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.

Should be no tribble to do so...

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.

We've had repeated discussions about submarine mapping styles on the Forum here. I've tinkered about with existing styles and a few additions of my own for use in the Community Atlas. I'd definitely love to see someone tackle these more fully, but am far from sure it'll happen in the short-term.

The main problems revolve around not having access to the same kind of imaging you can get easily for surface landforms, so it's much harder to create artistic symbols and fill styles, because these simply don't exist, and never have done. The Tharp style is fine, but essentially, this is all there is to draw upon of this type for the deep undersea environment especially, and it falls apart as soon as you try to use it for areas less than oceanic in scale, primarily because the detailed mapping to help also to a large extent doesn't exist (plus these maps are interpretations of instrumental readings, such as sonar, which don't give the same impression you would get if you saw the features in reality; the Tharp maps are calibrated and redrawn artistically to fit with more familiar visual landscape impressions - like using wall shadows in dungeons, say, even when you know those couldn't be really there).

There are undersea features that have no land-based equivalents, such as seamounts, trenches and mid-ocean ridges, much of which remain remarkably poorly-understood, often because the areas are difficult to access and impossible to image visually on anything beyond a very limited scale. Even trying to find a reliable drawing of what a single, fully-grown giant kelp looks like (they're usually far too big to image, at up to a couple of hundred metres in height), proved a nightmare when I tried to do so some years back for my Atlas symbols. Photo images show only bits at a time, or from oblique angles, because of the size issue, and the fact they grow in dense forests commonly makes it hard to tell which bit belongs to which kelp! It is possible to make an artistic interpretation, much as the overland styles often use slightly vague interpretations of trees, and it's that "vagueness" I relied on, certainly!

So yes, one more vote for more undersea mapping options (though I have voted for this repeatedly anyway 😁) - just don't hold your breath 😉!

As mentioned before, my Errynor mapping project for the Community Atlas has been an opportunity to bring to life ideas sometimes previously developed, and occasionally even mapped, in earlier decades of fantasy gaming. A Faerie settlement has been a concept under consideration for years, without finalising a mapped setting. When a Faerie city - what became Embra - came-up among the randomly-designed places for Errynor, that seemed the perfect time to progress with the concept finally.

Influenced by literary, artistic, folkloric, musical and fantasy gaming sources, I wanted to give the impression that visiting the city would be like negotiating Maurits Escher's semi-dream-state artwork and that of some of the surrealists. Disorienting, essentially, yet retaining a quality of magical wonder.

That's fine as an idea, but it then must be transposed into the physical reality of one or more maps to fit the limits of the Community Atlas.

Eventually, I settled on having many maps for the city, each showing only a small part, without defining what the city as a whole should look like, or how its pieces might fit together. Thus every visit there will be different, albeit with some familiar places for those returning - if they can find them!

The Atlas connections mean a map can have multiple links from it, but each linked map must use the first map as its only parent. They can't cross-link separately. Thus I opted for a two-fold access structure like two concentric circles, an outer "ring" linking with the Mortal Realm (and the next map "up" in the Errynor maps, that for Clack Valley), while the inner would lead to the Faerie city proper, so entering or leaving the city would be usually via the outer "ring" - inward to Faerie, outward to Mortality.

So as not to be too linear, I decided that when approaching the city from outside, it would look like just a village, so someone wishing to visit the Faerie "inner" city would first need to find a means to do so from there. That might be achievable randomly, by GM's choice, or using something like the magical Law of Similarity - like goes to like - possibly variably. For the latter, entering a field through a gate at the "village" might lead instead into a floral garden or a park in the Faerie city, say, and so forth.

From this, I thought having the "village" be different in form depending on the direction it was approached from would add extra spice, and decided on eight for the eight main compass points - north, south, east, west, northeast, southeast, southwest and northwest. So that's eight maps already, and we're not yet into the city!

This does though provide those three options - a D8 random-roll possibility and the approach-direction "Similarity" mechanic, either of which could be superseded by the GM as preferred.

For the Village maps, I decided to use as a base some from the two Judges Guild "Village" map books from the late 1970s, chosen randomly from their nearly 100 layouts. These are identically-scaled, set within a hexagon 1,056 feet, 0.2 miles, across from flat side to flat side, subdivided into smaller hexagons each about 40 feet across similarly.

Following from the Similarity principle, seven main elements were identified in each settlement: enclosures such as fields, orchards and gardens; crossing-points, like bridges, fords or ferries; damper places - lakes, ponds, streams or marshes; travel routes - roads, tracks, footpaths, etc.; upland areas such as hills, cliffs and broken ground; woodlands - copses, forests, even shrubberies; and structures - the village buildings.

Hence seven themed general areas developed: Enclosed Places, Crossing Places, Watery Places, Travelling Places, Hilly Places, Wooded Places and Constructed Places. These could be connected at GM's choice or by Similarity, leaving only the random option one short of another D8 roll.

In the notes for deep-sea hag Aunty MacKassa (PDF link; Forum discussion for this map is here), I'd mentioned Embra contained the great Twilight Market. That was to be incorporated in seven parts here, one for each of the Place groupings. Instead of impractical cross-links between the Market segments, I devised a Twilight Market identifier, based on various online and hardcopy-book designs, adapted and recoloured (not a CC3+ symbol, simply a piece of artwork):

Rather than a "Return" option, the eighth item became an additional D8 re-roll, ignoring further "8s", after which the GM could continue to the part of the Twilight Market for whichever of the seven places had been determined.

Thus the eight Village entry-points, seven general Places links, and the Twilight Market indicator provided the initial map for the city, accessed from the Clack Valley map in the form of a schematic drawing, given its sole purpose was to link to the other maps of the city. I called it the "Embra Official Guide", similar to how some real-world tourist guides are named. The next image is a cleaned-up (i.e. legible!) version of my final pre-mapping sketch for this schematic:

The eight outer Village maps link from this schematic individually, while the seven general area Places each get their own "landing schematic", as they consist of a group of separate locations. The random element, with other factors of what was both practical and interesting, meant each Places grouping would have ten different components in it, including the Twilight Market map for each Places set.

Ideas for what these Places might be came from a range of sources. Some were old concepts of my own, some drawn or adapted from fictional works, though many derived from real-world placenames. The origin of the city's name, Embra, is the local dialect contraction of "Edinburgh", Scotland's capital city. However, it also sounds like "ember", the glowing remains of a fire, which in turn conjures up the magical twilight glow of somewhere lit only by firelight, a place for stories of mystery and wonder. Thus the real-world City of Edinburgh became a source of inspiration for many of Embra's Places, suitably renamed, amended and altered to better suit a Faerie settlement.

The 70 items included locations in the city and names of streets, since Places need linking in ways more mundane as well as magical, to help keep things interesting. Ultimately, the split between Places and Streets was 34 to 36, as the "Streets" included a railway.

Each Place needed its own map, but the Streets and railway were condensed into a single map for each Places grouping. So the final tally of maps comprising Embra totalled "only" 57. Perhaps I should have named it "Heinz"...

This sketch illustrates the way the maps were to be connected:

Random base maps for the main Places were selected from all the old Judges Guild map books I had available - Villages I & II, Castles I & II, Temples I and Islands I (there never was a "II" in either latter case). Each book contains around 50 maps, though the Temples volume doesn't use the same hexagon style and scaling as the rest. Places were allocated to particular base maps from their appearance and content, although changes were made, so sometimes only the overall form of the base map was used in constructing the CC3+ Atlas version.

I reworked a set of tables for randomly generating caves and mines from another old Judges Guild text to decide on the Street lengths, widths, types and layouts, although that system ultimately was more "me" than "JG"!

A few notes were added in the process, but I wanted more, less predictable, aspects too. I turned to two tarot decks, which each coincidentally consist of 78 cards. One card was randomly drawn for each Village, Place and Street from either deck, and extra comments added to the map. The decks were Tarot of the Secret Forest (although this online review page has a lot more images), illustrated by Lucia Mattioli (Lo Scarabeo, 2005), and Shadowscapes Tarot, illustrated by Stephanie Pui-Min Law (Llewellyn Books, 2010). Both are heavily Faerie-inspired in their designs.

For the mapping style, I chose the Fantasy Town one from the January 2021 Cartographer's Annual, as it was ideal for the relatively small areas I needed. It has an attractive dark-wood-look border frame. I've not done much with frames in my Community Atlas mapping so far, so my initial thought was to discard this, but I had a change of mind, and for most of the maps enlarged it as a distinctive aspect. Partly, this was to help tie together all the Embra maps, after adding a series of Celtic-style knotwork and animal designs to the "wooden" frames.

Some of those designs were inspired by the connecting vector symbol options from the Cartographer's Annual Map Border pack (as recently featured in one of the ProFantasy live videos), one of which was used for the final "Official Guide" map. Others were reworked from the copyright-free drawings in Celtic Borders on Layout Grids by Mallory Pearce (Dover Clip-Art Series, 1990), coupled with more found in various online sources. Each Place group and the Village maps gained its own distinct variant, adapting and redrawing which proved a new challenge in itself!

All the maps have written PDF and text file commentaries, as usual too (preparing which took notably longer than the CC3+ mapping!).

I'll be posting notes about the various Places groups on the Forum over the coming weeks, as well as sending Monsen the Atlas items. Next today though, I'll start with a look at the final Official Guide schematic map.

By the time I'd chosen a property to map the floorplans for from Vertshusen for this contest, I already had some ideas as to what it was going to be, and what mapping style I'd be going with. The chosen property is that marked by the red square in the SE corner of the walled area:

My initial thoughts had revolved around a haunted house theme, and because I've already done quite a bit of mapping for the Community Atlas using some of the more realistic floorplan styles, quickly decided I wanted to do something different. For me, part of the point in participating in the Atlas is to experiment with new ideas and different mapping styles.

Three possible styles were uppermost in mind, all very similar tech-drawing styles, the 1930s Travel Guide Floorplans from the April 2011 Cartographer's Annual, the 1800s Floorplans from April 2016, and the one I finally selected, the Dracula Dossier style from September 2015. Haunted house, after all!

However, I also took a look through the PDF of "Hobbs' Architecture", which was a recommended freely-available download from the Internet Archive site, mentioned in the mapping guide and webpage for the 1800s Floorplan style, to get a feel for what house layouts should look like and contain in this general type of map appearance.

The working title for the map was "The House That Wasn't There", as I had vague early ideas of creating a building that wasn't always there. Indeed, one initial concept had been to pick a completely empty space in the city, and map the house into that, only I couldn't find a space large enough!

Which building was chosen was partly down to something that looked interesting, that was also a little out of the way, and the final choice was swayed after I was drawn to one of the smaller buildings in "Hobbs'":

which just looked interesting, and had some features not dissimilar to the building in Vertshusen. The size and scaling weren't the same of course, as the Vertshusen buildings are uniformly tiny by contrast to the structures in "Hobbs'". It was a starting point though.

Having measured the house size on the Vertshusen FCW, I set up a suitable template in the Dracula Dossier style, and then directly imported (copy & pasted) the "Wasn't" House and its neighbouring properties, setting "my" house down in the centre of the map border area.

Of course, it's angled as originally drawn, and as others have commented in topics for this mapping contest already, that's not the friendliest layout for drawing rectilinear structures. So I copied the house again, and rotated it to better suit, and then copied that twice more (as my initial idea was for a ground floor plan, an upper floor plan, and a further plan for the two taller roof towers. I also imported copied scans from the Hobbs' book as reminders for the overall look of the plans, setting them up on their own Sheet with a Transparency Effect, so I could position them over the CD3 house roof and get a better idea of what might go where. And then started drawing. This illustrates where I'd got to with the drawings when I ran out of time yesterday:

If you're struggling to work out the general sizes of things as a whole, you might find it useful to look through some real-world maps, like an atlas, a map of your local area and your own town, for instance. That should give you some ideas about the amount of detail visible on different area-sizes of map.

It might help you too to draw out some sketch-maps by-hand first of what you're wanting to create in CC3+, as that way you can get a rough idea of what size of map is going to better-fit the map you're wanting to draw once you start-up in the program. Even if you don't get it right this way, you can always resize the map in CC3+ if you find the area's too large, or not large enough. We've all been there!

There are various options for showing contouring beyond what's been discussed here, though some probably will work better, or with less effort, than others for this scale and type of map. The Fantasy Towns Annual issue might be the more suitable alternative to consider, which uses a version of shaded terrain using the transparent solid bitmap fills and bevel effects to generate a form of shaded terrain. I made extensive use of this style in mapping the Faerie City of Embra for the Community Atlas a couple of years ago, of which the "Hilly Places" maps are perhaps the more helpful to see some examples of what it can do (you can access the Atlas versions via the links in the last post at the end of the page, and also of course find the FCW files in the Atlas that way).

Shessar's Battlemat Tutorials (PDFs) provide another alternative, using cliffs drawn with symbols, and map shading, similarly to what you've been doing elsewhere using Sue's connecting cliff symbols, and not dissimilar to Sue's use of sheets in her famous Merelan City map.

Although it's more often used for larger-area overland maps, the various shaded relief options (again using bevel effects) may be worth exploring further, such as via the Shaded Relief Annual, or Hadrian VI's PDF tutorial.

Overall, nothing beats thinking things over and experimenting to see what works best for you, however!

Place 1 from this list is the Freed Haven Floral Garden:

The general layout for all the "Places" maps is much as set by the "Villages" ones earlier, except obviously that the maps are now square (or occasionally rectangular). Although the scales have been retained, the unlabelled compass-rose has been omitted. While that decision was made partly for space reasons, it also follows along from the concept that in Faerie, sizes and directions need not be fixed. Plus the rectilinear borders provide clearer indications for such directions than the round "Village" map edges, should they be needed. The misty map edge is a reminder that the various Places in Embra do not link directly with one another, so visitors could go almost anywhere in the city from one Place to the next.

This map clearly has more detail in its middle than the usual Forum resolution will allow, so a closer view seems useful for that:

With all these maps, the intention is for there to be a toggle in the Atlas FCW version to allow the on-map labels to be turned off for greater clarity, given that sometimes the labels have had to be placed directly over the feature they're marking. There are though no buildings here - for all some elements might looks as if they should be (the accompanying text and PDF files explain more, and what the real nature of the not-buildings is):

The fourth Place of Interest here is Lady's Hollow Floral Meadow:

Again, the borders are especially subtly-defined here (the paths), and it is a little difficult to pick-out details at the usual Forum resolution, so this is just the map itself, now with the building interiors shown (albeit there's just the one building that has such an interior):

While there's probably less to explain overall from this map, there are a few features that benefit from some additional detailing - such as the castle-like garden of Lady's Rest and the High Pavilion dome - provided by the accompanying PDF and text files.