The set of Aunty MacKassa maps is the final group in the series of sub-maps from Map 01 of my Errynor mapping project. I'm not intending anything quite so extensive for the other 39 250 x 200 mile maps in the set, though you never know! Indeed this group of drawings grew rather out of hand anyway, albeit I've long found RPG scenario planning has a tendency to do that as the ideas build up along the way. My original intentions for three maps to detail deep-sea hag Aunty MacKassa's lair (site 11 in the lower right corner of Map 01) have ended-up as seven separate drawings!

Partly, this was because while working on some of the other detail maps in that corner of Map 01, I'd realised Aunty MacKassa could have been long-influencing events elsewhere across the region, especially at the Kachayan settlements of Shark Bridge and Ellenge. Aunty's backstory in all this is given among the various map notes with this set, incidentally.

As Shark Bridge is almost 50 miles from Aunty's coral cave lair, I decided to set a 50-mile radius limit to her influence overall, a zone where she might sometimes be seen, and within which she might wish sometimes to act. This had the further possibility to reduce the edge-of-the-world syndrome of Errynor Map 01, because this zone spans parts of Maps 01, 02, 09 and 10. Of which only Map 01 has so far been completed, of course:

Thus came about the first Area Map, in three versions, following the standard pattern established by Map 01, for the sea-bed, water column, and sea-surface views, using the Herwin Wielink mapping style:

Fresh PDF and text notes were prepared to accompany this map.

Next, I began zeroing-in on just Aunty's lair:

The next map shows in detail the sea-bed region a little over a mile in extent all around Aunty's Cave home. I'd rather enjoyed drawing the Shark Bridge area map earlier, using a different background and simple vector not-symbols (they're just copied small drawings, not true CC3+ symbols), so opted for a variant on that, choosing one of Sue's Parchments from CA132A for this map's backdrop, and sketching-in the cold-water coral reefs, with the local wildlife and other surface features, all of which had been previously randomly-rolled in preparation. The "symbol"-drawings were much-expanded from the collection used in the Shark Bridge map, naturally:

The second version allows the zones closest to Aunty's lair to be precisely identified for GMs, using toggled circle overlays. The nature of the features themselves is detailed in a further set of PDF and text-files notes accompanying this map.

There wasn't space to add a metric scalebar too, so that's been provided as an option via toggle for the Atlas FCW version:

The remaining five drawings in this set should follow shortly, all being well!

As suggested when I requested this part of Kentoria a few days ago, this is the WIP thread to try to show something of how this mapping project's been developing, and where I'm up to with it.

It all began in 2020 July, when Quenten suggested a series of potential mapping projects for various Forum "regulars" from an area in western Kentoria he'd just been mapping, called Shoenia. While I had no time then to do any mapping for "my" bit, Wyvern Citadel, I did some basic exploration of the area and made a few notes even then. Not much has been said about Kentoria, but what there is suggested to me a high magic-use continent, now threatened (if presumably only to an extent) by barbarians. I also discovered that this Citadel was the sole structure shown near the western shores of Kentoria on the continent map:

That suggested it was of considerable significance, and being next to the Barbarian Ocean (despite the considerable separation from the nearest land on that side of Kentoria) started suggesting reasons why, particularly seeing that Quenten's Shoenia map had provided a lot of obviously high-yielding agricultural land in the region, stretching for several hundred miles into the surrounding valleys (told by the numbers of settlements, as well as the extent of the farmed lands).

I toyed with a few ideas around all of this at different times, but it's only been this past week or so that ideas have really firmed-up. The orange boxed area on the Shoenia map here shows the area I decided would be useful to map in a little more detail around the Citadel itself, because that large, swampy, river delta seemed a likely place for barbarian sea-raiders to be able to strike unseen, tempted in by the obvious agricultural richness of its surroundings, ones likely equally rich in other resources, like gold, say!

What I've come up with is that the delta vicinity was attacked by barbarians last year, when an unusual sickness in Kentoria laid low much of the population, and prevented the folks hereabouts being as vigilant as normal. The raid also happened in the winter - or as much of winter as Nibirum's southern tropics ever get - during a spell of abnormally severe weather. It was so bad, the snowy remnants can still be seen on the south-facing slopes of many of the mountains hereabouts. It appears the weather was magically augmented by one or more powerful druids/shamans that accompanied the raiders. Some of the raiding ships were driven-off, though one larger fleet especially managed to land in the southernmost estuary of the delta, nearest Monseignor, which city was raided particularly heavily, losing much treasure, and having its Forum destroyed. While the Forum was quickly rebuilt, as the political leaders locally say, "bigger and better than before", the population remains very nervous, and has demanded further action, especially as the sickness seems to be dragging on in places into another year.

The area has been long known for its colourful wyverns. Indeed, some say the smallest kinds outnumber the birds in these parts, and are of comparable sizes. The region is sometimes called the Wyvern Coast elsewhere in Kentoria as a result.

So, wyverns. Wyverns in defence. Wyverns and their riders. Squadrons of wyvern-riders. Thinking here something on the lines of Anne McCaffrey's Pernese dragon-riders, with mentally-bonded wyvern and rider pairs. Aerial defenders made me think of the Battle of Britain in 1940, particularly because of KENToria, Kent being the English county above and near which much of the aerial combats then took place. Thus came about the recently-constructed Wyvern Citadel Defence Zone:

The perceptive may notice a certain - familiarity, shall we say - about some of the new place names. And some are just... well, why not?! I had to name the river and its delta, and The Great Stone Wall mountains conjured up for me the famous American Civil War general "Stonewall" Jackson. There'll be PDF and text-file notes to add more flavour to all this eventually in the Atlas.

There are four main colours of wyvern, as illustrated here by the four wyvern seals from Sue's brilliant new symbols pack with this month's Annual issue. Couldn't resist! Each colour has its own particular powers. The blue wyverns, for example, are extraordinarily powerful flyers, able to fly higher and for far longer than any other type of wyvern hereabouts. They also have the greatest wingspan of any of the wyverns. Or big wings, if you prefer. So, their primary training ground is the drome nearer the mountains where they're often found wild, at Duck's Ford. Obvious, if you know your Battle of Britain history, of course!

As for the Scrying Detection Finders, I'm sure someone will eventually start calling this system "Scrydar"...

The mapping was done using the CA128 Parchment Maps style from 2017 August, including the font, plus Sue's seals, as mentioned.

I'll add a copy of the Defence Zone map to my Gallery shortly, with more to follow on the area later!

So having chosen my ten snowflake templates, it was time to test things out using CC3+. Summer Palace 1 was drawn using DD3, with the snow fill from SS2 Bitmap A as the backdrop:

The Palace size doesn't encourage adding too much interior detail, as it starts to look cluttered very quickly, so I settled for showing simply the major, fixed features instead. There'll be text notes and a PDF to accompany all the maps in the final Atlas version, as normal. Each Palace version is intended to have the same seven main areas (Hall of Mirrors is one of the seven, incidentally), though not always in the same order - it is meant to be the same place, just with a different appearance each day, after all.

I was a little concerned about the narrowest passages, for all I'd checked with the grid on as I was drawing it - the narrowest are between four and five feet wide in the connecting passages. I decided early on that it wasn't going to be necessary to ensure access to every nook and cranny that didn't require direct access. It is meant to be a magically-grown, natural creation, and when real snowflakes can be so complex, that seemed an ideal recommendation to follow!

There was a degree of experimentation in this, as I wasn't sure how best to work the complex outlines at first, as you may find when you have access to the FCW file later - such as several overlapping floor segments in places. As I was just using the normal straight polygon drawing tool though, not fractal, I probably shouldn't have been too concerned. That's easy to say after the event though ?

Returning to Alarius, if not to my usual part of it, in my Dungeon24-ish project (this previous topic has more information on that), saw me hunting for a suitable location on the Southern Scar Environs map of eastern Alarius, for where to place the fourth and final "Crypts" Inkwell dice design map.

That's a big area, and one affected by the unpleasantly weird effects from The Scar, the linear volcanic feature surrounded by swathes of greyness in the top centre of the orange rectangle in the above illustration. The dungeon design is, by contrast, tiny, although the nature of The Scar, as sketched in the map notes, coupled with the fact this was to be another burial tomb site, had already suggested something undead and/or necromantic as a theme for the subterranean layout. So that narrowed things down somewhat, and ultimately, the site very nearly chose itself, given that one of the few labelled main locations on the Southern Scar map was "Witch's Valley", which had a circle of standing stones set in its midst. Right at the northwestern, mountain-enclosed, end was a cave symbol, so that was that!

The orange rectangle around the cave is actually 25 miles by 16 in size, so not wanting to simply drop in a little dungeon map there, as has started to become typical for this project, I also needed to devise a suitable area map into which the dungeon design could be fitted. Having sketched the basic features for this onto graph paper, I then added a random selection of additional items from the sources mentioned in my first post last time on Mate Ora, although here, the selections were tweaked to better reflect the negative feeling of this area, so relatively near The Scar - if sometimes with a few hints that things were not always as they now appear here too. Once these feature locations were emplaced, it was possible to draw in a few river and stream lines to fit, since while no major river is shown in Witch's Valley on the Southern Scar map, valleys rarely happen without something of the sort, and the mountainous terrain, plus the near-tropical location (the cave symbol is at roughly 37° N latitude), showed there would be some water channels at least.

Then it was time for the mapping. Several possible overland styles were identified as having a suitably large number of mountain and hill options, of which the DeRust Overland style from Annual 81 seemed a good fit. Thus the Witch's Valley Head map:

The labelling font is the Mason Serif Alt Bold one that comes with CC3+, as that seemed a comfortably "spiky" fit for this map style. As normal, there'll be PDF and text file notes to provide a few more details on the labelled items in the final Atlas version. While the sites for these were chosen purely randomly, it was pleasing to find they'd clustered more towards the western to northwestern part, given those are the directions of the more imposing, larger, mountain symbols on the Southern Scar map beyond this selected area.

Slightly later than I'd hoped for the eighth main update on this map, although Day 250 of 2023 seems an apt moment to present it at least, particularly as just this morning, I completed the draft notes for area 360, the final one in this mapping project! Getting those notes typed-up still lags some way behind (at area 310), so the map and notes won't be going into the Atlas right away. The end is in sight, however!

While there may be (hopefully only minor) changes needed to the map after this, during checking of the text, or as other things occur, this is likely to be close to the final version now:

From this, it's clear I finally got round to adding the title and a key for the more recurrent mapped elements, and also moved the North pointer and scaling note off the map entirely. I decided too to make the colouring of the title and header labels a pale cream, the same pale cream this style uses for its drawing window background, and which, in preparing the map for the Forum, I've also used as a thin "map border" of sorts. This header-colouring usage helps draw my eye (at least) into the map, making clear which items are peripheral to the map itself.

I've not prepared any additional close-up map or PDF notes to add here today, since the final version will be ready relatively soon anyway, although I have updated my Gallery image for this map now, to a higher res version of this near-final one.

All being well, the next update should be the Atlas submission one!

The second of Aunty's vehicles, and the concluding drawing in this whole Errynor Map 01 set, is Scuttle, as promised earlier, a giant-crab-legged, ramshackle, shipwreck hut. This has two floors, accessed by toggling in the Atlas' FCW map, with a further toggle option to add a five-foot grid:

For the crab legs, I tried sourcing top-down crab images online, but couldn't find one that worked well enough for what I wanted for tracing. There are few crab symbols in CC3+ and its add-ons, and although I did find one that looked good among the free Dundjinni Archives collection, it wouldn't scale-up properly without becoming too pixelated. In the end, I used that enlarged symbol as the base, and partly traced, partly redrew, the legs as individual segments on different Sheets, and then fitted them to the base of the hut, as now illustrated.

The bulk of the hut and its contents were copied from The Naughty Lass deck plans, the walls and windows redrawn, and a driftwood balcony added to the front of both lower and upper floors, partly to increase its overall crab-like appearance. By contrast to the ship, these drawings largely flew together quickly. A fresh PDF and text file of notes and - done!

Hopefully, more Errynor maps to follow!

In theory, this ruins map was going to be one of the smaller, thus quicker, maps to draw. I wanted to add it to the set from Errynor Map 01 as it was the only Thalassan (Fish-folk) structure in the area, and it seemed useful to provide at least one sample settlement for each of the represented undersea humanoid folks shown on that map.

The overall pattern for it was easily established randomly from a few dice rolls, and I had already some ideas for its appearance, with whatever else might be concealed by the ruins. Given the site lies below almost 3,300 metres of ocean (nearly 11,000 feet), I wanted to use a black-and-white mapping style, in-keeping with most of the other deep-water maps in the set. It was though obvious that no style would provide the symbols I'd need for the structures, which would have to be hand-drawn. So I settled upon the Black & White Towns style by Pär Lindström from the 2015 April Cartographer's Annual, mostly because I thought the sketchy contour-line symbols in it might work well for the silt-covered rubble piles I'd envisaged as surrounding this ruin. While these did work out quite nicely, adding shading to give the rubble more definition took a lot more time than expected, particularly in showing the whole site in an elevation drawing as seen from the sea-bed.

The font is AquilineTwo from the 2012 CA, as I originally thought to use the scale-bar symbol as well as the draconic north indicator from this style, and that's the font employed in these.

Clearly, there's a lot of blank space here, and the scale-lines look a little odd too. The reasons for both are explained by activating the Residual Magic toggle in the FCW file:

The explanatory banner text has also been increased here, although for clarity, those notes are repeated and expanded upon in the map's accompanying text-file and PDF notes.

As the magical blue glow extends some distance below the sea-floor surface, it's obvious there's something more happening there too, and activating the Subterranean Tunnels toggle shows what this is:

A series of subterranean chambers and tunnels, essentially, with a further banner note of explanation. The latter of course hints at still more to come, given the vast blank space beneath it. So activating the Original Towers toggle reveals...:

I'd had to draw out in advance what the towers would have looked like before they became ruins, to get the look, sizes and angles right, so it seemed probable this would be something other GMs might find helpful.

For the underground maps, I added a "concealer" Sheet with a Transparency Effect to reduce the strength of the surface features and magical glow for clarity, which is largely why the shadows on the surface views ended up so relatively strong, when the subterranean areas are hidden. Naturally, the shadows are unrealistic anyway, as there'd be ordinarily no light at all at such depth. Without them though, the drawings are much too flat, as some shadows at least are what the eye more or less expects.

I wanted to add my thanks also to PF and JimP for providing the prizes here.

I also wanted to add that though it was my good fortune to be awarded the 500th Atlas map thanks to the random draw, the Atlas wouldn't have reached this milestone without the input from large numbers of other people, many of whom have contributed far more to the Atlas project overall than myself (with a special mention for Remy Monsen as not simply being a mapping contributor, but for the huge amount of work he's put in to setting up and maintaining the entire Atlas website as well). It really is and has been a Community enterprise throughout. I hope those here new to the Atlas, as well as those who've already submitted any maps to it, will feel inspired to keep on contributing towards the next 500 maps and beyond!

All of which preparation finally brings us to the dungeon map, entitled "The Tomb of the Prophet and the Sailor Prince", albeit in the Atlas to be known by the somewhat more manageable name of "Tomb of the Prophet", which some may feel is probably no loss (sorry...):

This was drawn using the SS2 Bitmap B style, with a few bits and pieces from its "A" variant, and was selected primarily because I needed a white marble bitmap fill, sarcophagi and coffin variants. The boat was the trickiest feature, as it's intended to be a large river-going vessel, with detached masts (ceiling's not high enough!), whereas the best the "A" style could offer was a rowboat, so that needed a bit of fiddling to look like something closer. The font is "Arabian" from the 2010 Annual.

Adding a mask to half-hide the walls was a late addition, as the shadows "inside" the solid rock surrounds beyond the walls seemed too distracting. This had a serious disadvantage, as the floors and walls had been drawn rather piecemeal, largely thanks to a few quite complex shapes (areas K and L were drawn square to the grid and then rotated, for instance. Areas A and B proved devilishly complicated to get right, particularly as for some reason, during the rotated copy operations for two of those small square peripheral tombs, the room size had slightly shrunk in one direction (well, one, but then that was mirror-copied to the opposite wall), something I didn't realise until I started connecting area H to the chamber between tombs I and J. Thus I couldn't do a simple series of "Trace" commands for a Color Key inner mask, and indeed ran into so many problems with it tracing the wrong bit repeatedly, I gave up trying to do that, and did a couple of external polygons instead, albeit that wasn't much easier...

In terms of the contents and area descriptions (in the map's PDF and text files), I found some of the options for the dice designs I'd used in the accompanying Inkwell Ideas "Dungeonmorph Delves and Descriptions" book for the Crypts, Lairs and Sewers sets very appealing. Most of the occupants and mechanics originated there, with a fair bit of subsequent tweaking in places, and the assorted treasure items scattered liberally throughout - together with the caveats on removing some - also derived from the same book, many as determined from the random tables towards the back.

Once the key and scale notes had been added, there was enough space left for portraits of a couple of the people buried here, created using Character Artist 3, naturally. The Sailor Prince is as he appeared in the later prime of his life, while the more ghostly appearance of The Prophet is because that is how he may appear in the Tomb, if the right ceremony is performed, for all he is not an undead creature. His holy symbol features repeatedly in the Tomb, so it was important one version of that should be added too. All those available have an attached cord in CA3, and while I thought of using a mask to disguise this, it proved possible to "attach" this version of it to the caption, to look as if it's hanging there.

Of course, it only really needs a few extra clicks in CA3 to generate full-body character portraits, and as I wasn't sure if I might need necks and shoulders for the versions to be used in the dungeon map, simply went ahead and drew the lot. It seemed a shame to not provide an Atlas version as well, so here they are:

Now, it's off to the ruins by the mouth of the Kalabanjar!

Once the Faerie City of Embra had been completed for adding to the Clack Valley map in the Community Atlas, there was one further place left there I wanted to add maps for, the fancifully-titled Queen Mica's Scintillant Palace, on its hilltop east of the Faerie Town of Dumbra in the lower Clack Vale, south of the river:

The reason was quite simple, as I'd decided some time ago that a version of The Hive maps, prepared for a mapping contest some years ago, should be converted for use in the Atlas too, once a suitable giant insect nest was located for them. Those maps had been prepared originally as just one small part of a far larger complex of subterranean insect hives, with five vertical levels and four links in more or less cardinal directions to other such hives elsewhere which were not part of that set of maps.

While a number of potential sites had been set-up for giant insect colonies across my Errynor maps during the planning and early random construction phases, it seemed there might be more potential for something unusual in one located in a highly magical region, which the Faerie Land of Errynor Map 40, where the Clack Valley is situated, provided.

Once this particular giant ant nest had been chosen, it was clear the ant queen here would have been affected by the magical nature of the place too, so the colony was going to be thought of as a great castle-palace of magical wonders. At least as far as the queen was concerned. Giving her a more intelligent personality than normal, magically-enhanced, one that made her curious to learn more about the dominant humanoids, their ways and magics, was a natural development. As the ants live on fungi they grow themselves on rotting vegetation, they are not liable to be antipathetic towards other creatures that respect their nest and the region they habitually use for foraging. Thus small bands of humanoids found wandering in that area - about half a mile, 0.8 kilometres, around the nest - would be more likely invited to the place as honoured guests than attacked, providing they respected the queen and her folk.

It would though be immediately obvious to the queen that both ants and their nest in its natural state were not people or places most humanoids would care to visit or interact with. So Faerie magics in the area - the ant nest already being a Faerie Portal site - would give the queen the ability to conceal the reality of both ants and the colony to outsiders. At least those less-attuned to Faerie. Thus in its illusory form, the subterranean colony would become a wonderful, glowing, magical above-ground castle-palace, the Scintillant Palace of Queen Mica, no less:

So the initial Palace map looks like this in its illusory form, which is, as might be anticipated, a little vague on details. Essentially, much of it could look as wonderful as the GM can imagine, because it's impossible to access most of it, as it simply doesn't exist.

The Queen of course gets her own separate portrait map in the Atlas, linked from her torso shot in the middle section of this map:

She has a fondness for the colour blue, and all her people wear it as similar crystalline armour, although even the guards don't carry weapons. Well, they do, but not the kind humanoids would expect of someone in this form. None have any body hair of course. And all her people have a curious facial resemblance to the Queen. She never leaves the Palace, though she can appear anywhere in the foraging area, either as an illusion that can still physically interact with things there in a limited way (Faerie magics allow the twisting of reality, after all), or projected onto one of her folk, using them as a physical avatar. A toggle in the FCW portrait map may help begin revealing the reality here:

The limitations of what's readily available in CA3 meant while a full-blown upright giant ant figure would have been ideal, the head starts to suggest things are ... different here at least. Plus the original CA symbol options have some handy giant ants, which in the background and a little blurred work quite nicely here. The Palace look has been retained intact for all this, because this version of the portrait then becomes a sort-of halfway point in seeing through the illusions. There should be a "Reality" toggle for the Palace's Level 1 FCW map though, which strips away all the illusion:

Still impressive, if perhaps rather less inviting now. The central part of the map repeats the first underground level of the earlier "Hive" maps, as does the cross-sectional diagram, though both have been amended in places to fit the Palace concept as now developed. All the features of this version of Level 1 have their equivalents in the Illusory version, and of course, there are PDF and text file descriptions to assist those wishing to make full use of the setting.

The original "Hive" was constructed randomly using the Carapace Pay-What-You-Want booklet by Goblin's Henchman on the DriveThru RPG download site, something that remained unchanged here, so the earlier Forum notes regarding that still apply. However, the connections to other hives were changed here to become four separate Wings for the Palace, and fresh maps had to be devised for those, though not using the same "Carapace" mechanism. We'll get to discussing what that was subsequently.

The main mapping style is that used for the original "Hive" maps, the CA07 Caves & Caverns one, while of course the ever-superb artwork of Mike Schley made possible the accompanying surface sketch views!