The fifth Constructed Place moves us into the "entertainment" quarter (if Embra had such a thing, at least), the actors' village of Stubble Chin Theatre. Subtlety isn't really in it, with Sorceress' Hill and Verdant Wood adjoining one another, but theatricals often feel the need to make a clear statement, it's said...

The Theatre itself is an open-air one, though it has a concealed clamshell cover that can be raised to move everything indoors when required, allowing for a greater variety of performances, not necessarily all of a theatrical nature.

As I noted after completing my Dendorlig Hall project last October, I'd hoped to have returned to my Alarius mapping by now. Other matters intervened however, and are liable to persist through at least the first quarter of this year too, so I thought it worth trying some smaller mapping projects for a while instead. Partly, this came about following discussions with a few folks on a Discord regarding what to do about possibly continuing with the Dungeon23 concept this year, given almost no one had persisted all year with that, and few had accomplished anything like what they'd hoped for it.

The concept I have for myself currently is to try to map a small dungeon or area each week or so, which, although probably impractical in the long-term, does provide a focus of sorts. Those I complete will all go into the Community Atlas, and following my normal preference for some element of randomness about such Atlas creations, I decided to use the Inkwell Ideas dice sets to generate the base maps in all cases.

For those unfamiliar, the Inkwell dice sets are packs of themed, over-sized, six-sided dice (D6s), where each face has on it a different geomorphic dungeon or cavern drawing. The packs contain either five, six or eight such D6s, and there are currently 12 packs available, three of which are overground settings, nominally "Villages", "Cities" and "Ruins", although the "Ruins" dice are duplicates of the "Cities" ones, where parts of the design have been wholly or partly destroyed. Twelve packs, you say 😁? As in months in a year...

By using random numbers, and selections, of dice from each set, I've generated 52 individual hand-drawn maps based on what the dice provided, which designs were then randomly allocated to places on Nibirum for which regional maps existed in the version of the Atlas I'd most recently downloaded, albeit from earlier last year. The ultimate placements for almost none have been finalised yet, as I'm opting to identify specific locations for them only as I'm progressing. So far, things may turn out to be more complex than I'd hoped, as it may be additional smaller area maps will be needed for many of these along the way too, to define more exactly where they are.

However, the first small map and its new area map are complete, and have been submitted for the Atlas, having oddly enough landed by-chance right into one of my own area maps, the Wyvern Citadel Defence Zone on Kentoria!

Although actually prepared in order of dungeon first, then overground, when going into the Atlas, this situation of course is reversed, so the general area the dungeon was to end up in has first to be identified, what became the Monseignor District map, whose placement was to be here:

That area now looks like this, in more detail:

Or at least it does using the Overland Black & White style from Annual 20. Most features had already appeared in the earlier larger area map, or its description, although now some semi-random names and features could be added to those previously unnamed and not shown. Plus of course, the location of the dungeon map had to be provided as well, at Melgore:

Last of the individual sites is the Twilight Market setting for this group of Places, Candlelight Hall. The Hall has a huge, pale-blue, glass-tiled roof over much of it, and while that was straightforward enough to draw - CD3 tiled roof shaded polygon with added Sheet Transparency Effect - the support structure took rather more thought and effort, albeit "Trim To Entity" does work wonders in cases like this, for all those roof beams. The view complete:

Even this view indicates the interior had to be quite heavily detailed while the roof was left in place, and for once it was prepared normally with fills and symbols, not just the cream-and-green plan sketches all the other Embra interiors have received. The "normal" image above does allow the focus to be a little more on the scatter of other stalls and tents outside the Hall itself, before plunging inside. And so to that interior:

Peering closely suggests there are a lot of windows piercing the walls, all narrow, high, point-topped, and painted with a great assortment of subjects and scenes, which with the huge see-through roof area, means that at twilight or in the dark, the lights from inside shine out like a beacon from here, partly hence the name. And just in case you couldn't guess, Smokin' Mona's is THE restaurant for this part of the Market.

Comparing the two views here, one other element becomes clear. The internal labelling can be turned on or off separately to the other map labels this time. If all goes to plan, that should be via toggles in the Atlas' FCW version.

SS5 Cities of Schley has a selection of Halfling house options (grassy mounds with round doors and windows), and also Elven treehouses, plus rough-looking Orc buildings. The main CD3 Bitmap B style has a larger range of fantasy building options as well, including for Halflings (houses and grassy mounds) and Elven treehouses again, as do the main CD3 vector styles, so there are options there without needing to go down the Annuals route. And the Annuals, being smaller in size than these main products, do tend to concentrate more on providing the basic styles first.

It is worth noting that you can draw your own house shapes using the CD3 toolset, and give the roofs whatever texture you wish from the range of options you have available. Stacking different shapes on top of one another on different Sheets with variant Effects can also increase the options for how things appear. DIY treehouses by placing a suitably-shaped and textured house in different sized tree and other vegetation symbols, all on separate Sheets, for instance. And things like varicolor wooden roofs can be made to work as market stall awnings with a bit of resizing and choice of suitable colours.

Sorry for hijacking your thread, Sue! Can't really add much beyond what's already been suggested above for Darklands Cities II, after all that... 😪

Ralf demonstrated exactly this, and the method to increase a river's size on an overland map, using the Pete Fenlon style, a couple of weeks ago on the YouTube live mapping stream. It starts around 19 minutes in here.

Must admit, I was getting slight déjà vu feelings watching Ralf's livestream yesterday, as parts of it reminded me of my Wyvern Citadel maps for the Community Atlas. Very different scale of course, but there are inevitable similarities for drawing anything set on a craggy hilltop in this kind of more realistic style.

I made much more use of symbols however, rather than drawn polygons, for the cliffsides, though I did experiment that way originally (see this post in my Forum notes on the Citadel map, while still in progress). Just couldn't get the bevelled polygons to look right though, so switched to a technique developed for battlemat cliffs by another of our resident mapping experts, Shessar, as described via the Forum post here. As ever with CC3 mapping, there are always different methods to try!

Looking forward to Part 2 of this video, to see how it all develops. Anyone would think Ralf was running a game set in Middle Earth...😉

I just don't know when to stop sometimes ?. Lifetime of designing RPG scenarios, I suspect, coupled with a desire to explore many avenues. All the time...

You might be able to use resized pieces of Cosmographer starship gear for the space-stations Jim, if they'll stand resizing sufficiently. At this scale, something that obviously isn't the shape of a planet will probably work!

Also, is it "Disapora"? I don't know Starfinder, but for a scatter of asteroids (which is what this seems to be), "Diaspora" might be more apt.

Quietly left without touching anything and went back to their knitting at home? 😉😁

As you might tell from my frequent use of random options in my Community Atlas maps, I've been a long-time fan of such random design systems, for all they can need a bit of nudging sometimes to get things to work out OK. I've not used the 5E system as yet, though almost exactly 20 years ago (July-August 2001), I created a classic 12-level dungeon using the random system in the original (1979) AD&D DMs Guide, each level filling an A4 page of graph paper. All done by-hand then, however. I did make a start converting it to CC3 not long after I got the program, around 2014 or 2015, I think, but that was very slow going, as I hadn't the option then to scan the hand-drawn maps to trace in CC3.

Have to say that your map looks a lot more elegant and less cluttered than any of my old ones from that dungeon set, so the 5E system may be something I should experiment with in future, perhaps...