I prefer to stick with an appropriate adhesive. ?

Next bit!

I'd already had to adjust the symbol sizes to be sufficiently visible on the map for the base design, as the default setting had proven much too small and hard to see. When I started adding the feature elements, those felt still a little too small even using that adjustment:

So I tried this higher-res test - this and the subsequent images are all at the standard, larger, Forum size-resolution, here concentrating on just that key central map portion:

The new symbols indeed look awfully small here as well, so were quickly changed to larger sizes, although that in turn meant some further adjustments in positioning to retain clarity, and sometimes even swapping-out the symbols for alternatives, a process that was likely to continue for the rest of the mapping (which I find to be a very common occurrence). The central area with resized symbols:

Followed by a shot of the whole-map view:

At about this stage, although it seems I didn't preserve any of the screenshots I took during it, I tried adding some of the Character Artist vector monster symbols, to show what creatures might be found where in some of these locations. While that seemed worth an experiment, as the general drawing style is comparable with the other symbols in the Filled set, there's a little too much detail on the CA creature drawings to work at a suitably rescaled size here, so ultimately that idea was dropped, which is probably why I overwrote the images showing the attempt. Hey ho!

Finally for today, we have the map with all the inner-zone features added, albeit these are still little more than place-markers at this stage, before a range of adjustments takes place to settle them in better with one another, and so that aspects such as the stream-lines make better sense with those in the larger region, etc.

Edging a bit closer to a finished map, at least!

It may help you decide how and what you'll need to draw by finding a real-world 19th century map that you like and think will work for what you're intending (suitable for the size and type of area you want to map, for instance). Then take a look at the thumbnail images for the various Annual issues that Loopysue created elsewhere on the Forum, to see if any of those match closely enough to what you're aiming for. Each thumbnail links to the correct issue on the main ProFantasy website, where there are different examples of the same style in use, which again should help you decide which might be better for what you want.

The Cartographer's Annual 94, Vandel's Dwarven Dungeons has an anvil and a furnace in it, and you might find some suitable objects for use as tools in various places - try the weapons catalogues, for instance. The Munson's Mines pack from CA125 has some whole and broken mining tools, as well, for instance. Might take some finding all there could be of interest, and you might run into difficulties getting things to match if they're drawn in different styles, of course. And it depends whether you have all these add-ons, of course!

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.

This blog posting by Remy Monsen might be worth reviewing, as it will allow you to create an image of whatever you wish that looks as if it's been cut into the surface involved.

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.

Map nine in my little set of ten is for Skara Hamlet:

The usual WIP and Gallery updates are elsewhere on the Forum for this map, plus the FCW and PDF notes files for it are below:

The final Hilly Places map condenses the last four items, the streets, into one sketch:

These have a different random design mechanic behind them to the individual-place maps, and it became a particular fascination for me to see what patterns came out of this system. Here, I had to fit hills to the streets so-created, but that wasn't particularly difficult. Some features along the routes could be added based on the various featured texts, while others simply came from the street names, or the shapes the system produced, if sometimes with a bit of adjustment, or inspiration that struck while drawing them. Circus Place though just happened to look like a huge pair of spectacles from the outset - and what greater spectacle than a circus? Well, two circuses! Not saying it definitely did, but that might have influenced the final appearance of The Eye in Western Approach as well! Plus how apt was it that Western Approach can be approached only from the west? Sometimes, you start to wonder if randomness is truly "random" after all...