This is a pretty complex set of tasks you're hoping to accomplish here, but as long as you're happy to put in the work yourself, it should be perfectly possible. That may depend on how comfortable you are working with the mathematics of orbital mechanics, however, and exactly what degree of precision you're hoping to achieve.

I'm not aware of any tools that will allow you to do all of this in one, but you may find some of the tools linked from the Worldbuilding Links and Software page of the Orion's Arm Universe Project website helpful. Note that some of these are only available via the Wayback Machine archival website now, and may use older software types to function. I've not really done much with this in a long time, so can only hope some of it may assist!

Unfortunately, the few folks I know, or knew, who did this kind of thing tended to write their own programs to do it, and while that may be an option for you too, that's not something I've had any experience with, sadly.

Good luck anyway!

Yes please to the Elf, Dwarf, Halfling and Orc structures, plus ruins, ships, icy elements, a volcano-mountain, variant settlement features (including for different cultures)! And after those, also perhaps:

• Magical site markers
• Battlefield marker, and a more general flag-style marker, to highlight important sites that don't fit to specific structure types.
• Oasis symbols for the deserts.
• Two more bridges at different angles to the current one - one running straight down the page, the other angled down from top left to lower right.
• I really like the Henge and Tomb hill markers, as they look good on any terrain. Another such marker with a cave mouth would be very useful.
• Some Mountain Peak symbols without the snowy tops (so grey mountains, just no white caps).
• Seeing the animal and creature comments, just the actual creature without any associated terrain would be better, as usable anywhere. Snag is, going down this route is liable to lead to requests for a lot more "resources" style markers - domesticated creatures and crops, minerals, etc.
• Some jungle-style trees, perhaps including mangroves, as well as the fruit trees Monsen mentioned.

I'll probably think of others later, but these are what're coming to mind right away. It's a wonderful style, and it would be excellent to see it expanded as far as possible in future, I think.

And thank you very much for creating it!

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".

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.

Thanks very much Sue!

Inkwell indeed have a fascinating collection of RPG-ideas mechanics like the dice and accompanying books, and a range of cards as well, for settings, adventures and characters. In fact, they currently have an active crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit that has only 36 hours left as I type this (ends 2024 May 10, 03:00 GMT) for some new cards.

Meanwhile, resuming from where I left off, the first thing I wanted to do was draw the base shapes for those hex-rooms, so they'd be actual hex shapes, not my wonky hand-drawn efforts. This would give a clearer impression of where the four upper level layouts could go, and allow adjusting the position of the inserted base-map, before starting the mapping. So I set-up a suitable 10-foot hex snap-grid:

The "Edit Hex Grid System" dialogue pane does pretty much all the work for you, as once you type in the first hex dimension, it automatically calculates the second. For everything else, apart from the grid system's name, I just used the default settings. The resulting maze of dots allows an easy check that the size will work for what's needed. One hex-room is larger though, so I also created a second, 15-foot hex grid similarly.

Then I created a TEMP Sheet and Layer, drew out both the hex-room layouts onto those, using 0.4-width lines, and made four copies of each that could then be moved around to test different layouts. The next illustration shows what I settled on just before beginning the map. In it, the BITMAP sheet now has a 50% transparency effect activated:

The locations for those upper levels are liable to need further adjustment, since I'm likely to want to vary the individual layouts, plus the cave walls will need to be shown too. That will mean more shuffling about, and could require the map border and background to be expanded as well. Neither should be all that difficult, at least in theory...

And so to the basic cave mapping:

Nothing fancy here as yet, as I've just dropped in a simple hand-copy fractal polygon of the main cave floor and the exterior, using the Cave, Default drawing tool (which also adds walls automatically). Using the drawing tool means it's easy to trace the exact outer lines of those hex-rooms in each respective cavern, although it does mean the cave floor won't be drawn beyond the map border. That creates a couple of problems, as the Outer Glow effect is larger than the current SCREEN sheet's mask (that thin white strip just outside the map's edge) can hide, and there's also a darkening towards the top left map corner due to the Inner Glow on the cave floors.

Enlarging the SCREEN's mask (typing-in the commands "collardel" - which removes the existing Screen Sheet mask - and then "collarauto" - which creates a new, larger, mask on the SCREEN Sheet) is easily done, but I'll wait a while for that, because I also want to draw on some exterior terrain over the cave's base design here, with some vegetation, to make clear it's the outside. Drawing that terrain "floor" so it extends beyond the map's border will also hide the "Inner Glow" issue there currently. That's something for another day though.

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!

Yeah, nothing with computers is ever easy, is it, Jim? 😏

@Mike Vermilye - I've just done a very quick test new map with my own reinstallation, and am not seeing the problems you've mentioned. However, I didn't do an uninstall, I just deleted the files and folders that Ralf referred to:

Once I'd done that, I simply installed the replacement Monkey Frog Annual as new.

I'd suggest going through the three places in Ralf's list, removing both any surviving Silverman AND the Monkey Frog versions, and then try a fresh installation of the new Monkey Frog version of the Annual, to see if that resolves things. Failing that, you'd probably be best advised to contact ProFantasy support (through your account page) - unless someone else leaps in here with an alternative. I am NO expert with computers, so that might be your better option now!

Beat you to it Sue 😎!

The water texture looks rather "busy" to my eye, but that's probably just me.

There is an issue with some of the text however, where the grey glow is blending into the background in places - on roads and buildings, especially where the road edges are outlined with narrow dark lines - e.g. "Petaluma Stockyards" and "The Heart Markets". In other places - e.g. "Northwind House", "Xi Ling's Market Gardens" - the text itself looks somewhat transparent when set above paler backgrounds. This is all based on the Gallery image, incidentally. However, it did look as if there problems with the text in parts of even the lower-res whole-map view posted above here.

The bulk of the city seems a little empty of named places. Maybe even a few major street names might help here, although perhaps a few of the larger or different-looking properties might be named as well/instead?

But you're not supposed to reveal them till the day!

And Easter's not till May 5 anyway this year (Orthodox) 😉!