I prefer to stick with an appropriate adhesive. ?

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.

For the next Palace in the sequence, Number Five, I decided to switch to one of the black-and-white styles, and picked the Mike Schley Inks one to try out for the first time. I'd hoped it might be possible to use some of the actual symbols that come with the style this time, instead of just drawing almost everything, but unfortunately, there seemed to be too much surface texture on the ones I preferred, so that when viewing the whole map, they looked like indeterminate black blobs, which didn't seem ideal. The texture might have worked for the ice furniture the Palace contains in a smaller map, I suspect; all part of the learning curve, of course!

I also took the opportunity to try out some ideas for colouring the whole map, using Effects like the RGB Matrix Process. That too proved unhelpful, as colouring not just the map, but all of the surrounding CC3+ drawing window as well, which isn't something I've come across before. Then again, I've not used anything other than the "Gray" and "Sepia" settings on an entire map like this previously, so again, live & learn.

What I did decide upon was to provide an option to view the map with a coloured screen over it, so I simply drew a white rectangle across the whole map and its frame, applied a strong Transparency Effect to its Cover Sheet, and a simple RGB Matrix Process Effect too, favouring an icy pale blue. Hopefully, this can be applied using one of Monsen's special toggles in the final Atlas version.

It is slightly terrifying to open the CC3+ map now with the Cover Sheet showing, but with the Effects turned off, because all you see is a white screen! First time I did that, there was a moment of panic as to whether I'd lost the whole dratted map! Then I remembered...

So, two versions of Palace 5 here, the first the straightforward black and white one, the second with that Cover Sheet in action.

Inevitably, the uncoloured one is the sharper, because to get a sufficient RGB Matrix colour Effect on the blue one, the Transparency can't be set too low, but it seems an acceptable compromise.

The last set of Embra "Places" maps is that for the Constructed Places of Interest, linked from central segment 7 on the "Official Guide" map:

This is the busiest set for individual locations of any of the Places groups, with seven, leaving a mere three to be condensed onto the eighth "Streets" map.

The Celtic knotwork border was adapted from one in the, by-now-famous, Dover Clip-Art "Celtic Borders on Layout Grids" book, providing a completely connected square, to complement the original circular design used for the Village maps. That seemed an appropriate method of "book-ending" the entire set, as well as tying-in with the idea of both being constructed places, if of somewhat different sorts. In altering the design from what had been a vertically-elongated rectangular one to the required square here, I discovered when looking at the finished piece with its colouring, that I'd accidentally produced an asymmetry in the patterning. I did wonder briefly about amending that, but liked the look of something slightly off-kilter as apt for a Faerie setting, and so left it. The hours of effort it would have taken to change it had, of course, nothing to do with that choice...

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

"C:/DOS

"C:/DOS/RUN

"RUN/DOS/RUN"

😁

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):

Since the next map in my sort-of Dungeon24 project was scheduled for a new continent for me, and the largest on Nibirum, Doriant, that seemed an opportunity to try to present it as a WIP topic for once. This is something I rarely try, as I usually forget to record what I've been doing as I go along when mapping. So, while making no definite promises, let's give it a try!

The starting point was, as usual for this part of the project, the base map generated by rolling, in this case three, of the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph dice from the "Delver" set, which produced this layout:

Each die in the Inkwell dice sets has the usual number somewhere on every face, and a unique symbol or letter to show which it is in that set (which is also keyed to descriptions in the accompanying book, for those sets that have them). The symbols have become more complex and non-ASCII as the series has progressed! Here, the "+" die is the one with the entrances, as mentioned last time (see the Petroc Hills topic). Ordinarily, I construct the layout based on the orientation and relative positions of each die as thrown, connecting them to form a pattern. Here though, the entrances die needs to be oriented to fit the rest of the pattern.

Naturally, being geomorphic, there will always be parts of the designs that can't be used, commonly exits that probably won't exist on the final map, or short stretches of dead-end passageways, like that in the lower left of the "1+" die. In this case, a large proportion of the design on the "1$" die and about one-third of that on the "6@" die don't link with the rest. Those might be connected up easily by adding short sections of new tunnel to the linked caves, or they could be left out. As none of these unconnected sections had any of the intriguing hex-rooms, or any other features not present in the rest (except the natural stone steps, which I'd just used in the previous map), I was already thinking to leave them off the final design. What convinced me to do so was checking the text in the accompanying "Dungeonmorph Book of Modular Encounters: Delver, Trailblazer & Voyager Edition", as that suggested using the caves as a bee-folk lair, with the two hex-room caverns as having five vertical levels in each.

Naturally, those could be done as a set of separate maps, one for each level. Given the relatively small areas though, I thought it would be more interesting to try to present them on a single map, with labels to indicate which level was which instead. That would need space leaving on the base map where those could be drawn, so losing the upper segment from the dice design made sense. Thus we come to something like this:

from which a hand-drawn base map can be prepared, smoothing-out the no-longer-exist exits, and fitting the hex-rooms more tightly into that southern cavern especially. As my original hand-drawn version is now so amended and annotated I suspect nobody but me could make sense of it, I've redrafted just the map from it in a clearer form for use here, a scan of which can be inserted later into the CC3+ map for copying:

Graph paper makes copying the designs easier, as the dice geomorphs are based on a 10-square layout, with the exits always 3 squares from each die-face corner (hence the layout marks and dots, mostly cropped-off the edges in this diagram). I take each graph-square to be 10 feet per edge, which squares of course make rescaling the image in the CC3+ map much easier too.

A by-eye estimate, coupled with years of practice, suggested a base-map size of about 350 feet by 150 feet should work OK to start with (it can always be enlarged later, if needs-be), and having decided already to use the basic DD3 style of Caves & Caverns from Cartographer's Annual 7 for the map, I went ahead and created a new map, followed by inserting this base map onto a new BITMAP Sheet and Layer created for the purpose:

This screenshot shows the 10-foot grid squares, for easy comparison with the graph paper ones. And so it begins...

There's a possibility your system's showing "frames" (white lines connecting the nodes on a line or polygon). You can clear those from view using Ctrl + F, if memory serves (and if that's what was happening). It can be useful to show frames, as it makes picking out the nodes easier if you're trying to adjust them individually, but it quickly gets irritating when you're not doing that!

Nice-looking map, certainly!

If you're thinking of further tweaking beyond the point about the mountains (it's never easy deciding how much or how little you can cluster these things; it often depends on the style too, as some flow together better than others, and some styles won't overlap symbols properly), it might be worth adjusting the bitmap fill scaling for the woods and fields a little, to stop the repetition creeping in so much (most obvious in Evenwood), although that's quite a minor distraction once it catches your eye - so, sorry for mentioning it 😏😉...

I'd probably want to tweak the effect settings on the text too, especially the regional red labels that are fading into the terrain a little too much for my eye presently. Text tweaking is always one of the more difficult aspects of CC3+ mapping, as text is something the program doesn't handle as well as it might. It helps if you remember to set the fixed point before placing the text (albeit that gets a bit tedious if you need to change it every time), knowing the text may expand away from that point for different zoom and saved-image settings, or moving it about a little after placement, so that things like text on a curved line avoid having a letter over some key terrain element (always seems to happen for me...). I'd also be inclined to reduce the drop-shadow on the title text, and give that a somewhat broader outlining glow effect, just to help it stand out more than the "normal" text labels.

None of this is essential, or even all that significant, but you did invite comments!

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 😉!

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: