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.

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!

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.

Shaded relief might be the way to go to be more convincing on the higher or more rugged terrain. There's this Cartographer's Annual from 2008 that would help in that regard, if you have it, or if not, try this free PDF tutorial by HadrianVI from 2017, elsewhere on this Forum.

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

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.

Just to make sure I'm not leaving anyone behind here, some brief explanation. From the early days of RPGs, those running the games have been encouraged to design areas for the players to explore, frequently using random generation systems to do so. "Hexcrawling" is the overland version of this, where each hex represents a fixed distance (if sometimes a little vaguely defined, given a hexagon is not the same size from its centre all around), commonly 5 or 6 miles, though larger or smaller sizes than this are not infrequent. What are now called "Old School Rules" (OSR) RPG systems often make use of this technique, and these have seen a particular upsurge in popularity this year, following ongoing problems from the current owners of "Dungeons & Dragons".

One of the unexpectedly phenomenal successes of recent times in the OSR line has been a new RPG called "ShadowDark", which presents a very streamlined update on the OSR theme, that incorporates improvements from modern RPGs more generally. I've been very taken with the whole ShadowDark RPG conception, particularly as the Core Rules include everything needed to play the game, such as a random generation system for hexcrawls.

Last weekend, I did a couple of small test areas, to see how the system worked (hexes here are 6 miles in size), and although the system which will appear in the printed Core Rules has been tweaked a little since then, I prepared the maps in CC3+ through the week, to see how they'd look, using the 2010 Overland Hex style. These are the basic maps as generated by the random system rolls, with a list of their contents, and a separate key:

Thanks Sue! I've been deliberately making the WIP images smaller than the maximum Forum res because they are still very much subject to change along the way, and I didn't want to spam the topic with higher-res shots that were only going to have changed, perhaps quite significantly, by my next posting. On which topic...

Plunging into more of the detailed work within the caves quickly indicated there were several issues in need of resolving or changing. Most revolved around the hex-room caves working as a 3D maze, which needed a mixture of doorways, floor and ceiling openings to work properly. Further complications came about as there were also new, higher, floor levels over parts of what had been simply darkened open areas previously, that were in need of amending. I even managed to find one place where the roof of a lower hex-room needed illustrating, as forming a new piece of "floor"! So, quite a bit of redrawing, adding a new sheet or two, tweaking the effects, and so forth, followed in what needed to be a quite intense spell of mapping.

Rather than post the results of just that, these last notes on the subterranean map condense what were really several sessions spread over a couple of days, as I also added the scaling grid, and then the labels. After reflection, I then changed almost all the labels, as I realised some weren't sufficiently descriptive, and a couple more needed adding! Of course, this is what happens sometimes. Well, it does to me 😁!

Thus the final map:

I opted for a subtly pale, 5-foot square grid for this map, after a few trials. The yellow labelling with a black outer glow is naturally quite deliberate for a bee-folk cavern. The font is Gaeilge 1 which comes with CC3+. I'd have preferred a bee or wasp option for the compass pointer, but settled instead for one of the varicolor options from the Pete Fenlon Revisited style from CA 179, because it was spiky and let me continue the bee-flavoured label colour scheme!

Now to work out where it fits on Nibirum...

Should be no tribble to do so...