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:

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.

Back for another visit to Alarius for the next segment in my sort-of Dungeon24 mapping (now so delayed, it's increasingly likely to become "Dungeon25" soon...). I noted in the topic for my immediately prior maps, set in the Whispering Wastes of Haddmark, Peredur, that this was scheduled for somewhere in the Feralwood Forest region of northeastern Alarius:

That's a big area, so from the start, I expected I'd be needing to prepare another area map, as well as that for the dungeon. Examining the Feralwood Forest map, it didn't take long to zero-in on a suitably intriguing-looking area, the Barrows of the Ferine Magi:

Since the base map for the dungeon was derived from the third of the four generated using the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph "Explorer" dice set, I'd again be aiming for a similar black-and-white design look to the previous couple of dungeon and area maps in this series, including that for this new general area one, which would be done as a hex map once more. So I generated a suitable hex-gridded version of the area, from which to start thinking more about the setting:

The hexes here are each six miles across in their north-south dimensions.

During the latter stages of the village mapping for the Whispering Wastes, I'd already begun thinking about what might be in this area, as there are no settlements, roads or watercourses shown, just the woods, the central region of dead land, the three barrow markers and the obelisk.

Ordinarily, I, and perhaps many of us, would assume the over-sized barrows were simply markers indicative of a large area, within which might be numerous burial mounds. However, having earlier been working with some of Ricko Hasche's delightfully pictorial maps, where the images for places and features are often hugely over-scaled compared to the physical land area, had set me wondering as to what if those were indeed to-scale depictions of the objects/places involved. An eighteen-mile high obelisk might be pushing things rather, although it could still be taller than might seem "normal". The concept of ten-mile-diameter round barrows though started to take hold.

While the dungeon map to be fitted now to one of these barrows was of the usual quite small size, that needn't prevent it being within a gigantic barrow mound. Burial chambers inside real-world barrows can be very small, compared to the overall barrow's size, for instance. The place-name and that vast tract of dead land all around the barrows also needed to be considered; wild magic from the wild magi that got out of hand in a big way, say.

From that, it was a short step to declare much of the inner zone drained and now devoid of magical energy, so no magic will work there, surrounded by a one-hex-wide ring where wild magic holds sway (the pale white circuit in the next image), and where using magic can be especially dangerous and unpredictable. This is Alarius, after all, perhaps the most magical of Nibirum's continents, so safety catch off! Outside that ring, things are more "normal", albeit creatures from the wild magic zone still might have wandered off there, of course, or indeed into the inner zone, unless they required magic to exist (a magically-powered construct would fail at the border, for instance).

The white small circles on the image above show the randomly-chosen hexes in which there is something of note. The three barrow entrances have also been marked thus, and the location of the obelisk.

What of the barrows? Are they burial mounds, perhaps ones gigantically enlarged by the magical event that blasted the woodlands around them? Or the squashed remnants of once-soaring mage towers? Or something else entirely - such as spacecraft magically ported-in from another dimension? That latter concept intrigued, and in a greatly modified form became the basis for the eventual dungeons (yes, yes, three barrows so now there will be three identical-form dungeon maps from the dice-set base one too!). This drew on ideas from the 3rd edition "Hyperborea" RPG by North Wind Adventures (formerly "Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea"), whose tagline is "Swords, Sorcery, and Weird Science-Fantasy", the "Metamorphosis Alpha" RPG by James M Ward (in both its original TSR and current, largely unchanged, Goodman Games formats), and especially - thanks to its degree of oddness - Monte Cook Games' "Numenera" RPG, which runs with the concept attributed to Arthur C Clarke, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", in a world setting of the distant future, where tech is essentially treated like magic. That idea is also an aspect of Metamorphosis Alpha, set on a small-country-sized spacecraft lost among the stars, whose inhabitants have long forgotten they were once its crew and passengers. Thus the "magic" that still functions in the barrow-dungeons is really all technology. For anyone concerned about that in a stricter fantasy setting, I also adopted the Numenera idea that many smaller devices are one-use items. Thus things in the barrows mostly still work most of the time. Things portable enough to be removed may only work once.

So expect a degree of weirdness in the map notes to follow. You have been warned!

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...

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!

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 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:

Having successfully negotiated the outer "ring" of Villages that comprise the initial appearance of the Faerie city of Embra when approaching it from beyond, using the "Official Guide" map, the first set of Places that might be encountered in the city proper are the Enclosed Places:

Or as we see from the new lower map, the Enclosed Places of Interest, following along from the "tourist's guide" style of naming for these link-maps.

The perceptive will immediately spot the new-look frame border decoration, this time reworked after part of one in the Dover Clip-Art "Celtic Borders on Layout Grids" hardcopy book, combined with one of the Dover interlace bird motifs. The link-spaces themselves are simply labelled extracts from the final maps, with a couple of reminder notes for how GMs could use random rolls to determine where the travellers might be going next from here. The PDF and text notes include a further reminder not to forget which number was rolled if the final "Streets" location was chosen, as that map condenses five places onto one map, whereas the others feature just one place each.

So, back for an update today!

Opening the New Drawing Wizard, and naturally picking the CCPro Overland style, I set-up a 30 by 30 mile square area (to give room around the base 20-mile-square mapped region for a title, possibly some labels, and suchlike), and changed the background colour from its default sea-blue to green, to fit the landlocked swamp I had in mind. Then I went to set-up a new BITMAP sheet and layer to import the base map image into, and was surprised to find there was more than just a single sheet available (which was what I'd expected), and that some of those sheets already had effects on them. I'd been assuming I'd be working without sheet effects (beyond a transparency on the BITMAP sheet, at least). This though opened up some fresh possibilities, as one concern I'd had was that a lot of the early vector symbols and fills use zero-width lines, which tend to vanish when extracting higher-res images. Being able to add elements like glows could help them stand out better, so this was going to be a somewhat more sophisticated map than I'd anticipated!

This is the opening scene with just the imported bitmap image in the map (I'm keeping these opening images deliberately under-sized for the Forum, as there's fairly little detail on them):

And this is it with the transparency effect on:

Next, I started sketching-in some base terrain elements beyond the centrally-mapped area, using only symbols, to have more control over their sizes. Here, I'm working with the BITMAP sheet's transparency turned off:

This is the appearance without the bitmap image entirely:

One advantage of this vector mapping style is that you can add effects such as transparency to the symbols sheets, and see - as here - that the symbols fade out a little, which is what I wanted to do for the area beyond the mapped zone, showing the terrain there still, yet without so much detail. There's no need for technicalities like the forced redraw command that would be needed for raster symbols, though these were all set-up on their own new sheet, of course. The symbols, incidentally, were all from the extensive "Filled" vector set available under the CC3+ overland style, which was the default set available on opening the new map.

The next snapshot shows this whole border zone completed, with the hills and river added, as well as a background colour showing the full extent of the hills into the central region as well:

I amended the edge fade on the terrain sheet to retain the softer transition at the edge of the hilly area. The perceptive may notice too that one hill seems a little less transparent than the others, as that one's now on the main symbols sheet, that has no transparency effect on it. That difference is a little more obvious as the central area gradually fills-in fully:

With that completed, deciding what symbols would be suitable to highlight the features on the fully-mapped area could begin - next time!

Travelling Place 1 is Toll Cross, which as we see, is an unusually heavily built-up area, surrounded by dense greenery, beyond which is open grassland or moor:

While the base-map was a similarly heavily-urbanised area, the nature of Toll Cross (and indeed even its final name) derived chiefly from the accompanying featured text, and especially that demonic satyr figure. The Impassable Hedges mean anyone wanting to visit the shops or houses here, or even just pass through it directly as a crossroads, is channelled into using one of the four access-routes. Then I adjusted the layout of the buildings slightly in places so those on foot can get to only a fraction of the properties inside unless they pass through the central Boulder Square, where Guess Who waits, like a spider in a web... This view is with the labels turned off to get a better impression of the settlement:

This looks a bit odd (or at least, it's meant to), with some strange rooflines, and what seem to be many towers. An extract from the accompanying text and PDF file may help explain:

Despite the range of building shapes and sizes, they all have just a single accessible storey at ground level inside, as the toggled view to show the building interiors indicates:

This also shows just how much some of the rooflines, and particularly those horn-towers, don't marry-up with the building outlines, yet the buildings, thanks to their lack of internal connections, further help block any attempts to avoid using Boulder Square. And if you try to fly in, it turns out those roofs aren't so immobile as they may appear...