While these are fascinating explorations of different seasonal map depictions, are they really appropriate for a site around 25°N latitude on Nibirum? This puts the locations near the northern limit of the tropics for the planet (equivalent to the Tropic of Cancer on Earth). This would also mean the snowy mountains are a little too prevalent, I suspect.

Sorry if this is a bit late to be useful. I've not been paying as much attention to the Forum here recently as I might, so it's only just dawned on me.

Should be no tribble to do so...

Ctrl + F should do it, I think. It's the same command as Tools -> Drawing Aids -> Toggle frames using the drop-down menus, because what you're doing is toggling the frame (thin white line) options to show where the nodes are on a line.

Thanks very much folks!

Closing-in on the final stages of this project now though, so here's a view of Palace 9:

This was done using the SS2 Bitmap A style. I was rather taken with some of the fill options for this, as you might tell! The background here is the snow fill, but the palace itself was drawn using the Water Green 1 fill, as this just seemed such a rich, icy-looking option to give some real colour to this Palace, as a change from some of the previous ones. Not a great many choices from the symbols, unfortunately, as very few come with a varicolor option to better match the icy theme - just the central throne in the end, though at this resolution, you can barely see it, of course.

I'm going to miss drawing these snowflake patterns, I think, but there's the danger that the more I do, the less interesting they may become, since - as my comments regarding the construction of Palace 8 might indicate - I have developed a pattern for drawing these now, which while useful, isn't necessarily such a good thing, as it discourages exploration and innovation. I have enjoyed seeing the styles that were new to me though. There's so much in the full complement of the CC3+ packages I've never properly explored, so I have been trying to take time during this mapping exercise to go through all the fill styles available in each mapping type I've selected, as well as all the symbol catalogues for each. Probably never going to remember where any of these things are when I next need them, but...

Haven't managed to get the rest of the "Palace Quirks" notes typed-up yet; they'll likely follow after the Palace 10 map. And hopefully a little while after that, I might finally get the set submitted for the Atlas!

If what you're wanting to do is use online images to make your own vehicle trace-drawings for conversion to symbols, it's worth checking the military museum sites (especially if you're hunting for more obscure vehicles) and also scale model websites - including model kit manufacturers. A number of manufacturers now have PDFs of their kit instructions online that you can freely download, and they sometimes have illustrations showing top-down views for the paint and decal schemes for instance, which might be another starting point.

In terms of constructing the symbols, I'd suggest having a set-up where the lines, base colour, camouflage patterning and any markings are each done as a separate Sheet in CC3+ (or more likely "layers" in non-CC3 graphics programs), to make it easier to swap those for different theatres and times. Also, @Lillhans' comment about separate tank turrets is an excellent one. I'd suggest too using Sheet overlays for the top of various AFVs that have different variants using the same lower chassis and skirts, again to make those easier to swap-out without having to keep redrawing each time.

Seeing the replies to Monsen's original query, I seem to be something of an aberration, as while I do make maps for RPG use, and tabletop wargames sometimes, the primary reason I invested in Campaign Cartographer initially was to make historical and semi-historical real-world maps, particularly regarding military history, and its mythical counterpart, from what wargamers class as the "Ancient" period. This covers pretty much everything prior to the widespread use of gunpowder weapons during European medieval times.

One of the first maps I did with CC3 was for use with the Erin wargame rules produced by Scottish company Alternative Armies. This concerns the mythological island of Ireland, its waves of invaders, and the battles they fought in the mythical past. Alternative Armies make a unique range of cast metal 28mm miniatures to go with these rules, interpreting some of the mythic inhabitants of Ireland in interestingly unusual ways (to me, anyway). The background information in the rules included some details on a few places already, along with providing a sketch map based on a 15th century CE drawing from details given by Claudius Ptolemy (circa 90-168 CE). However, I wanted to go further than this, and embarked on a lengthy journey into the mists of Irish mythic history, and how that has been influenced by physical topography and prehistoric sites across the land.

Ultimately, in 2012-2013, I constructed three maps of this mythical place. The first was based on modern topography, with selected Curious and Ancient places of interest added using various red-labelled symbols or markers. The purpose was to provide a range of sites scattered across the whole of Ireland, without cluttering the map too greatly, to help stimulate ideas for Erin game scenarios, drawing upon real-world and mythical Ireland, where the latter elements were mostly taken from the different redactions of the 11th century Lebor Gabala Erenn (The Book of Invasions).

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Since this was intended as a poster-sized map, the labels on this image are mostly illegible, so to give a better idea of what was going on, this is a closer view of the central-eastern part of the island - still a little fuzzy to keep within the Forum's image parameters.

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Blue labels are for watery elements - so coastal features, rivers, lakes and so forth - brown place-names for physical features such as mountains and hills.

Next, I drew-up a revised version of that 15th century Ptolemy's map of Ireland with all of Ptolemy's place-names added using blue and brown labels, and red-labelled items taken from the Erin game background positioned in relation to the amended geography, as far as possible, along with green name-labels for the five peoples involved in the Erin setting.

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While compiling notes for this project, I came upon a paper by Robert Darcy & William Flynn, "Ptolemy's map of Ireland: a modern decoding" that had been published in 2008 in the periodical Irish Geography (Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 46-69, if anyone wishes to hunt it up). Their research suggested a rather different form for Ireland as understood by Ptolemy, and on the principle one can never have too many maps, I decided to draw a third version showing this, again adding features as for the "other" Ptolemy map, but this time making the named watercourses more closely follow patterns like their plausibly-identified modern ones, variant coastline permitting.

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Further afield, one of my particular historical-archaeological interests has long been the ancient Near East, notably from the 4th to 1st millennia BCE. Published maps often use only established modern geography when discussing parts of this region and period, whereas both coastline and river courses are known to have changed considerably in places. This can become confusing, especially where ancient coastal trading settlements seem to be nowhere near the modern coast, along with those places no longer served by watercourses or wells of any kind. Plus of course, even maps with the earlier coasts and watercourses shown (so far as such things can be established now) frequently failed to contain other details of greatest interest to me - isn't that though always the way?!

A couple of CC3 examples. This was one of the first maps of its kind I devised, back in 2013-14, for the 3rd millennium BCE, to illustrate the relative locations for a selected number of key ancient settlements around the Fertile Crescent region, notably in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).

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Those familiar with the area will appreciate the head of the Gulf lies significantly north of where it does now, and there are more channels - mostly human-built canals - on the lower Euphrates river.

The second example, from the same epoch, was to illustrate the places east of southern Mesopotamia known to have had trade links with the near-Gulf city-states.

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Here, there have been additional changes to the Pakistan-India coast and the lower River Indus, for instance.

Sadly, the FCW files for both these maps were lost in separate hard-disk and memory-stick failures, before the originals could be copied elsewhere, so all that survives are a couple of JPEGs.

Returning to more mythological themes, something else which has held a long fascination for me is the voyage of the Argo, firstly thanks to the Harryhausen "Jason and the Argonauts" movie, but in later times through the various ancient Greek and Latin versions of the tale. In 2015, I finally got round to doing some CC3 mapping for that too, regarding the outward voyage of the Argo from Greece to Colchis, at the eastern end of the Black Sea (modernly Georgia). The overview map:

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However, as this was designed as an A0 poster, I'd be amazed if anyone can properly read any but the largest labels on this reduced-size version. So this is just the mainland Greece part:

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Even that's not as clear as it might be, but the eagle-eyed may spot an unexpected inland lake where there now isn't one north of Pagasae, restored to its probable 1st millennium BCE appearance. And if you think some of the names look a little faded, you're quite right; that was entirely deliberate, because settlement names were often widely understood for the period, but regional names could be rather more fluid.

I did a whole series of maps for some of the places sailed-by or stopped-at in one or other version of the Argo's journey, using a similar "contoured" style to this Black Sea one for the more historical settings and places. However, I switched tack for those more mythological places, such as Colchis:

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You'll notice a lack of scale on this image. That's because even the relative location of the places shown isn't firmly-fixed in the tales, let alone how far apart they were from one another. Real-world geography is no help at all, as even the possible location of the city of Aea isn't as established as you might hope.

Along the way to Colchis, I devised a series of tabletop wargame scenarios, including mythical battles described in the tales as well as some "what if" ideas that didn't feature so, drawing on the "Hordes of the Things" (HotT) fantasy wargame rules. These allow small-scale actions to be fought on a handily square area - often no more than three-feet on a side. So I sketched the tabletop layouts for those too with CC3, like this one for the escape of the Argonauts from Colchis with the Golden Fleece:

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Can the Argonauts get to their ship and escape before the pursuing Colchians catch them?!

Working on all this, in conjunction with the HotT rules, which allow for longer wars to be fought too, I came up with a couple of on-land campaigns between the various peoples along the southern Black Sea coasts and further inland that the Argonauts had met, knew about, or had sometimes fought with, many of whom also featured in the more historical ancient texts. So another mapping style could be explored as well, if of a more abstract nature suited to the standard HotT campaign procedures:

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It may not be obvious that Dorylaeum and Ankyra are intended as independent, unaligned cities, separate from the named powers illustrated here. For orientation, Cius and Amycus represent places near the eastern-southern Propontis/Sea of Marmara coasts, while the line from Calpe via Mariandyni City (modernly Eregli) to Sinope is effectively the southern Black Sea coast east as far as the modern Sinop headland of Turkey.

Having discussed the design ideas, methods and overall appearances/layouts for the various Embra "Places" maps in the opening Enclosed Places topic, I'll not reiterate those points here, unless relevant. So moving on, the second set of Places of Interest the Embra "Official Guide" map gives access to, are the Crossing Places:

I thought a simpler criss-cross kind of frame corner decoration might be interesting here, partly inspired by that used for the Official Guide map. While the lines along the map edges are easily drawn in CC3+, there was a more elaborate corner-piece in another of the Dover Clip-Art "Celtic Borders on Layout Grids" hardcopy book designs that I thought would add a little more elegance to this map than my own clumsy efforts were able to achieve. As was established for the first of these "Places" link-maps, the link-spaces themselves are just labelled extracts from the actual maps, with added notes for the benefit of GMs, and further reminders in the accompanying text and PDF files. The seven streets condensed into one map here makes for fewer links than some of the "Places" diagrams, though it did mean making that link point larger, to fit all the names in. As luck had it, I somehow managed to get the dragon in just the right place here to avoid running into problems with it wanting to feature itself in others of the link-squares when I added the Dragon Bridge map extract, as of course it's a complete symbol, considerably enlarged, not something that can be easily dismantled to stop it from doing that otherwise!

Hopefully before folks get too involved in their mapping for this, it's worth reflecting that Vertshusen is situated around 65° South latitude on Nibirum, which means it's about on the Antarctic Circle (for Nibirum, this is at 65°S). So in summer, the Sun never sets, and in winter it never rises. For those less familiar with such locations, it may be worth examining some of the architecture and building layouts used in settlements in such places today on Earth - Alaska, Northern Canada, Iceland, northern Scandinavia and northern Russia (there are no southern hemisphere equivalents on Earth) - some aspects of which might require a nudge or two from magical elements to replace the technological ones, given there really weren't many substantial, permanent settlements around the Arctic Circle during medieval-equivalent times on Earth.

I second Sue's comments; this was an extremely difficult vote, as there are just so many fascinating maps produced in such different styles.

Hopefully, everyone contributing enjoyed their mapping, and perhaps learnt something fresh along the way.

It's certainly been a delight reviewing them all again now!

Get voting folks!

Thinking about the late-stream discussion regarding using the "normal" Mike Schley city symbols to create a top-down map, and then the isometric ones to show a pictorial impression of the place on the same map, with Ralf's comment about using vignettes to highlight important individual places within the settlement similarly, brought to mind the Middle Earth poster map prepared by Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's only approved artist during his lifetime). Digging around online, I've come up with this reasonably high-res version of the original on the Museoteca website, which shows why it came to mind. I used to have a copy of the poster, sadly lost somewhere along the decades since, though it remains strong in my memory!