crest Market:

This gives the variable appearance of the River Clack another kick entirely, to the point where the far bank doesn't even make it onto the map at all! And while the shape may (correctly) suggest another, if much more substantial, castle map was at the base of this one, it's always interesting to see what can be done by using the shape, but converting the purpose to something quite different.

I always intended this part of the Twilight Market to be quite a complex mapping project, after seeing the original plan I'd be working to, though this one grew into a larger undertaking than I'd expected. Indeed it was one of the maps that took the greatest amount of time to complete, just setting-up all those floating platforms, market stalls/tents, and making sure there were walkway links to all the separate parts on the river.

There are buildings here as well, and not simply on land:

Some of which have a second storey:

One even has a further upper storey (close-up on the northeastern part of the map now):

This latter image has the advantage of giving a better view too of how the floating platforms, gangways, ramps, tents and stalls have been applied, as well as showing the great dome on the little island in the Clack, covering the statue which is mentioned in the featured text for the Market. There's a detailed set of PDF and text-file notes to go with this map, as might be anticipated.

The Cartographer's Annual star charts graticule started life as described in this Forum topic from 2018. There are several links to find similar graticules from that topic if you don't want to draw your own. CA34 from 2009 October has one, for instance, and long-time Forum correspondent @JimP has done work on the subject too, culminating in Bill Roach producing some templates available for free download from Jim's Crest of a Star website - zip file is on this page.