Next to be mapped was the Castle Peris area, various locations in which had a scattering of weird and wonderful items added to them thanks to the random card draws.

There are three main parts to the map, the Harbour (most of which has fallen into the sea), the Village (much of which has only had building foundations laid, and may never have been inhabited - or not for long, at least) and the eponymous Castle itself. Living here much of the time is that now-amended, card-derived "Chieftain", who has become Hypatos, the isle's sole permanent humanoid inhabitant, a self-exiled, hermit-like Human, and former chief sage, who successfully predicted a major eclipse and planetary alignment in the past, but being imaginative and forgetful, he then failed to warn of an abdication crisis he believed these celestial events portended, somewhere on the mainland (he is quite vague as to when and where all this took place). He still wishes to right the wrongs he thinks followed that crisis. He is convinced there is something on the isle that will help him resolve those perceived wrongs, although he does not know what (possibly that Talisman at the Watchtower of the Sea). He is also the sole priest, of sorts, for The Twisted Torchbearer, and is apparently under her protection. He is very knowledgeable about the isle, and seems to have been here for a very long time, although his appearance suggests no great age, merely late middle-age...

Further notes will be in the final Atlas version.

The drawing itself was done using the Jon Roberts Dungeon style from Annual 54, since it allows the easy draughting of surface areas like this as readily as underground ones. If it had building roof options, I might have been tempted to add those too, but the cross-sectional, ground-floor-only plan views are in-keeping with the original "Castles" book maps, at least!

Next time, the little dungeon map proper.

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!

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!

After a bit of digging around (it's actually SS3, not SS2, which confused at first!), the SS3 Bitmap A and B styles both have wall features like doors, so will cut the walls. SS3 Blueprint Floorplans has no door symbol options, so won't have any wall-cutting tools (so that symbol catalogue comes up as blank).

It looks, though, as if you're actually using the Vector style, as in the Symbols > Modern > Floorplans Catalogue are two vector wall features catalogues Wall Features 31 and Wall Features, both of which have wall-cutting features.

For unknown reasons, using the symbol catalogue icon doesn't call-up either of the Vector Wall Features catalogues in a new Modern Vector Floorplan map I did as a test, so at least I can say it's not just your system!

You can navigate to the symbols manually, or you can add either of those files to your map using the drop down Symbols - Symbol Settings... option, which calls up this panel:

In which I simply added the word "Floorplans" after "Modern" in the "Master filter" box and browsed to the correct FSC file under "Catalog setting specifications", saved that, and the catalogue now shows up when I click the :CC2SYMPATH: icon.

Hopefully, this will help with your mapping.

@Don Anderson Jr. - The line with the horse icon will only show up if you have the various non-ProFantasy symbols from the CSUAC, Dundjinni, Bogies, etc., items installed.

As mentioned last time, the next map in this sequence was heading for somewhere in the NW Doriant map, a huge part of that largest continent:

However, when I investigated further, it turned out the Malhavania peninsula there had already been mapped previously. While itself no small region, that did start to look a little more hopeful:

Checking the smallest pre-mapped part of the Malhavania one, around Loksa, clinched things, with its convenient selection of interesting potential sites available to slip-in a small, new, dungeon map:

As this final map indicates, I chose the Ruins of Shadow Keep for this site. It's probably not too obvious at this resolution, but the black-and-white area is covered by a hex-map (drawn for the Atlas by Kathorus), with six-mile hexes. I did consider mapping the whole hex, but decided against it finally, mostly because the previous map-group I'd prepared had already been so long delayed in being completed.

The dungeon design was derived this time from randomly-rolled layouts using the Inkwell Ideas Trailblazer Set of Dungeonmorph Dice, the first of the four designs prepared from this set, though I did make a few minor changes to fit better with how things developed for what the contents and purpose of this structure might be/have been ("Ruins", after all). Much of those contents were determined using random tables from the revised edition of "The Tome of Adventure Design" published by Mythmere Games. I only realised after doing so that the Trailblazer dice set actually does have accompanying notes in a separate Inkwell Ideas book! Still, there are three more designs from that set after this one, though I did take a few ideas from that book as well, notably that the original inhabitants of Shadow Keep had been Dwarves, that part of the complex had been a temple, and that another part had been kennels.

One thing the "Tome" came up with were some very weird creatures, which rapidly became the focus for why the Keep had been abandoned and ruined, the Elemental Wasps. From the notes prepared to go into the Atlas: Elemental Wasps. Horse-sized, hairy, spider-form, colonial, egg-laying outer horrors, with three spherical body parts - a small head, medium body and larger abdomen - the body segment with 8 or 10 pincer-tipped legs. Normally invisible, except during and after feeding on blood, when their forms appear pink and sharply-ridged. Attracted to small, shiny objects that they collect as nests. May become ghostly and intangible at will. They have three forms, Queen, Forager and Warrior, of which the Forager and Warrior may cocoon to transform into any other type, as the Queen requires. Cocoons and eggs are always visible.

I also provided the creatures with relevant game stats based on the "Shadowdark RPG", published by The Arcane Library, for GM's guidance. To give an idea of what these (all non-flying) Wasps get up to, these are the notes for the Queen: Elemental Wasp Queen. An almost immobile form, with a huge, egg-laying abdomen and eight tiny legs. AC 12, HP 42, ATK 1 mental burst and 1 lightning cloud or 1 blood suck (near) +3 (1d10 + blood drain), MV close, S +3, D -4, C +2, I +0, W +1, Ch -4, AL C, LV 9. Blood Drain. Extensible head proboscis can hit one target in near. Once attached, may auto-hit each round as the Queen's only attack. Queen regains 1d6 HP per successful attack round. Target may DC 12 STR to break attachment on their turn. Lightning Cloud. Fills a double-near-sized cube extending from the Queen. DC 15 DEX or all within the area take 4d8 damage (DISADV on check if wearing metal armour). Mental Burst. Fills a near-sized cube around the Queen. DC 15 CON or paralyzed 1d4 rounds. Impervious. Electricity immune. Incorporeal. In place of attacks, become corporeal or incorporeal. Invisible. Naturally invisible. After using Blood Suck attack successfully, becomes partly visible. All who can see this, DC 12 CHA or paralyzed 1d4 rounds.

The other forms all have variant powers based on these, with physical pincer attacks as well, and they're a lot more mobile, able to climb vertical surfaces and so forth. There are grubs too, but they're unable to defend themselves, and need looking after by the other mobile types till they become adults.

All of which preamble brings us to the new map:

This also has a gridded version, although the angled areas work somewhat less well with that, of course:

The mapping style here started out as the CA94 Dwarven Dungeons one, given the initial inhabitants were, after all, Dwarves. However, it soon became clear that I needed other elements as well. SS4 Dungeons of Schley and the free monthly "Schley" symbols are already intended to work with Dwarven Dungeons, so that was fine. However, I also ended-up adding items from CA209 Stairs & Steps, Sue's Creepy Crypts (CA186 + CA188) and DD3! So using the Worn Manuscript font from Perspectives 3 wasn't much of a step further...

Of course, when you start a new map with Dwarven Dungeons, the first symbol catalogue that shows up has the cave bugs in it, so while they're not very close to how I envisioned the Elemental Wasps (except maybe the maggot-grubs), I thought they'd do to hint at Things To Come for explorers here 😉.

There is much other weirdness as well. The "Tome" provides opportunities to go to town when designing features such as statues, and having had it come up with a Statue Hall (4), all the statues in it now have individual descriptions in the Atlas map notes, based on those random options, as do the individual pillars in those seven Pillar Rooms (because you can also randomly design pillars using it!). Even the glowing hanging moss across the Kennels area (13 to 25) originated in tables there. The ceiling crevices from which it has grown down from the overlying jungle (the site is at about 25°N latitude on Nibirum) were though my own thought to explain how it got to be here at all, at least. Oh, and there are poisonous little spiders in it that keep away other predators...

One more weird item discovered late in the process concerns the Dwarven Dungeons scalebar. If you peer closely at the gridded version of the map, you may be able to tell the 10-foot grid squares do not match perfectly with the 20-foot marks on the scalebar. Ordinarily, when adding a scalebar symbol, I always check it against the grid, to make sure the size is what it's supposed to be and that I haven't messed it up. Commonly, I also place the centre of the scalebar using the snap grid, as a further test. Doing that showed this scalebar didn't fit to the grid, even after testing with adjusted symbol scaling, including trying the varicolor and metric scalebar versions, in case one worked. All proved identical, however. So then I measured the separation of the marks on the bar at scale-size "1", and found the separation between individual marks came out variably between about 15 and 17 feet, with no consistency, which of course explained things. I did think of swapping-in an alternative bar, but I wanted to try to stick as much as possible with the Dwarven Dungeons style here, so have just left it, given it'll still be sufficiently correct for most uses. Something to be aware of when mapping with this style though, perhaps.

Meanwhile back at the broader-scale map, features such as those ceiling crevices in the Kennels, started me considering it probably needed a surface map as well. We'll come to that next time...

You'd need a bitmap image version (BMP, PNG or JPG) of the map you could import into the CC3+ drawing on one of the lower Sheets, and then resize it to fit the size of map you're intending to draw, but yes, this is eminently practical.

To import the bitmap, make a new Sheet and a new Layer both called BITMAP in the FCW file you'll be working with, and make sure both are checked to be the active Sheet and Layer.

Then to import the bitmap, use the drop-down "Draw" menu, and click on "Insert File". Navigate to wherever your file is stored, click on it and click OK.

You'll then have it on the cursor in your map. Click once to secure its top left corner, and then move the cursor to enlarge the bitmap to the size you need, and click again to finish the command.

You might find it helps to set up a snap grid of a size to be useful in finalising the bitmap size, and make use of that during the import process.

You can then check the image size is correct by using the CC3+ measuring tools against items of known sizes on the image. You can rescale the size of the drawing very precisely after import too, if necessary.

And if you get stuck, just ask again on the Forum!

One final thought. You might like to check around on the Forum for topics created by @mike robel who's done a lot of high-quality work of exactly the kind you're wanting to do, specifically to create board wargame maps using CC3+.

While I know some folks that comment and contribute here like to present and view Work In Progress topics, I rarely map in a way that allows this, as I tend to simply change things as I'm going along and don't record what's been done or when. It also needs extra time and effort, which is something I rarely have available either. However, when I started the second of the 40 250 x 200 mile maps for "my" corner of Alarius, that did seem a rare opportunity to try to do a bit more in this line. So while not a WIP thread as such - because the map's already completed, and will be submitted for the Atlas shortly - it may be of interest to some to have an overview of how it got to be as it is.

When I started preparing for this whole Errynor project, one of the first things I did was to set up the grid for where the 250 x 200 mile maps were going to be on Shessar's Alarius map:

I then hand-drew onto squared paper details extracted from this map for each of the planned 40, including things like where the exact lines for the different background terrain fills lay on land, where the edge of the contour-colour fills were for the sea, and so forth. Although these wouldn't be so critical for the later mapping (the edges of the fills being softened in the map as shown above here means there will always be a degree of leeway in such things), they were important for some of the more detailed features I wanted to add, such as creatures which tend to be biome-specific.

Zooming in to the Map 40 area (lowest right corner of the full gridded map above) showed what I'd be dealing with here:

The yellow line that's just peeping out from under the lowest outer orange line is for the southern limit of the Errynor mapping area (it also extends up the right-hand edge of Map 40, but is better hidden there), while the thinner white line extending south of the right-hand corner of Map 40 is because when this mapping began several years ago, the area east of Errynor had been reserved by another Atlas mapper. Ultimately, the person who was hoping to map that region had to drop out unfortunately, but Shessar subsequently stepped-in and completed part of it, although that no longer extends south to the southern edge of my Errynor area, as a comparison of where the major river (now named as the Faerie Run) lies in relation to the lowest corner of the illustrations above and below this paragraph. On the following extract from the bottom left corner of Shessar's "Alarius North Central" map, I've added a 250 x 200 mile orange rectangle for scale:

The left edge of this rectangular area immediately adjoins part of the right edge of my Map 40, and also part of Map 32 to Map 40's north.

Returning to Map 40, to the hand-drawn map of landforms and terrain features, I added randomly-rolled creatures and places using a series of tables based on ones I'd constructed decades ago, updated and amended here where that seemed necessary. The squared-paper maps had been designated so that every square would be five miles on a side, and each 5-mile square was allocated a maximum 10% chance of having something noteworthy in it at this mapping scale (variably reduced for anything less favourable than temperate surface land conditions). Of those features, about 17% - 1 in 6 - might be settlements of some sort, with a maximum 60% chance of being inhabited, or deserted/ruined otherwise, again partly condition-dependent.

All of which got me to the point where I could also begin filling-in some of the lesser terrain features based on what had been rolled-up. Settlements need a significant water supply, as would some types of creature, which allowed new river lines to be sketched-in. Certain creatures also need a lair of some kind, and that meant smaller areas of cliffs, caves, trees, marshes and lakes could be added, all again based on random rolls determined by the creatures in question. Thus the map came to look like this:

This isn't very clear at the size suitable for the Forum, and the scan I made of it has cut-off the column numbering along the top edge. This wasn't important for what I intended, as it was simply meant as the traceable background bitmap image for the CC3+ map. I can't re-scan it like this, as it's been further amended since, and indeed right into the creation of Map 40 in CC3+ changes were still being made, not all of which ended up on the hand-drawn version anyway! It is still possible though to see this is a "warts and all" sketch, with crossings-out, amendments and annotations. Even the original map isn't as clear as it might be now, and I can't remember which of the various lines represent which terrain type in places where the annotations have become too dense! Note too that the line of the map's only major river (that is, the one shown on the original Alarius map) hasn't been finalised here. It's still drawn at the scale it was, so is about ten miles wide, hence why the new tributaries end at its edge. As this also illustrates, the size of the paper means the edge of the mapped area is seven squares short of this image's right-hand edge.

Features were allocated one or two numbers as well as a written note of what each was, as I learnt early on the importance of recording these (they're the dice roll values) after making some mistakes in identifying which thing was in which terrain type, and thus what the random tables said it was meant to be... In the map's centre-top, that Yeti that became a Blood Hawk Flock with a cliff lair turned out to have been a Yeti after all, as you may be able to tell from this close-up of a later version of just the top left corner (now so you can see the top column numbers too):

If you can see some dots that don't have any annotations, or other faint markings, that's because I hand-drew all these maps on both sides of the paper, and occasionally that shows through weakly.

Selecting only the main features, such as the major settlements and ruins, as well as the new lesser watercourses and vegetation areas, was what let me build-up the final Errynor map, of which the Map 40 segment is shown below, here with its latitude lines and the southern limit for Nibirum's northern polar auroral zone (red arc). Only the cream-coloured latitude arc, for 55°N, features in the Atlas CC3+ Errynor map. The black arcs for each 1° were added in preparation for these individual 250 x 200 mile maps, and will feature there:

I'll present and discuss the final CC3+ map for the Atlas in more detail in a subsequent Forum topic. For now, merely a teaser view of the final Map 40's terrain (only) - no settlements, or creatures, or anything else. Yet!

There are various options for showing contouring beyond what's been discussed here, though some probably will work better, or with less effort, than others for this scale and type of map. The Fantasy Towns Annual issue might be the more suitable alternative to consider, which uses a version of shaded terrain using the transparent solid bitmap fills and bevel effects to generate a form of shaded terrain. I made extensive use of this style in mapping the Faerie City of Embra for the Community Atlas a couple of years ago, of which the "Hilly Places" maps are perhaps the more helpful to see some examples of what it can do (you can access the Atlas versions via the links in the last post at the end of the page, and also of course find the FCW files in the Atlas that way).

Shessar's Battlemat Tutorials (PDFs) provide another alternative, using cliffs drawn with symbols, and map shading, similarly to what you've been doing elsewhere using Sue's connecting cliff symbols, and not dissimilar to Sue's use of sheets in her famous Merelan City map.

Although it's more often used for larger-area overland maps, the various shaded relief options (again using bevel effects) may be worth exploring further, such as via the Shaded Relief Annual, or Hadrian VI's PDF tutorial.

Overall, nothing beats thinking things over and experimenting to see what works best for you, however!

Might be worth tweaking the glow on the lettering to help it stand out more. Might be the colouring instead, but I'm struggling to pick out the numbers for some of the features on the map, and I get the impression the red doesn't seem so clear on the background as the black.

+1 from me for the tanks/AFV annual!

If you're seriously thinking of a full range of vehicles, maybe choose a specific theatre and time to reduce the options somewhat. Colour schemes and camouflage will easily swap over, but the modifications to vehicles, and the different types involved, end up as the real problems (speaking as a long-time model-maker and WWII wargamer).

Aircraft to follow? 😉