@Autumn Getty - I'd forgotten your comment about castle maps earlier.

I've rather drawn this one "by-hand" as it were, instead of using some of the shortcut options CC3+ might have provided. The Castle Walls add-on from the Cartographer's Annual for 2010 adds some useful commands for drawing the walls particularly, for instance. I wasn't sure how it might handle some of the variable size crenelations I needed here though, but it would have added fancier doorway and archer-window options than the simple straight cuts I've used, certainly.

If you're intending to draw a lot of castles, you might want to think about the Source Maps: Castles pack too. It is an older system which hasn't been updated for CC3+, and probably won't be now as far as I recall. However, you can use it with the usual DD3, etc., fills and symbols instead of the simpler vector options it comes with (it was designed to the old CC2-Pro standard). Beyond the information in the product pages I've linked to, if you also have the Tome of Ultimate Mapping, there are some additionally helpful discussions and tutorials regarding all the Source Maps products there as well, so you can get a better feel for what it can do for you.

Well, this comes after a rather longer gap than I'd expected! However, progress has been continuing with this map throughout, if at a slower and much more intermittent pace than previously. Unsurprisingly, six months after the start, quite a number of folks who embarked on the D23 concept in January are either also finding problems and delays, or have abandoned the project entirely, so some ongoing progress is a positive note at least.

My scrawled notes have now got up to area 271, although getting them typed-up has slipped back further, as I'm currently only up to starting area 211 with those. It is, of course, always much easier to add a few jottings to a piece of paper in a few spare minutes than to have to set up the wpc on the computer, type, check and correct stuff that can be deciphered from said handwritten notes, often written many weeks earlier!

The map continues to receive small changes, and at some point I really must remember to add a key and a title to it... However, in honour of this Solstice update, let's start with an overview of the current state of the entire map:

From which it's clear that tweaking of label placement continues, along with amendments to the appearance of the map, albeit for the labelling, only in areas for which the type-up has been completed still. The enlarged numerals, while now easier to read overall (at a higher-res than is suitable for the Forum, at least), have needed moving off their rooms entirely at times for clarity of map details. Area 210 has even had to have an indicator line added, so things still look OK on that bit of the map. That's the hidden entrance room to the old Thieves' Guild, also known as Toad Hall, incidentally. You'll have to wait to find out why though, as for today's closer examination, I thought we'd head into the more upmarket part of the Hall (or what was, when it was still occupied, at least), Khy Row (167-190):

Why Khy Row? Well... When I was looking over the randomly-appointed features for the various rooms here, I thought one should be a bazaar. So it became the Old Bazaar (170); and for those who may not know, or recall, there was an old British Music Hall style song, "In the Old Bazaar in Cairo" 😁.

For those undeterred by such awfulness, 😉, these are the PDF notes extracted from the full document just for this part of the Hall:

Hopefully not quite so long a delay for the next update, though after what's happened lately, I make no promises!

As long everything except the solid-colour parts of the vector drawings are transparent, and in a PNG format, this should be perfectly practical.

Not sure exactly what parts of the process you may need help with, but perhaps these two half-hour video tutorials may help:

Symbols - Part 1: Finding and Preparing Images

Symbols - Part 2: Creating a Symbol Catalog

Today's update is partly a minor way to revisit the original premise behind the whole D23 concept, creating a dungeon room a day through the year. While it was never my intention to aim at trying that, because of the way I've developed the Dendorlig Hall map and description so far, as mentioned, areas 1 to 49 are effectively separate to the rest of the map, as being the reoccupied "Village" area closer to the cavern entrance. As today is day 49 of 2023, an update on how these first 49 places have developed seemed apt. The image below shows the current state of this part of the Hall complex:

There've been a few changes since the previous update, including increasing the label text sizes (and having to move one here off the actual labelled area itself), along with setting up a different label colouring for those parts of the Hall that have yet to be reinvestigated by the incoming Gnomes. Note that those black labels have not yet been repositioned after their sizes were amended.

And to complete the process to this point, here's the PDF covering just those first 49 areas for those interested. Be aware though that this is a draft version of the typed notes only at this stage, so may yet - like the map - be subject to further changes. It does though give a comprehensive view of how my thinking has progressed regarding amending the random notes from the Wizardawn system, in combination with how I felt this part of the dungeon would operate.

Where we go from here is a little less straightforward, or rather when might be appropriate to post about it here, following the same "timing" theme as today, since the explored areas outside this Village section don't comprise a simple straight run of numbered places (as noted before, these are areas 50-66, 93-110 and 143-146). In the final PDF and text notes for the Atlas, these will be collected together for detailing ahead of the rest of the unexplored complex, a process which has already begun, in fact, as getting the notes typed-up has so far progressed to area 104 of these three segments, while my handwritten notes cover through to area 140 right now. Only another 220 areas to go!

It has been fascinating, as it often is, to adapt the random information from Wizardawn into something that works better here, though I still feel I've been adding a few too many of the coin treasures at times (the classic D&D treasure type going right back to the original system, for those less familiar). Of course, those using the Atlas are naturally free to ignore or amend whatever they wish from these notes, so I've not been too concerned at this. It has been entertaining though to sometimes find the random system has come up with something perfectly suited to a given area, along with occasionally needing to resolve the equivalent to the old joke of finding "40 kobolds in a broom closet". That's what being inspired by random design systems will do for you, though!

It's been a while! However, I've completed the PDF notes for this map now, have made a couple of minor tweaks to it, and have now submitted it for the Atlas.

This is the final map version (larger version updated in my Gallery too):

And this is the descriptive PDF:

Although I had fairly clear ideas of what features were going to be where in this small area, some additional elements were added randomly from a new paid-for product available on DriveThru RPG by Atelier Clandestin, called "Sandbox Generator". While this allows the construction of entire regional or larger hex maps, together with many items that may be found in such areas, including settlements and dungeons suitable for a low-magic, more-or-less pseudo-feudal, world, I chose just a few of the more interesting "decorative aspect" tables, plus one or two from the settlement options, to spice-up some of the places in the Vale. Not everything rolled made it into the final notes of course, as not everything randomly-selected always fits well enough. This seems to be an interestingly detailed system, even if I was only able here to test a few parts of it. Long a fan of trying-out random systems, as I may have mentioned on the Forum previously 😉 .

In case anyone's wondering, I have been continuing with the write-up for the large Dendorlig Hall subterranean map as well, although other things (including this map's notes!) have slowed progress there over the last couple of months. Hopefully though, I'll have an update for that too shortly.

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.

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...

It really depends how close a match you want to that original Northern Italy map you linked to.

Looking closely at the book's image, it seems they used mainly one set of hatching lines to represent the general appearance of the landscape, with denser, longer hatching for what I imagine would be higher peaks and ridges, less dense, shorter hatching for lower hills. Occasionally, there is more than one such set of lines (Mt. Viso, a little below the 45° line on the map's left edge, has some complex examples, for instance), but this seems fairly rare, often used only for some of the higher, or possibly larger, more complexly-formed, mountains.

In places there does seem to be a "contour line" drawn for some - but by no means all - of the unhatched higher areas and hilltops, though that seems to be sometimes only on one side of the top, or only around part of it. In some cases, this seems to be an illusion due to the density of the landscape hatching lines. In others, it looks as if it has been drawn to show ridge or scarp features partway up a hillside too.

Similarly, the line density and direction can be variable in different places around the same peak or along the same ridge, probably to show ridges and spurs, or other smaller features, that can't be shown just using the "hatch and bare hilltop" style because of their sizes.

Unfortunately, because the map looks to have been drawn to try to replicate much of the overall patterns shown by the actual landforms, I'm not sure creating drawing tools will allow a very precise mimicking of the style, and might need to be done almost entirely by-hand, like the original. As I said though, this really depends how close a match you need your version of the style to be.

As Sue suggested, what you have now is a perfectly reasonable facsimile overall, though I would probably make less use of the dashed "contour lines". Maybe think of adding some of those blue speckled areas for the icy, glaciated highest peaks as well?

When @Monsen announced the latest Forum mapping contest, for a (winter?) holiday-themed postcard-sized map, I was deep in the latest part of my Community Atlas mapping project for Nibirum, and indeed still am, so wasn't sure if I'd have time to do something useful for this as well. But you know how it is when you start having vague ideas for something...

Thus away from any CC3+ mapping, I jotted down a few silly place-name thoughts. Since some early comments on the contest topic had suggested something holiday-themed appropriate to the place of origin would be suitable, I focused into aspects of the Christmas period in Britain, which of course include ghastly jokes, puns and other nonsensical daftness. I'm not sure how far all these may survive beyond these shores; however, it's too late now, as the map's done!

My original list of nearly 40 place-names was quickly halved, given how small a postcard-sized map would be, and then being me, I sketched-out by-hand on squared paper where all these places were going to be in a rough sense, based on random dice rolls. The square sizes were chosen based on an estimate of the size the symbols would be on such a small map, to hopefully avoid over-crowding.

I'd already decided I wanted to use the standard CC3+ Overland Vector Color style for the map, as I have a fondness for vector styles, and this overland style in particular. Vector symbols have the advantage it's often quite possible to add-to, amend or adjust existing symbols, or even create new ones, without them looking too awful, given my legendary lack of artistic ability...

When I began, I had the loose notion I might try and take a few screenshots for a WIP topic here, though I soon forgot all about that unfortunately, as the map started to come together remarkably quickly, after a few early tweaks to get the symbol sizing to look right. I created a few fresh tools, and tinkered with the Effects in places, though nothing very major or time-consuming. The latter needed adjusting mostly because the Effects had been set for a much larger mapping area, of course, while the former needed adding because for some unaccountable reason, the style's designer hadn't prepared for drawing whisky rivers and snowy roads in advance. Some people are strange 😉

Handily though, the style's symbols all have really helpful varicolor options for being snowy-frosty white in just the right places (with a couple of minor exceptions, where a few snowy flatter roofs had to be added by-hand). In barely a couple of hours, the basic map was done. It needed a few fine-tuning adjustments, but the longest task, once all the labels were added, was trying to work out the better colour combinations for those labels and their Glow Effect, so they'd stand-out nicely, without being overwhelming. That dragged on for over an hour, to the point where I'm sure I ended up more or less where I'd started!

And so we have Merry Old Christmas Town, British-ish style:

Meanwhile, back at the mapping, more progress, more battles!

Two main challenges today, firstly to get everything correctly aligned and pulled together into a single coherent map (I hope!). I decided that this simple style didn't justify a string of separate maps for each level in the building, so, as probably suggested by yesterday's image, I wanted to present everything on just the one drawing. This is the current state of play, now complete with labels:

I very nearly slipped-up on the labelling, as the original style on which the CC3+ Dracula Dossier style is based, uses the Blanch Caps font, which was linked from the Annual's PDF mapping guide, and which of course, being freely available online, I'd already downloaded and installed back in 2015. However, the font isn't available for free redistribution, so instead ProFantasy had substituted the similar free Franks font. As this map's intended for the Community Atlas, fonts not available with PF products or a standard Windows 10 installation can't be used (well, they can, but you have to explode the text to become polygons, so you can't change it as with normal text afterwards). Of course, the default font is set as Blanch Caps if it's available, so there was very nearly an "oops" moment, followed by Naughty Language, had I gone ahead with that! Franks it is though!

The second challenge was getting the scalebar correctly rescaled and then labelled. For reasons I won't pretend to understand, the scalebar symbol doesn't have equal divisions along its length, so trying to rescale it exactly to the scale grid, when all you can see is a ghostly outline in places when you move it proved, shall we say, trying... There may even have been an N.L. moment or two! Once it was finally sorted, I measured the irregular divisions, which turned out to be 0.8 metres long, something that still leaves me mystified. Perhaps something important from the original Dracula Dossier RPG book though (as I don't have that).

If you think the Cellar plan looks a little empty, you might be right:

There's a walled-up low cave concealed on the SECRET Layer, with the tops of some very ancient, worn, partly inscribed standing stones visible in its floor, one of which (admittedly smaller than it was yesterday now!) has been built into the actual cellar wall, and protrudes somewhat from it. The idea is this ancient circle, dating to long before the city was built here, is at least part of what's causing this house to be haunted and abandoned now. As well as such a favourite spot for ghoul feasts, naturally. The "S" = secret door, isn't technically a door at all, but a walled-up thinner part of the cellar wall, so it's obviously been used for access to the cave at some earlier time, and then deliberately sealed later, so it can't be told from the normal stone walls in the cellar now.

Still plenty to do though, more tweaking primarily, plus getting the notes typed up, and maybe adding some missing or slipped tiles on that roof. The house is meant to be boarded-up and shunned by the locals nearby, after all.