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...😉

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!

Reawakening this topic as over the weekend I discovered a recent change to the basic Windows image viewer software, "Photos", means it will now convert webp images to other forms of image, including various bitmaps, such as jpg. You simply use the "Edit" facility and save it how you require from there. There've been a number of other changes to Photos in recent months, but this one is actually useful 😉!

Folks - Do please note that this week's live video is scheduled to begin 30 minutes later than normal, according to the timer note on YouTube. That's at 16:30 UTC, NOT 16:00 UTC!

Glad we got that sorted at least! I did know about the hotspot disabling, but wasn't online after you replied yesterday. Thankfully, we always have Monsen 😁!

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!

I spotted today that Remy Monsen has just posted the final segment in his three-part look at mapping railways at battlemap scale using CC3+, and really just wanted to say how much I've enjoyed this examination of practical mapping based on real-world sources. There are links to the earlier parts, from May and June 2023, at the end of this new blog piece as well. I know I could comment there, but such comments tend to get easily overlooked, and this is an interesting, and very useful, group of articles, like many on the blog.

If anyone's needing more inspiration for drawing rolling stock especially, don't forget too to check out what's available by way of scale drawings from actual railways which abound in the model railway world, as well as via museum and heritage railway sites, many of which are freely available to download online, albeit as Remy mentioned, those prior to the early 20th century are in shorter supply.

Plus, as Chaosium will be launching a KickStarter for the boardgame of their huge "Call of Cthulhu" roleplaying-game scenario "Horror on the Orient Express" next year, for release in 2025, this might be no bad time to brush-up on your railway carriage design skills 😉!

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).

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...