Thanks very much Remy!

Since I've had a couple of queries about the Inkwell dice sets outside the Forum, and to clarify for those interested here, the simplest solution is to visit the DungeonMorphs page of the Inkwell site. As you'll discover there, the designs are available also as cards and fonts, and there are books with descriptions and ideas for the more recent sets as well.

In addition, and because I think he actually started the whole concept of geomorphs with this ten-space design (that's ten spaces per side on the design), it's worth looking at the past postings on Dyson Logos' blog, as he's provided illustrations showing many - now maybe all - the designs he's produced over the years, including those he's done for Inkwell. There's a "Geomorphs" tab under the "Navigation" sidebar on his blog, but that only covers the 100 designs he did for a personal challenge in 2009-2010, all collected for easy download in one place. Using the "Post Categories" search box, the Geomorph Mapping Challenge has 217 blog entries, which goes WAY beyond those he's been commissioned to do for Inkwell and those 100 earlier maps!

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!

And so to the third map, Hex 505, Ivan's Keep:

Subject to frequent attacks by bands of Goblins and Kobolds, this had to be a defended settlement, and I thought it might be fun to use what is actually the symbol of a short stretch of straight wooden town wall, to create a neatly rounded palisade! It wasn't actually that difficult, after setting up a guideline oval to work with, ensuring the village properties stayed within that boundary, and then fitting the wall afterwards. The shortness of the wall symbol meant it actually worked rather well in this manner. As to why it's so neatly symmetrical (if not entirely to the low hill the place is built on), there is an explanation in the accompanying notes.

While less intentional, the mix of shadows and road textures does help make the palisaded settlement a very definite focal point for the whole drawing. Plus the fact the village wasn't always where it is now meant a couple of the ruin symbols that come with this mapping style package could be employed to hint at that. Most were cleared away when the Fence was being constructed, to help build the newer properties in the settlement as it now is, of course.

Selecting can be problematic, especially when you have two things that directly overlap one another. Fortunately, there are a number of different options you can select by using CC3+ to identify which of the objects you've selected you actually want to do something with. This post, the accompanying short linked video, and the linked additional post, again all by Remy Monsen, will help with this, whatever issues you're having with selection.

There isn't a global search mechanic across all the add-ons you may have installed, mostly because it's advisable to choose a style to map in, and stick with that, since those items will usually work well with one another in terms of the overall map appearance. That doesn't stop you from bringing in symbols or bitmap fills from other mapping styles, but you'll need to identify what those are when doing so first of all. If you want to see what symbols and bitmap fills you have on your system, the easiest way is to use Windows' File Explorer, and navigate to wherever you have your CC3+ system installed (the standard default is in ProgramData under Profantasy, for instance).

Realistically, and much as Sue already said, if you're aiming for a hand-done pen and wash style illustration, it should look like a watercolour painting, where the wash sometimes covers the line, sometimes runs short of it. There isn't a voting option for that, and I really don't see this as an "either or" choice. So sometimes that'd be "A", sometimes "B", but more often a mix of both, with some additional overlap too.

The lower cliff edges could perhaps do with something to help them "sit down" in the terrain better; they have rather too crisp an edge currently, whereas in reality, there'd be some snow drifted or fallen around the base to make the edge a bit more irregular.

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.

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...

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!

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.