Thanks very much again folks! The response here has been equally amazing for me, Lorelei! And "cool" somehow seems very apt ❄️!

Time for the final Palace 10 map now, this time using the SS2 package as for Palace 9, but now in its Bitmap B format. Even more so than with Bitmap A, the opportunities to use symbols (no varicolor options) were a little limiting, but I did manage to find an upholstered chair in a convenient shade of paler blue, and a fountain with pond that didn't look too out of place either. The background's not actually snow, but the Dirt Grey Light fill, greatly enlarged (wonderful it held off pixellating to such a degree too), while the floor texture isn't ice, but the Marble White fill, both of which worked out quite nicely in their re-imagined versions, I think.

Having completed all ten sample Palace maps meant I could also now update the Locations map too:

For reasons I don't pretend to understand, the markers and labels for Places 1, 2, 9 & 10 have all ended up much closer to the two Ocean labels at the top and bottom of this rendering of the map than in the CC3+ file. I tried a higher res version as a test too, and as the markers and labels there were further from the labels, I assume it's just a resolution artefact. It's especially odd that none of the other markers and labels had shifted position at all, so I suspect it may have something to do with these four being nearly aligned with other text blocks. Certainly, even the higher res version didn't have the 1, 2, 9 & 10 markers quite as far from the Ocean labels as the CC3+ original still. Weird the things you find out!

Comparing this with the earlier version I showed at the start of this topic, I decided to stick with the text size for the Places list, even though that makes it very hard to read in this low-res version, mostly because I wanted to add a miniature of the Winter Queen CA3 marker under it. I also simplified the look of the snowflake symbols for the Palaces list, as originally, I'd simply been copying-in the floor designs from the Palace maps, with whatever fill style they contained. That started to look a little messy, so I thought a more uniform approach might be better. The idea is that, hopefully, our esteemed Atlas Coordinator Remy will be able to use these map-side markers to link-in to the eleven other files in the final Atlas version.

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...

The published maps and artwork for ShadowDark all tends to be black-and-white. I don't mean greyscale here, but sharply-contrasting black-and-white line hand-drawings. It would be good to have something similar for CC3+ (especially for dungeon-style maps, as the current CC black-and-white dungeon styles don't have sufficient bitmap options, or high enough symbol and bitmap resolutions, to look sufficiently clear and presentable - I did some tests for this too), particularly given the current popularity of OSR systems overall, which tend to favour this kind of map look in general. It is though easy enough to convert these maps to at least greyscale, simply by adding a suitable RGB Matrix Process effect to the whole map:

Oh, and a minor tweak to the colour of the lettering!

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...😉

Looking a lot better now!

Yes, I think the walls would work very nicely for ruins too.

If the stepped outer surface was full regulated, it would also work for buildings such as ancient Mesopotamian temples, which had deliberately constructed outside walls that had this kind of "vertical recesses" patterning all round them. I've had to draw these before, both by hand and on computer, and it can be pretty tedious for a larger building plan!

Thanks very much Sue!

I wanted the cliffs here to look different to yours, which I'd already decided to use for the red sandstone types at Embra, as the Palace Heights ones are meant to be a harder, volcanic type of rock. Actually, a Faerie type of volcanic rock, which has different properties and abilities to "ordinary" volcanic rock, so I also wanted the forms here to act as a reminder that something a little different to normal was involved. I also used a similar style of cliff drawing in one of the Crossing Places Streets - the Rocky Vale under Seafield Road there, again because the Vale is a weird place that can't be reached, another reminder of something odd happening there.

For the crystal city concept, it may depend exactly how you envisage it. For a large-area map such as the Dungeon Worlds Annual will let you create, you could perhaps repurpose some of the standard CC3+ overland map symbols, like glaciers or icebergs (though you may have to get creative about hiding what are intended as water lines for the latter!), and making use of the varicolor options to recolour other features - and also with CD3 house symbols, for instance, if you wanted to map the city itself, or parts of it, in more detail.

It's definitely worthwhile to take some time to look through all the symbol catalogues you have available, and make a note of any symbols that might work in such map creation, even if that's a long way from what the symbol was originally meant to be! As you can resize any symbol in CC3+, imagine too how it might look if a given symbol were larger or smaller, or a different colour (which you can set and see while you're browsing through each symbol catalogue that includes varicolor symbols).

Yes, CC4 is a work in progress. As CC3+ users, we have no definite information beyond that, so far as I'm aware. It will doubtless all be revealed in due course!

Just as well Wyverns can fly 😎🐲

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...