Having at last managed to map the exterior region beyond the Hall to its south, Dendorlig Vale, and having just discussed it on the Forum, it seemed a good idea to update the state-of-play with the Hall itself today as well. My handwritten notes currently have reached area 201, while the type-up of these has reached area 160, all of which is easier to tell now, as I'm past the point where some areas were being written and typed-up out of sequence. The map continues to be amended in minor ways, notably in the placement of the area number-labels, after these, as noted previously, were enlarged some time ago.

Today's notes cover what was partly shown in the lower right corner of the previous sample map-segment here, the places formerly occupied by The Pegasus Club and the areas adjoining it (not all of which were directly related to the Club in their previous use). This is the map segment covering the areas involved:

And these are the extracted PDF notes to go with the same areas (only):

As usual, both map and notes are subject to further amendment subsequently, as the text hasn't been fully checked still, while the project remains ongoing. Indeed part of the earlier notes posted here, which mentioned Dendorlig Vale, have been altered slightly too following the mapping of that external region, to reflect how the map actually turned out, rather than how it seemed it might earlier!

Further updates should follow, if all goes to plan.

[EDIT: And if only I'd realised this would have had the Forum-added note "28 Days Later", I might have made some post-apocalyptic comment as well 😉. Too late now though...]

Well, were-elks are we going to find them 😎 ?

The fifth map in my Whispering Wastes set is the weird necropolis setting of Osalin Village:

I've added some fresh notes about it to my WIP topic, and there's a higher-res map in my Gallery for this place too. Meanwhile, the FCW and PDF notes files are here:

Possibly, though it's quite common to have a heavy plume of smoke above the fire, so you can't see the central flame so well. Chimney fires have a tendency to produce copious amounts of dark smoke, sometimes with embedded sparks, which tends to be more what you'd see, particularly given the chimney itself is relatively tiny compared with the smoke plume. As house chimneys often kink inside, you might not be able to see the blazing soot unless it's near the top of the chimney anyway. From memory, the flames tend to be redder as well, though this is from the perspective of viewing from the side, rather than top-down.

Should be no tribble to do so...

If you're struggling to work out the general sizes of things as a whole, you might find it useful to look through some real-world maps, like an atlas, a map of your local area and your own town, for instance. That should give you some ideas about the amount of detail visible on different area-sizes of map.

It might help you too to draw out some sketch-maps by-hand first of what you're wanting to create in CC3+, as that way you can get a rough idea of what size of map is going to better-fit the map you're wanting to draw once you start-up in the program. Even if you don't get it right this way, you can always resize the map in CC3+ if you find the area's too large, or not large enough. We've all been there!

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!

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.

Four rooms left to complete now. The first two were fairly straightforward, a lower barrack-room for the temple staff and guards below part of Banys Hall on the surface, and a shared space for some of the temple priesthood:

These were followed by combined study and bed chambers for the leading priests, which necessitated adding cross walls to both the last two rooms, and fresh doorways, as well as somewhat more sumptuous furnishings:

That completed the main map drawing, which left the labelling and layout, plus I decided to add a grid, as I often do for dungeon drawings. I tried with a 10-foot grid spacing at first, but the offset walls, and non-standard width areas in places, because of the adjustments to fit to the pre-existing surface features, meant that wasn't helpful, and looked quite messy. So I went with a 5-foot grid instead, although that too looks uncomfortable over that northern segment, where the diagonal floor tile lines clash with the grid in places. It seemed OK for the rest of the map at least, and people can always turn it off, or amend it, in the FCW file if they don't like it.

It only needed adding to selected parts of the whole drawing, and without a walls mask sheet, that meant a grid mask was going to be required, with another chance to break-out the magic of the Color Key sheet effect:

Looks quite impressive here, less so with Color Key off, to show how it was accomplished:

Thanks to the complex and off-axis shapes involved, I'd quickly created a new drawing tool just for this Color Key mask, because that allows the tracing of already-created polygons, of course. And once the remaining strident pink sections were added, the magic was complete:

The perceptive will have noted too that one basic layout action has happened while all this Color Keying was ongoing, moving the map's title. More such juggling followed, as also with the labelling, to reach this final version, gridless, then gridded:

The usual higher-res versions have been added to my Gallery as well today.

The outline arrow for the surface entrance from Maleng Hall was just a little drawn polygon linear shape using the snap-grid, and the upper part of the background map area has been shrunk to better fit the final map's layout, using the Stretch command on the Map Border and Background sheets. 

Not quite ready to submit these maps for the Atlas yet, as the PDF notes are still to complete, so I'll post again here once they're done and the maps have been sent-off to Remy.

Sometimes, the Forum throws weird notices at you while you're doing other things. That can be because you've been sent a new message by someone, or somebody's just posted in one of your topics, or someone's added a new post to the topic you were typing your notes into, for instance. Here, I just posted the above, and suddenly it announced I had achieved the rank of "Cartographer".

Now, these labels are just for a bit of fun on the Forum here, of course. However, it seemed very apt that this should have happened by chance while I was adding to this topic, because our departed dear friend JimP was also of that rank. It just made stop, think and remember again for a moment. Which was also part of the purpose in my doing these maps in the way I am.