The opening map in the group, for the Painted Light Monument, was based on a design from the old Judges Guild "Temples I" book. As noted previously, these maps are smaller in scale than those in any of the other JG books being used as bases for the Embra Places maps, so this too needed a smaller CC3+ layout:

Which of course also reveals the dragon and lion motifs used to further decorate these map frames.

While a deceptively simple map with just a few shapes on it, apart from the omnipresent vegetation (Wooded Places, after all), as the central round tower is almost 90 feet tall (27 metres), there's clearly more to this than meets the eye, which the toggleable (FCW file) interior views should help demonstrate. First the lower level of the Tower Base (the map labels have to be turned-off for clarity when showing the interior):

Then a schematic mid-Pale Tower view:

Followed by one more for the highest interior view, just inside the roof:

I decided to add a few basic notes to each of the interior views as well, to help clarify exactly what was being shown. And yes, the number of steps IS accurate for the height of the tower, as the accompanying PDF and text files for the Atlas will reveal!

Speaking of steps, I had quite a few problems with the Effects on those little steps leading up the gentle angle of the outer part of the solid Sloping Base, as regardless of what I tried, there was - and indeed still is - a degree of interference between the stacked Sheets comprising them. This final version was the better compromise I decided was liveable with, where unless you're paying especial attention, the markings could be simply a bit of wear across one of the pale step stones.

The penultimate map in this series of ten is from Hex 1611, Skara Hamlet:

Last of the three settlements marked on the Haddmark regional map for the area that is now the Whispering Wastes, this was in another hex that missed out on being randomly selected as holding a feature of interest, so one in its immediate neighbour to the northeast was simply swapped-in, which is how we have PlikPlok Cavern as a notable element on this map, or rather the entrance to it. Beyond that, looking at the general area map, it seemed likely this settlement would form a focal point for the surrounding farming and logging districts, given the western fringes of the Skara Bray hills, in whose southwestern tip Skara is located, have denser woodlands shown on them, along with the hills themselves, and the relatively nearby major Torne River. It also felt plausible that such places would be quite scattered, so the settlement itself was allowed to spread out here too, helping make it seem more important than the number of buildings alone might suggest.

While constructing the map, and having the overall close-by region in mind, I decided to add more walled, paved yards here than in other places, since the proximity of the upland surroundings - hinted-at by use of the contour and cliff symbols - suggested a more readily-available source of building stone for Skara. In-keeping with its somewhat lowly status though, the wall-lines aren't always especially straight. Nearer the centre, The Field and The Green ended up as open spaces almost by accident, as while I wanted to add some denser woodlands around the periphery, I didn't want those to become too dominant. Plus The Blade & Razors needed an outdoor space to expand its events into, and the significance of Skara to the surrounding areas meant some kind of open space for occasional markets - even though no specific market place was randomly assigned to it - seemed a natural addition as well. As mentioned before, sometimes these things just happen almost by themselves. Meanwhile the random option for a chirurgeon was amended to become also a vet, given the significance of livestock hereabouts.

Final map now approaches!

Well, were-elks are we going to find them 😎 ?

As usual with such competitions, there are far too many entries deserving of the top places, and far too few votes available per person to vote for all I might wish!

I do think it's important to emphasize again that everyone who took part deserves our praise and admiration. There's not a single map here that won't grace the Atlas with its presence.

And they'll also have pushed us on way beyond Map 1,000 once they've all been added to the Atlas.

Well done to one and all, regardless of what the final results may show!

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.

Still reeling from the shock that the style wasn't called "Sinister Suers", naturally 😉!

Looking at the base drawings you're working from, and dependent on how close a copy you're trying to make of them, it's worth studying things in some detail before going further, and thinking-through exactly what's being shown.

For instance, it looks to me as if the full width of the vessel at the waterline hasn't been included in the top-down plan drawing. There should be a sliver of the broadest part of the vessel's sides visible below the cannon barrels, which obviously isn't shown on the plan view.

As a perhaps more significant element, the masts are not all vertical, but at a slight angle (hence why they're not illustrated as circles on the original plan view), they're not all of the same dimensions, and you seem to have missed the bowsprit entirely (or rather, you have a broad linear piece of wood texture at the angle and placement as shown in the drawing, but drawn as if it were merely a flat piece of the deck). The latter will be especially problematic, as the original drawing doesn't seem to indicate its full length (it should extend well beyond the bows, for instance). There's the further complication that it should have at least one yard suspended below it, partway along, to carry the spritsail. You may have to busk this from the 3D model images in Remy's posting, I suspect - much as with the features of the upper parts of the masts, i.e. any crow's nests (which should probably be shown as the ship's highest "level" in an FRPG drawing). If you're intending a vertical cross-section for the ship too, you'll need to think-through where the yards are on the main masts.

There are other features that would benefit from further consideration (beyond what Sue and Remy already noted) - e.g. the hatch covers - but this is already running longer than I'd intended, and I haven't time for more currently!

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.

Switching from the northern tropics of Nibirum's Alarius last time to almost the Antarctic Circle there this (about 60°S), in my ongoing sort-of Dungeon24 project, took me to Kraken Island. Although I have the base sketch ready for the feature map I'm intending in each fresh area, developing ideas to expand that into an actual, if imaginary, place draws on input from that map, possibly some details the accompanying Inkwell Ideas book may have for those of their dice sets that have such, and whatever information the Atlas maps have available already (both maps and text notes). Kraken Island though has very little written about it, and even the maps so far are somewhat vague regarding it.

As the second map suggests though, I quickly settled on an intriguing-looking spot, Haunted Cloud Mesa. Krakens' Plain and the somewhat straggly, "undersea" look to the Mesa's symbol set me off down a "watery" route in this case, especially because the small dungeon map I was working with had a stream through it, and the Inkwell book for the dice designs in question (from their "Delver" set, the book being "Dungeonmorph Book of Modular Encounters: Delver, Trailblazer & Voyager Edition") had already suggested some amphibious humanoids could be in residence there.

Ideas clustered in profusion from that, influenced in part by some 15 mm-scale underwater-ish fantasy miniatures from many years previously (almost 25 now...), especially the squidfolk and landsharks, part of a range by the wonderfully-titled Evil Gong Miniatures based in Australia. Not all are imaged there, but the Lost Minis Wiki has more information on the range than most places now, as sadly, I'm not sure Evil Gong are still a going concern. The minis were available in the UK for years from East Riding Miniatures, who started trading in 1999 (Evil Gong started-up around 2000). Unhappily, ERM ceased trading on their owner's retirement in 2021, and Evil Gong seem to have been only on FaceBook since 2019, although the page has been dormant since 2020 apparently (according to the Lost Minis Wiki, as I'm not on FB). They were - maybe still are - based in NSW.

So Haunted Cloud Mesa was going to have spindly (ish), "underwatery" mesa spires, with clouds and mists rising from their tops and valleys, and amphibious/underwater creatures living happily in the air and on the land surface around it. These rapidly came to include (of course!) the squidfolk, called "Plains Krakenfolk" here, and their landshark steeds on Krakens' Plain, along with the gigantic Land Krakens (helping to explain the lack of information on the island, and the few settlements mapped there all apparently being ruined, perhaps), and amphibious Mountain Krakenfolk in the mesa plateau itself. Adding in some transparent deep-sea creatures - Ghost Sharks, Ghost Jellyfish shoals, Ghost Squid and Ghost Giant Octopodes, all flying in air as if swimming in the sea - with some genuine undead ghosts, and suddenly the place was starting to get crowded! After which I decided it needed something a bit more scary still, so added in some Lovecraftian Giant Flying Polyps, which of course are also more or less transparently invisible, as well as hugely inimical to other living things.

When it came to mapping the Mesa, that orange square is about 30 miles per side, and I knew I needed a top-down mapping style so as not to lose too much information on what was supposed to be where. Sketching out some early thoughts, based almost entirely on that single symbol at first, and adding in a series of random features and creatures (using the various sources I've mentioned in previous of these mapping topics), pointed me towards styles that would have hatched contour line markers of some kind. Ultimately, I went with a style I've used before, the Fantasy Realms pack from Annual 26. I did consider the very recently-updated version, but needed the original's hatching options for giving the appearance of flat-topped and stepped hills better. Which brings us to:

As the right-hand side key panel mentions, the number-labelled sites are detailed in the accompanying PDF and TXT map notes, alongside notes on what the creatures are (the Krakenfolk Goblins are simply the local Goblin-folk; the locals know what they mean by the names, and there aren't many tourists passing through here!).

And if anyone objects to the missing apostrophe in the "Krakens Plain" label here, I have to tell you, it looked far worse when there was an apostrophe out in the middle of nowhere all on its own! "Text along a curve" is great, but unforgiving sometimes...

To paraphrase from "The Simpsons" TV show, obviously...

"C:/DOS

"C:/DOS/RUN

"RUN/DOS/RUN"

😁