There's an obvious couple of problems here. One is there isn't a great enough diversity of symbols to cover even the fairly small range of non-settlement features that might be useful, and which only an expansion of the style (either by PF or personally) would solve. [There is a further issue here too, in that none of the location symbols actually work to the standard snap grids used in this Annual. I'm not sure if that may have been amended since I downloaded my copy, however. I ended up having to place most by eye alone, certainly.]

The other is that anything placed in a coastal hex looks as if it's really in the sea, because that's just how hex maps of this sort work. That though is something I could resolve. Plus as I'd been randomly rolling terrain up, I'd noticed there was no "Hills" option in the current ShadowDark tables, so decided to tweak that a little to include some.

So the maps, and additional keyed terrains, came to look like this:

All I did for the coasts was add a small section of land from each adjacent hex over the coastal sea.

D&D, homebrew RPG systems, Ars Magica, Call of Cthulhu, Erin (fantasy Irish-myth-based wargames), Laserburn (science-fiction skirmish wargames) and Hordes of the Things (fantasy tabletop wargames), in terms of specific game systems, though a lot of what I've used CC3 and CC3+ for has been to provide maps to illustrate published ancient military history factual articles. I have a lot of hand-drawn maps from other RPG systems going way back too which might be fun to convert into CC maps at some stage. However, the Community Atlas mapping takes up most of my mapping efforts presently!

That 22-foot Roman Empire map is the Peutinger Table, aka Tabula Peutingeriana, and the Wikipedia page includes a high-res complete image of the whole - may take a while to load, however, as the full-size JPG is about 15 MB. This is the direct link to that Wikimedia image.

We've mentioned before on the Forum that Chaosium provides a lot of free PDF resources that you can download from their website for the various RPGs and supplements they produce. Today, I picked-up a physical copy of their latest Call of Cthulhu book at my FLGS, "Cthulhu By Gaslight - Investigators' Guide", the updated version of an earlier work for the line in which our own ScottA had a hand back in the day!

With the book comes a beautiful fold-out map of late Victorian London drawn by Alyssa Faden, a name doubtless familiar to some here, especially those who have her style pack from the 2014 Annual. You can download a free PDF version of that London map (and a set of the players' maps from the book, which share a similar look) via the links on the Cthulhu By Gaslight webpage here.

Map 3 in this set covers Hoolie Hill, yet another Edinburgh-influenced spot, as there is a real-world ancient site near Edinburgh called Huly Hill, which has a tumulus surrounded at a distance by three standing stones set on what seems to be a concentric ring (or perhaps two rings) centred on the burial mound. This though is Embra, so things have to be done a little differently, hence:

Thus similar, but not the same, and it is a particularly strong Faerie site. The base map used for this one also allowed scope for plenty of surrounding terrain features, so the Hill here isn't necessarily the most obvious feature for those unfamiliar, and trying to find it. The name, while a phonetic variant on the real-world one, was chosen as it can be thought to derive from the Scottish dialect term meaning "very windy", originating in a variant contraction of "howling (pronounced as "hoolin'") gale".

Dragging this topic back into the light, as I recently discovered this book was reprinted in all its glory in 2024 (the original is dated 2018). It's an astonishing, and beautifully-illustrated, collection of essays by various authors. It's been on the shelves in my local bookshop since at least December apparently, though I only saw it in detail for the first time today.

I don't find it takes quite that long on my PC, but certainly it isn't as quick as "normal" symbols.

I suspect the only way you might speed things up would be to amend every one of the symbols using Symbol Manager in CC3+ so that all parts of the symbol go on one sheet, while it still looks the same. This would prevent adjusting the features of each symbol that are currently on separate sheets using sheet effects, although you could still adjust the appearance of the symbol as a whole using effects on whichever sheet the whole symbol is on.

That would be a lot of work per symbol, and you would be best advised to store the amended versions in a separate, new, symbol catalogue, so as not to change the original symbols in case you might want to use those again, or in case something goes wrong with the changes you've been trying to make.

On the whole, Shessar's excellent artwork options might be preferable all-round, however!

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... 😪

Overland, Cities and Dungeons are the three key planks for CC3+ mapping though, and it has been mentioned here now, so... 😎

It seems we may soon be looking to more new maps, and some fresh mappers, for the Atlas, which can only be A Good Thing!

Meanwhile, back at the camp, and wondering which style to choose for the area map...

One of the issues with symbol-based overland styles is the hidden "north" side of everything, where you can't properly show what's happening there without using some sort of indicator or map notes. Often, that doesn't matter too much, but for details of what's where within a mountain range, it can become more problematic. For this area map, I decided to use a top-down drawing style instead, and picked one I've been intending to try for a while, the Worthington Historical from CA91. This has only a few symbols for the settlements particularly, with the terrain and vegetation all illustrated using bitmap-fill drawing tools and sheet effects.

As the area's size had been determined already, the one thing I changed when creating the new map in CC3+ was the background fill style, opting for the green Farmland fill in place of the default blue Sea one, as there's no large expanse of open water here. After that, I simply created the usual new BITMAP Sheet and Layer, and inserted my features map onto them:

The grid dots that are showing are from a new "2 miles, 2 snaps" one created for the purpose as well, making for both easy placement of the inserted map, and a check that the scaling was correct (I did a double-check using the Info -- Distance drop-down menu command as well, just to be sure).

I sketched in a base colour for the rising land that fills much of the map except in the top right and lower left corners using the Terrain Default, Hills tool. That was rather hard to distinguish, as it uses the Solid 10 fill, the palest of the transparent "Solid" fills. I tried changing it to Solid 20, and while the Glow effect on the TERRAIN HILLS Sheet looked interesting, the fill itself still didn't really show clearly enough. After a further couple of failed attempts using the darker Solid fills, and an examination of what effects were on which sheet, plus a few more experiments, I ended up simply copying the drawn HILLS area to the CONTOURS (LAND) Sheet, and changed the fill style to the Land, Default style, which produced this:

Happy with that, I began draughting-in the hill and mountain terrain using the Terrain Default, Mountains drawing tool, only to find that the two Mountain sheets had no effects on them. I'm not sure if this may have been corrected subsequently in that Annual's download file. If not, it's easy enough to correct by just copying the effects over from one of the sample maps for this Annual issue instead. Which I did!

I had a couple of false starts in drawing the terrain. While it's important to try to mimic the placement of symbols with where the more dominant features are in this kind of "zooming-in" area map, I find it's often a question of trial and error to see what looks best when converted to a different, in this case more topographical, drawing style, something that will likely also need testing variations in the sheet effects subsequently as well.

As the mountain terrains are all drawn using the same fill and effects in the unadjusted Worthington Historical style, stacking mountain contours atop one another also creates the dreaded mottling of transparency acne, thus a series of "BACK" sheets without effects and a different fill had to be added - and changed - each time I redrew the various contours during this. So long as you do this singly or in batches, to make best use of the "Prior" selection option, that's not too bad though.

This shot is only partway through the process of changing the contours, so it looks really messy still in places. The Glow effect on the various terrain sheets is obviously too strong as well, for all it helped keep things clearer for me while drawing to this point. Hence why I hadn't changed it at this stage. This is as far as I got during the session:

The final image for today shows what happens when one of those "BACK" Sheets is deactivated:

Someone's knocked over the pepperpot 😉.

More to follow.