Just a thought, but did you set up the trees so you can hide the canopies, yet still show where the trunks are for use in ground combat? Of course, that also means you can hide any GM-placed traps under the canopy cover as well 😉!

Well, I'm still hunting for the connecting sewer symbols to let me create a sewer layout for Parchment City (hey, it says I can do this on page 1 of the PDF Mapping Guide for it!) 😉😁!

[At a not-so-wild guess, that's an accidental copy-over from the March Annual!]

Helen, you can find that map, and many other illustrations, on the Pauline Baynes website. She was an amazing lady who did a huge number of illustrations, including the only ones of Middle Earth not drawn by Tolkien himself during his lifetime which he authorised.

This map, and that for Middle Earth, were available as posters at one time, as I used to have both. They are true works of art!

Plus, she also did all the maps and illustrations for all of Lewis's "Narnia" books. There is, or was, a single volume hardcover at one stage which had all the texts, maps and illustrations in, all in colour, if I recall correctly.

Certainly, I found drawing "Naughty Lass" quite a challenge overall. There's a particular complexity in trying to visualise things in 3D to be able to draw 2D versions from top-down and side-on viewpoints, and deciding exactly which line you'll pick for the cross-section, etc. There isn't an ideal solution, so you end up just picking whatever seems to work better, and hope users/viewers will be able to tell what was intended.

There is a similarity to the cross-sectional views of caves we've discussed before here, though with a ship, you can't usefully vary the line of any sections, as that just makes it still harder to draw for a vehicle.

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...

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).

I got the program in 2013, but did very little with it for a few years afterwards. I've only been especially active with it in more recent times, notably since about 2018, primarily in contributing items for the Community Atlas.

Using the program more frequently and regularly has certainly improved my grasp of what its capabilities are, something that's true for most people, I think. Finding the time, and sometimes the inspiration, to do that can be more of a challenge though!

Just as well Wyverns can fly 😎🐲

I'm not saying it will definitely help, as I'm not sure what changes were made when the Ships Annual was updated, as they were drawn only using the original, but I had to handle similar deck-level elements, and other features, when designing "The Naughty Lass" for the Atlas. For ease, you can pick up the deck plans FCW here, and the sideview here, in case those may assist.

Note though that I did "cheat" with the yards, by having them piercing their respective masts, partly because it's a magical vessel, partly because I was trying to avoid needing to show the complexities of the rigging...

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...