Last among the Watery Places maps is one condensing the final five streets into one drawing, the second illustration below showing just the streets for a bit better clarity at the normal Forum resolution:

The roadways were constructed randomly, as described in the Enclosed Places Forum notes, with the final appearances and features determined sometimes by the street names, sometimes by other factors. Potter Row is of course where the great ceramic craftsfolk live and work, several in houses built of pottery - a couple even in the form of gigantic pots (this is Faerie, after all). The featured text for Wadingburn Road suggested a willow-lined stream, and fancier properties. Rainbow Lane had to have rainbows along it - even to the roadway itself - while Bathtub Alley cried out for a large pond or pool to be added for those water faeries to be in. And then we have Glass Harmonica Way...

I mentioned in the introductory Embra topic that music had been one of my primary influences on how a Faerie city should be presented, and maybe one of the most "faerie" real-world instruments should be the glass harmonica, as well as being one that requires extraordinary skill and ability to play. So having come up with the street name near the start of developing Embra, it was always clear this was going to be a community of musicians, instrument makers, composers, and the like. The random nature of my street design mechanism meant the available area was smaller than I might have preferred initially, though the whole point of using random systems is to work with whatever that may throw at you, and adapt accordingly. The featured text provided an interesting adjunct, suggesting this wasn't going to be an ordinary street at all, but one closer to a gated community in the real-world, and from that everything else simply flowed (appropriately for a Watery Place, perhaps!). The one downside to the final map is that because I wanted everything clearly labelled, the small area meant the labels ended up concealing quite a lot of the area's character. However, the toggle option in the FCW Atlas file to turn off the place-names means it is possible to get a better view of the whole:

From which we can all again play "spot the red sandstone components" - and hopefully get a clearer impression of the final layout. And yes, the street was originally populated with random CD3 houses, which then got moved, adapted, redrawn and converted to their final shapes here.

Today's update is partly a minor way to revisit the original premise behind the whole D23 concept, creating a dungeon room a day through the year. While it was never my intention to aim at trying that, because of the way I've developed the Dendorlig Hall map and description so far, as mentioned, areas 1 to 49 are effectively separate to the rest of the map, as being the reoccupied "Village" area closer to the cavern entrance. As today is day 49 of 2023, an update on how these first 49 places have developed seemed apt. The image below shows the current state of this part of the Hall complex:

There've been a few changes since the previous update, including increasing the label text sizes (and having to move one here off the actual labelled area itself), along with setting up a different label colouring for those parts of the Hall that have yet to be reinvestigated by the incoming Gnomes. Note that those black labels have not yet been repositioned after their sizes were amended.

And to complete the process to this point, here's the PDF covering just those first 49 areas for those interested. Be aware though that this is a draft version of the typed notes only at this stage, so may yet - like the map - be subject to further changes. It does though give a comprehensive view of how my thinking has progressed regarding amending the random notes from the Wizardawn system, in combination with how I felt this part of the dungeon would operate.

Where we go from here is a little less straightforward, or rather when might be appropriate to post about it here, following the same "timing" theme as today, since the explored areas outside this Village section don't comprise a simple straight run of numbered places (as noted before, these are areas 50-66, 93-110 and 143-146). In the final PDF and text notes for the Atlas, these will be collected together for detailing ahead of the rest of the unexplored complex, a process which has already begun, in fact, as getting the notes typed-up has so far progressed to area 104 of these three segments, while my handwritten notes cover through to area 140 right now. Only another 220 areas to go!

It has been fascinating, as it often is, to adapt the random information from Wizardawn into something that works better here, though I still feel I've been adding a few too many of the coin treasures at times (the classic D&D treasure type going right back to the original system, for those less familiar). Of course, those using the Atlas are naturally free to ignore or amend whatever they wish from these notes, so I've not been too concerned at this. It has been entertaining though to sometimes find the random system has come up with something perfectly suited to a given area, along with occasionally needing to resolve the equivalent to the old joke of finding "40 kobolds in a broom closet". That's what being inspired by random design systems will do for you, though!

Having succumbed to expanding this map-group to three, I set-to randomly allocating some extra places to the Swamp of Toads, beyond what was there already, though not too many, as the area involved is just six miles by three. I toyed with the notion of changing the mapping style for it as well, but the symbol options were just so much greater using the CA140 and SS1 styles than others I'd thought to try, that I chose to stick with them:

Drawing the twisting river lines was rather fun. Indeed, I had to calm down some of them with redrawing, as while accurate to such things in reality (take a look at some of the historical maps showing how the lower Mississippi has appeared and changed over the years!), it made this map look too messy and hard to read. I also dropped the idea of drawing oxbow lakes alongside the channels for the same reason, plus some of the swamp symbols come with little pools anyway, which worked just as well to hint at such elements, while not looking too cluttered. I did have to add one larger lake from the random design process, though that was big enough not to be a problem.

Many of the features came from a variety of the Story Engine decks again, including the three main ones, "The Story Engine", "Deck of Worlds" and "Loremaster's Deck", and several of the fantasy and horror supplementary decks, but this time added to from tables in the main Shadowdark RPG rules, and the free PDF adventure pack "Shadowdome Thunderdark", both available from The Arcane Library.

Within the Swamp is much monstrous flora, both in size and nature, and the place has been generally little-visited by outsiders for centuries, other than a few folk from the Leechfort martial arts school on the Leech Hills (yep, there are giant leeches here as well as toads!). Most of the intelligent creatures here are humanoid Toadfolk, many of whom live in separate homesteads or small communities scattered over the Swamp and nearby jungles. Then there's a gigantic, deity-like Swamp Elemental, commonly known as the Toad Lord, who lives near the heart of the Swamp. And that Palace was what the dice-design dungeon map was soon to become! (Next time!)

Simplest solution is to use the drop-down menu "List" command by selecting both the overlapping objects, and decide which you need to remove from that information. Make a note of the "Tag #" number.

Close the List window, then click the :CC2ERASE: button (left side column) and click again on the items involved.

Then right click to call up the dialogue box, and choose the "Combine" - "And (Both)" option.

Next, right click again, and choose "More" - "Entity Tag #", and then type in the Tag number for the item you want to delete. This will appear in the Command Line (lower left of the CC3+ window). If the number is correct, press the "Enter" key to accept it, and then right click one last time and choose "Do it". That will remove the chosen one of the two overlapping entities.

I think the problem we're having in helping you is we don't really know what YOU think constitutes Steampunk, or what it is you're trying to map, so just saying you want Steampunk assets without saying what they're for, is a little like asking us to give you a piece of string to accomplish a task you can't define. Now you're saying you found some Steampunk packs elsewhere but they weren't what you wanted (which rather goes against your prior comment that anything under the Steampunk label would do). Maybe if you could say what assets you DO want and what it is you want to map, instead of what you don't, we might be able to help more. It's clear you know what you're looking for, but we don't.

Certainly there is no ProFantasy pack that carries the specific "Steampunk" label, if that's all you were hoping for, although that doesn't mean there aren't assets you could use in that genre in many other packs, as we've tried to indicate in the notes above.

Still haven't tried Edge since it appeared in one of the all-too-frequent "Windows improvements" recently. I think the only prior difficulty I had with Chrome was on my ISP's site, which apparently - and incredibly - still uses Flash Player for part of their system. Hardly Chrome's fault of course. Stunningly, my ISP wasn't aware that support for Flash Player ends this December, yet they still haven't updated that part of their site...

I prefer to stick with an appropriate adhesive. ?

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...

Having established that I wanted to draw an overground map for Shadow Keep's ruins based on the underground one, I copied and pasted over into a new map the sub-surface wall lines for the Keep's Grand Entrance octagon, and those areas of the Kennels where the hanging moss skeins were shown, together with sketch-lines for where the heaviest collapsed rubble lay, blocking the stairs down into the Grand Entrance chamber, and the first part of the stairs too. That Grand Entrance became the surface ruins' Inner Keep, with a larger octagonal sketch-line for the outside wall of the Outer Keep, together with a couple of similarly sketchy gatehouses for access to both. I also added the line of the Old Road from Elkan Village, leading off the southeast map edge, based on the trail-line illustrated on the Atlas map for the Loksa Environs area (the B&W hex-map from last time).

This looked a complete mess, as sketch-maps often do at first, especially after I started cutting-up the wall-lines, showing which had completely collapsed, and which were still partly intact. I wanted the final walls to look as if they had some surviving dressed stones covering their lower parts in places, with those missing from the higher surviving stones, which I decided would be chiefly packed-rubble wall-cores. These walls were thus initially drawn as stone-fill polygons, so as to have flat sides yet ragged ends where the rest of the wall had fallen away, something simple lines can't do. A couple of higher sheets were added to the stack for numerous hand-placed rock symbols from the Mike Schley SS4 Caves options, sometimes rescaled, with more fallen rock rubble strewn liberally across the ground surface. As so often with elements like this, a degree of trial and error was involved, getting the shadow effects especially to look right, without being too overwhelming or invisible (hopefully!).

The fissures and crevices took still more trials to get right, with various attempts to use bevel options failing to achieve a suitable look, whereas a simple Edge Fade, Inner was all that was really needed, on several dark grey, angular, hand-drawn polygons! In the end, there was so much fallen rubble everywhere, I started to wonder if any of these painstaking efforts would ever be seen at all! At least I'd know they were there though 😁.

Indeed, I scaled-back the amount of rubble, especially over the stairs, since while it's all fine for the map to be accurate, it also needs to be usable for GMs, so things can't always be drawn exactly as they might genuinely appear. In a century since the event, there'd be likely a lot more vegetation covering the rubble than appears here, for instance. Thus, the final map:

As the mapping was underway, I also designed a couple of surface aspects, beyond the heavy vegetation of the Shadow Woods jungle (which was already placed as present on the earlier Atlas map). This was done again using The Tome of Adventure Design, which came up with the Flying Foxes (terrier-sized canines with prehensile forepaws, bat-like wings and sharp teeth, whose bite carries disease - they like to live in the largest jungle trees with big branches they can easily walk along) and the odd-sounding Slap Grass. Slap Grass grows in patches up to adult-human-tall, and crawls along slowly through rubbly soils using its roots. It has sword-length, wing-shaped, flattened flower heads that it uses to slap at passing creatures (attracted by sensing heat and motion from them, if large enough). This forces its seeds into the creature's skin, and if not removed quickly, once in living tissue the seeds grow rapidly through their host's body, killing the creature in a very short time. And, as the yellow-green patches on the map suggests, there's a lot of it about here!

I decided to keep the map overall fairly simple in its labelled features, and not too threatening in its contents, although GMs could always have a few Forager Elemental Wasps pass through as an additional problem for parties trying to clear enough rubble away to access the underground complex.

Looking ahead for next time, it's a return visit to Artemisia, around the south-centre of that island continent, somewhere in the Lampoteuo Region...

The first of the Hilly Places of Interest is a rocky mound by the curiously narrow River Clack, Palace Heights:

No real sign of a "Palace" as such, although that maze of low, grassy features all over the slightly domed hilltop hints that something may have been here once. This is one of those Places I'd had an idea or two about before the project was too far along, and parts of this map will recur in a subsequent one from the Constructed Places, where the Palace isn't just a series of grassed-over ruins. Faerie time-dilation effects can permit all sorts of weirdness, and in this case, both the hill with ruins, and the hill with a fully-functional Palace, can coexist simultaneously in Embra. The particular one to be found - perhaps even both - dependent on how the city is navigated.

The original concept came about loosely because the real-world city of Edinburgh, which was an early influence for Embra, has its own great castle-palace, set upon a rocky pinnacle in the city, although the two aren't closely comparable beyond that, chiefly because each of the Places for Embra being unconnected from any others, has to be presented on a more-or-less standalone map, whereas Edinburgh Castle's rocky platform continues down into the adjacent street area leading up to it, known as the Royal Mile.