Not merely tin (or other sorts of metal) roofs, but any smoother kinds of roofing material, such as tiles or slates. The idea is to substantially roughen the surface in some fashion - using rocks or logs sometimes (still to be seen in the Alps today in places, for instance). Reason I suggested them is, and depending on the snow thickness, they can break-up the appearance of the smooth surface of the snow seen on the roof symbols currently.

Thatched roofs tend to be pitched steeply enough to shed snow (and water), thus snow shouldn't accumulate as much on them (in parts of Japan subject to heavy snowfalls, the thatched roofs have a particularly steep pitch, for example). This isn't so much because thatch can't cope with the snow or water, but because thatch is usually lighter than other roofing materials, so may not be sufficiently supported by the underlying roof structure to carry the additional weight of substantial snowfalls.

Yeah, I agree with Monsen regarding the text labels. There's also a problem that parts of the words on the paler text fade where they overlie the palest green on land.

I get the impression too that the roads are on a Sheet higher than everything else, so look to be overlying some of the text labels as well.

Might be worth tweaking some of the red dashed border line nodes to try to remove the odd long dashes in places, though this is a perennial difficulty and can't always be properly resolved, I know.

I'm finding the dashed roads a bit distracting. Partly, this seems to be because the roads cross over the settlement circled-dot symbols, so that could be simply part of the Sheets issue noted above. However, I think it's also partly because the roads often don't pass through the centre of the settlement symbols. While that can be a legitimate point on a map (i.e. the main road may not pass directly through a settlement), at this scale, I think it probably should be tidied-up.

Congratulations Sue (and very nearly Shessar as well!)!

Seems highly apt, given Sue's entry was the genesis for the forthcoming Winter Village CA style for the March issue.

And well done to everyone else who entered, regardless of the voting results!

I suspect green became the default sewer-water option as an easy way to differentiate it from the blue "ordinary" water which didn't involve anything too "realistic" (given blue as normal water isn't realistic either, of course).

And are we calling these the Sue-ers now 😉😁!

If the gelatinous cube symbol is actually partly transparent anyway (given you can see the texture of the floor below it), items don't all need adding to the cube. As long as the items exist as symbols, they can simply be put "below" the cube by the map's creator.

On the size element, the "you can drive a cart along them" argument is partly why I suggested seeing the sewers in "The Third Man" movie, because that's where the climactic chase happens, with large numbers of police and soldiers, where there are multiple levels stacked over one another, and nobody has any problems for headroom, and places are up to river-cavern wide in parts. Somewhat like the early London Underground "tubes" (and I'd assume others built around the same time, later 19th century), some of these would have been dug out as trenches, had their surfaces coated with mud/bricks/concrete, etc., and then covered over later where necessary.

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 😉!

The broken-open eggs could use a more ragged broken edge. They look much too neat presently. And again, sorry Sue!

While the next map in the zooming-in sequence is for the Village, it was actually prepared only after the subterranean tombs one, because various overground features had to be fitted to that map design. While the Village map did draw on the Inkwell Dice "Ruins" design too, because that provided simply a base street layout around the pyramidal ziggurat structure, surrounded otherwise only by debris and a few ruined wall-lines, I elaborated on that somewhat, as while I wanted to use that layout as the Village's centre, I also wanted to show the above-ground area within which the lich, now the Lich Queen of Yhangha, was trapped. Random rolls on the suite of tables noted earlier provided further points of interest, and a selection of creatures and things a group of adventurers might encounter in this area if they visited it (which list is in the map's accompanying PDF and text files), some living, some undead. The map:

The fact there's both a ziggurat and a barrow mound here is partly why the translation for "TlokPik" referred to "hill(s)" in plural, of course.

I chose the City Designer 3 Bitmap B style for this map, primarily because it allows the City Ruins Annual to be used fairly seamlessly with it, which provided the distinction between different kinds of partly-roofed ruins I wanted to help loosely define the area the Lich Queen cannot leave (it's the region with the yellow straw-roofed structures around the Temple Tomb ziggurat). That loose definition is quite deliberate. Oh, and one other feature of this inner zone, that I termed "The Glade" in the descriptive notes, is that the night sky seen from it isn't that of Nibirum, but somewhere else entirely. Should it ever change back to Nibirum's, the spell will be broken and the Lich Queen will be able to leave the area. Just waiting for the stars to be right...

Since the Village is half overgrown by the jungle, it became something of a challenge as to how much could be hidden and how much left still visible. I wanted the old grassed-over trails to disappear into the trees towards the map's edges, though closer to the centre, this became more of a juggling act. If you think the Barrow Temple looks a little strange, and maybe a bit "thin", you'd be right, as it's a semi-transparent ghost building set over its own low-wall ruins. Turn off the "Ghost Temple" toggle in the Atlas FCW file, and it vanishes:

Thanks Jim!

Yeah, the Inkwell City dice are a bit trickier to use than some of the other sets. They work quite well for focal points within a town or a city, less well to not at all for defining the whole settlement. It's possible to tinker around with the Villages set too to get a kind of "fading edge" to the settlement, where the houses thin-out to fields and wilder lands. Surface settlements are often heavily dependent on the nearby terrain (rivers, coasts, available materials, good agricultural land, etc.) of course, so lend themselves less well to being generated purely randomly like this.

That ain't no turtle! 'Tis a lizard-folk lich!😁

One of the Twitch livestreams I follow more regularly runs out of New York City, and they seem to have endless problems with their Internet connectivity. I gather from what's been said that this is a particular NYC thing, where each few city blocks ends up trapped with only one available ISP, so even complaining doesn't help, as you can't threaten to switch to a different provider.

And don't get me started on those dratted "Captcha" things. Great, images so tiny I can't even guess what they might be showing, and you want me to identify a what in each of them (US terms do not always travel well, folks...)?