The fortress of the Citadel. The idea is it's a reused ancient castle, which has been brought up-to-date with modern Kentorian conveniences. Being a high magic land, I've gone with these being things like decent indoor plumbing, heating (to an extent; this is in the tropics, after all) and lighting comparable to mid-late 20th century norms, fitting with the overall concept of the Defence Zone's basis too. I think "electrickery" (not my invention as a term!) fits the bill for how it all works. It also means I've been playing around with some repurposed Cosmographer 3 symbols in places. Eventually, there will be magical rooftop Strickfaden Lightning Cannons in place of arbalests and ballistae. [Strickfaden? Look him up!!!]

I'd already decided some while back that the basis for the actual fortress was going to be the castle in this video, produced by Dwarven Forge in July 2020, Build of the Month: UnNamed Castle.

For those who don't know, Dwarven Forge make highly-detailed, modular, cast scenery for RPGs and wargames in 28mm scale. They started out as a one-man operation in New York City back in the later 1990s, when all their castings were made in a solid type of resin, pretty robust for its time, and indeed it still is (mine's survived completely intact since '03, for instance). The great selling point, aside from the incredible detailing (all hand-sculpted, also as still), was that all of it came hand-painted, with primarily options for dungeon and cave settings. At the time, nobody else made modular caves as cast models, so this was really A Thing!

Time passed, and the company, while still quite small (about eight or nine full-time staff currently, I think), remained NYC based, but their business model shifted to a KickStarter one, roughly one major KS per year since 2013. This different funding model allowed them to move away from resin to (now) a proprietary resin-plastic mix, trademarked as "Dwarvenite". This is lighter and a lot more robust than the old resin - many users quite happily let their kids play with it, as it's pretty well indestructible through any kind of normal use or accidents. It also now comes with the option of being DIY unpainted, or hand-painted still.

Nobody would pretend it's cheap; the painted version of that castle model in the video would, if all its component parts were in-stock currently (they aren't, in case anyone should be tempted!) would cost you nearly $1500 before shipping (or taxes & import duty, etc., if you're not in the USA). The modular castle pieces are however particularly expensive, as being complex castings requiring more expensive moulds.

For all the model has a nice, clear, 5-foot-scale square grid engraved across its horizontal surfaces, this has proven a tricky conversion into a CC3+ drawing so far. Plus I'd already amended it in places to add some internal-courtyard ancillary buildings, and add or move some of the internal accessways. Even to get to a hand-sketched version needed stills extracting from that video, poring over printouts of them and from the product pages on the webstore, plus the free PDF downloads showing how each component section is built. Even then, a few places have had to be winged, as I could find no useful images of certain areas, and the video castle build has a few minor variants compared with the standard build in the PDFs. It is modular after all!

Of course, a hand-sketch is all fine and good till you start fitting that into the precision of a CAD drawing, when suddenly things like whether those shooting slits in the wall-tops might be better at 1 foot 3 inches, not 1 foot 6 inches, wide starts to become an issue. I have made compromises, and there are likely to be more subsequently!

And then the castle drawing is only one part of the whole, as it needs to have a background as well. I'd decided in advance that the Citadel was going to be on a rocky ridge, probably one of its higher parts, and separated from the rest of it by deep trenches/cliffs to give greater protection, as well as some point to retaining that wooden drawbridge.

My first thought was to try some bevelled polygons for the ridge in the castle's vicinity. This is an early version of those on the Ground Level drawing for the fortress:

The castle itself here is in the basic DD3 style, though I had to add the Bogie stone steps, and the beds from the Jon Roberts Dungeons CA style, as the DD3 beds were just too elaborate for what's essentially a military base. And don't ask about the spiral stairs... Each step is on its own Sheet!

I'd picked the cooled lava fill for the ridge, because that has a suitably rough, rocky texture, but the bevelling - and I persisted with it for some time - just never looked right. Oh yes, and I really loathed the angled roadway from almost the moment I'd finished it; it just looks wrong approaching the drawbridge anything other than directly. So that didn't last long...

Having abandoned the bevel idea, I thought I'd try Shessar's cliffs and contours options (PDF guides available elsewhere on the Forum here), and after a bit of tinkering around with those, this is what I've settled on at present:

The castle's had a couple of minor tweaks, which may not show at this resolution, since as I've been drawing the higher levels, I've had to make fresh adjustments of some of the lower level drawings as well. The current plan is there should be five above-ground levels and two smaller subterranean ones. The below-ground ones - haven't quite decided on their full extent yet, perhaps with some old unused sections, as well as those in-action presently - will also be prepared drawing on some old Dwarven Forge dungeon layouts, to maintain this part of the theme of the project, and will include the Citadel's main purpose now, as the command and control centre for the Defence Zone. I already have the design for the table-top in the Operations Room, based loosely on the appearance of actual Ops Room tables during the Battle of Britain:

Although a reduced-size version is intended for the table in the final drawing, it seems useful to add this map as a separate FCW file with the set, I think. Ten-mile grid squares, incidentally.

Enough for now though, since on any given day, I've essentially the choice of providing an update here, or getting on with the actual mapping ?

A little quicker this time, as the second Barrow map, for the Barrow of the Noble Jewels, had already had much of its layout prepared in advance through last time's "Emerald Guardians" one. This is its "normal" view:

While this is the view with the non-Nibirum passageways revealed:

There was a degree of copying and pasting of items over from "Emerald Guardians" here, including where things had changed since the base map for all three of these designs was laid-out, although I retained the original non-Nibirum wall-line colouring here, as not needing to add the pneumatic tube lines for this map. The Ceiling Lamps are still present in this drawing though. While I did consider moving some about, that really didn't make any sense, as they shed light over a limited area, and with only 20 Lamps to play with, that had already restricted the options in the previous map anyway. I did try to make the exterior sliver on the far left map edge look a little different, and I changed up the look of the railings around the lower level pit in area C, as here, they're meant to be floor-to-ceiling glass or crystal panes, with metal frames, isolating the lower level from the upper walkway completely.

In terms of the contents, most derived from Numenera again, with items and inhabitants both randomly chosen and distributed, although the identical Mysterion makes another appearance, something which, while unstated, gives GMs the opportunity to make things still more weird for visitors from Nibirum who have already met this character previously. There are curious others here as well, including a couple of sort-of, yet not undead, "ghosts", and a superstitious Human Crafter of technology (he's living in a haunted workshop, as he believes it, after all!). Possibly the deadliest creatures are three living-steel spiders, whose web-strands are essentially monomolecular steel threads. They've been set up so opening the door into the chamber they're in will slice off part of the metal door without slowing it, as a warning...

One more of these identical dungeon layouts to come!

[EDIT 19 November 2024: Although I originally added the provisional PDF description for the map to this post, I've removed it now, as the final version has been submitted for the Atlas!]

Resuming where we left off, the next phase was to add the external segment at the map's right side. Rather than redraw that, I simply copied and pasted what was required from the Snakeden Hollow map, added, and in some cases amended, the relevant sheet effects to better fit this different map-view scaling, and adjusted the cliff to be a simple line, separating interior from exterior.

The vegetation looks a bit sparse there now, so that may need adjusting too later on. I also had to add an extra mask segment to hide the wall shadow from the new cliff line near the top, where it was showing on the interior of the rock. Other tweaks seemed likely as well, but I wanted to get on with the complexities of the internal layout, so switched to that.

Which brings us to something of a hiatus in screenshots, because this process turned out to be a lot more complex than expected. Looks great as a simple hand-sketched view - five minutes to draw that... Yeah, right! Basically, it turned into two full sessions spread across a couple of days, with a lot of switching and changing, during which I completely forgot I was meant to be recording such things as I went along.

So, imagine a burst of gentle harp-music, water-on-glass visuals, as we fade back to where this got me finally:

Main obvious change, aside from the range of new features, is that the interior floor colouring has been darkened. At the same time, much of the internal wall shadows have been reduced significantly, while still helping to differentiate the various levels in a more subtle way than the original shadows. In practical terms though, the whole interior floor has been redrawn as separate pieces, because it proved impossible to retain the complete original floor even for the lower part (darker, extensive, left-hand segment, except the darkest cave's floor there). That was largely because of the glows on each floor element, and the stair symbols, interfering with one another. Several now have separator sheets and underlying mask polygons added, to further help keep things clean.

At which point, I remembered I should have been taking more screenshots, so here's one where the changes are so subtle you may be hard-pressed to spot them:

The well's been added as a first test for how the internal lower symbols would look (lower right, on yet another new sheet) and the basal shadows for the two sets of stairs in the darker leftward part of the drawing have gone. Well, masked now, at least, to look less steep-drop-floaty!

It was about this point I stood-back and examined the map as a whole for once, always useful in the latter stages, to see how things are working together as a complete map, not just how individual bits are holding up when zoomed-right in to fine-tune things. Which made me realise I was struggling to differentiate between the separate internal solid wall blocks and the floor levels. Thus with a few clicks, the interior rock colouring was changed to:

Some further amendments have been made as well. The tunnel through the raised floor in the large right-side cavern has been added (no, it hadn't been forgotten, although earlier I had forgotten the steps up on the south side of that extended raised platform, leading to the rounded cavern at its end, during the unrecorded mapping sessions). The other changes are likely too subtle to be spotted, adding masking patches to tone-down the upper-level shadowing glow by the three small drop-lines at the cave-mouths in the left-hand section. I tested a similar idea on the longer ledges as well, but felt those looked better without them in the end - as they are here. That mild shadowing suggests a slight dip towards the drop-line that seems to help fool the eye better.

With that all completed, it was time to start adding some symbols to give a little more life to the whole, as well as a scaling grid for the interior (I decided against adding one for the outside too, as this is really a map of the interior, after all). A couple of sloping-passage arrows were added along the way:

The wall shadows mask had to be extended to hide unwanted bits of the grid, although because the original mask followed the complexities of the fractal cave wall, that proved unworkably slow and impossible to control by the normal node-editing processes, so fresh patches of suitably-coloured polygons were dropped-in instead. After which (higher-res map now - must be approaching the end!) it was time to break-out the labels, north pointer, etc.:

Plus a decorative SS2 Lizardman. And sans grid:

On the CC3+ version, these labels all looked fine and clear. As soon as these JPG test versions were done, it was obvious the labels weren't working nearly so nicely. I also didn't like the faintness of the scale square here. So more changes followed to reach these final versions (unless I decide otherwise before submission to the Atlas, anyway!), with and without the grid:

A trio of external labels were added in the process too.

Now I need to make some progress getting the notes for all three of these typed-up and finalised so they can head-off to further swell Remy's queue of maps for the Atlas!

I'll post again when that's done.

Oh, and the critter in the Undercroft. It's a huge, serpent-bodied, 20-headed hydra!

The final stages of mapping took a bit longer than expected, as that top area, still incomplete last time, had been allocated more ruins and features than many other spots. Along with this, the additional minor stream channels were emplaced in the swamp too, with a few more shrubs and trees in places:

I'd always intended to replace the map border with something more rustic, like that for the Snakeden Swamp map earlier, and settled on the angled fence-line symbols from the options available in the CD3 Vector Shaded style. They also look like sharp teeth a little, a happy accident. Getting these to look right took quite a degree of trial and error though, and while the corners don't perfectly match on this final version, I was happy with that, because I didn't really want the frame to look too perfect anyway - Lizardfolk fences, after all!

After which it was time to start thinking of labelling the map, adding a north pointer and a scale. Unfortunately, there aren't options for the latter two in this style, so alternatives from what symbols were available had to be drafted-in, again with some experimentation, and tweaking of effects:

At this point, the pale brown lettering seemed fine. However, when some place-name labels started being added across the map, it rapidly became clear that both this colouring and the black shadow and glows were interfering with the effects on the mapped symbols, creating irritating bleed-through lines on parts of the text. More experiments followed to adjust both to something that was still sufficiently clear, yet which wasn't equally causing such problems. Which turned out to be this:

With this map finished, it's now time to head underground, since although the little square surface map with the cliff-line (the area now labelled as "Undercroft") was the original dice design that prompted these maps, it was obvious to me from the outset that the two cave entrances in the cliff would demand more attention - as to be shown next time, if all goes to plan!

Having decided to prepare three identical layouts for the interior Barrow "dungeons", the obvious first step was to get a version of the hand-drawn map traced in to CC3+ which would then act as a template to be refilled and adjusted for each separate interior, given their contents were not going to be identical. As the general mapping style was already well-established, drawing this was pretty quick and straightforward:

The walls are paler than those in the two previous dungeons in this group, so as to indicate their different character to the typical stonework. The semi-tech setting was going to have plastic-coated metal panelled walls (or something similar), hence this choice of wall texture. While it looks quite straightforward initially, the layout here is actually on three different levels - the rectangular pit in the lower-right quadrant has a raised pathway/passage around it, and a trapdoor access from below into it, as well as two side passageways opening directly into it, for instance, and the elongated side-passages/rooms flanking the long, straight entrance passage (with wall slits into that long corridor) have a bridge accessway over the passage, connecting them to each other and, by secret door, the rest of the complex, though not directly into the entrance route. Took me a while to get to grips with this as well!

While that was all fine, as I was drawing this out, I started wondering about how the semi-tech-world's inhabitants were going to get in and out of here. I'd already drawn-up lists of items and potential denizens from the sources noted back in my first post in this topic, especially the Numenera RPG, and had realized the three layouts would work best with these as workshops, laboratories or a museum. Ultimately, we'll be going with one of each of those. Naturally, some kind of teleportation/transporter beam option was a possibility, for all that felt a little contrived.

Ordinarily, as explained previously, any segments of the geomorphic dice designs that don't link to the main part of the layout, including the connections off the dice edges, are simply skimmed away in preparing the Atlas version. However, now, I started thinking of adding some or all of those external links to this map too, as passages/doors only the semi-tech inhabitants could see and use. This is a shot of the two Inkwell Ideas Explorer dice designs I was using here to indicate what those possibilities were (from dice "V" and "K", in case anyone might wonder about those letter labels):

And this is how they were drawn into the CC3+ plan:

Each new passageway has a wavy line ending it, to show the route goes elsewhere beyond this map, without indicating where that might be, in the semi-tech land that isn't Nibirum. In addition, they've all been set up on the GAME MASTER ONLY Layer, and a series of new Sheets (for the walls, floors, grid lines, and dot-shading symbols), so they can be shown, or not, for each individual layout, something that's intended to be possible via a toggle in the final Atlas version. Each separate layout will have a variable number of these accessways only; the rest will be removed in those final maps. It made sense to draw the set together though, because there is quite an art to doing so, so as not to forget some key element.

While doing this, I next realised the long entrance passage and the rooms/corridors flanking it probably would be in the original Barrow stonework, not the semi-tech walls. This was mostly to avoid the complications of why the semi-tech folks hadn't wandered off into Nibirum at some stage, and more importantly, why they'd have set up a passage with viewing slits to watch for nobody ever coming in down that long passageway! Instead, if this was all the original stonework by the Barrow builders, simple anti-tomb-robber floor pressure-plate traps to shoot darts from magazines that had to be emplaced before the Barrow was sealed, began to crystallize, and were ultimately adopted, as a concept. Thus the wall texture there was changed:

Plus, it no longer made sense to have any linking passageways attached to the semi-tech world from this segment of the layout, so they were removed:

The perceptive among you will doubtless have realised that one other change has been made here, to the semi-tech wall texture. This happened because when I adjusted the new darker wall texture's bitmap scaling, I discovered that, as sometimes happens with the older Annual styles, I had to force the system to use the very high res bitmaps. I hadn't realised sooner that this wasn't happening automatically, partly because the walls lines are quite thin, I suspect. When I did that though, the selected semi-tech texture - the only one that gave a suitably pale appearance - started to vanish into the dot-shading exterior texture in places. This image shows a comparison test, where just the top left room's texture remains as it had been earlier:

Thus I ended up with simple, solid, pale grey wall lines for the semi-tech areas, rather than bitmap-textured ones.

Clearly, this is all still WIP, given that the entrance passageway doesn't go anywhere right now, nor have a blocking doorway to the outside, and the wall around the pit is likely to change too, so it doesn't look like the same solid walls as everywhere else, albeit that may be different for each of the three final layouts anyway. Plus everything needs fitting-out and labelling, something which is still rather in-flux currently, as the lists of items and denizens are allocated and consolidated to their respective layouts. Some progress though, at least!

So finally, an actual map I DID make here!

The area map was going to be drawn and filled first. While the basic format for the style of hex-map was already established, I had some new sets of random design mechanics I wanted to try, to determine what was going to be in those identified hexes. These would later have Shadowdark notes added into the map's PDF file, where relevant, to keep a degree of consistency with the other maps in this current collection.

So the contents for each labelled hex were determined using, or adapted from, tables and random processes in "Into the Wild - Omnibus Edition" (from Third Kingdom Games, 2023). This is designed to work with the Old-School Essentials RPG by Necrotic Gnome, so it draws on creatures from that, and other associated sources among the established "old-school-rules" form of the RPG hobby (as to an extent does Shadowdark). This was my first time using Into the Wild, and it proved something of a challenge, as its layout is not the clearest to find things quickly, or avoid accidentally missing some key element. It did though come up with a lot of interesting ideas, sometimes after a little tweaking, and with occasional additions from the random Shadowdark tables.

The nature of the area, having wildly magical, magic-free and normal magic regions, meant I was looking primarily for unusual creatures or aspects for whatever came up randomly, and so often chose tables accordingly. I also opted to check for both features and creatures in each highlighted hex, again with adaptations, so not everywhere ended up with both elements. One aspect I decided against was involving any high-tech aspects from the barrows also appearing on the surface, as I quite liked the idea that only if a party of adventurers opened one of the barrow entrances and failed to close it properly, might those denizens begin creeping out into the world.

As noted for previous of my area maps, once the features list is decided, other aspects of the map start to fall into place, here including where the streams might lie, as well as larger areas of new terrain types, including some odd, black-sand dunes, and low hills, notably towards the eastern side of the magic-free and wild magic regions. After which it was time to progress to the CC3+ mapping:

This too proved quite a challenge, since the forest density originally hid too much of the normal hex lines (those not highlighted) and had to be revised a couple of times, to try to keep things clear enough while not looking too hex-based. Similarly, ensuring the highlighted-hex symbols weren't overwhelmed by the trees involved more tinkering. The No Magic Zone was possibly the easiest, as it was just the background colour revealed by punching a Color Key hole though the overlying terrain fills, creating the Wild Magic Zone's circuit simultaneously - that circuit achieved by a desert (dot-shaded) terrain fill polygon, without any effects to ensure the edges were sufficiently obvious.

A few extra symbol-shapes had to be hand drawn, such as the little pools (of mercury) in Hex 807, and the depressions in Hex 905 (harpy dust baths), one more of which items was resized and reused as the sinkhole for the stream in Hex 1102. Most other highlighted hex features were either normal symbols, or resized ones (sometimes resized differently in one or both dimensions).

The main drawn items were the three gigantic barrows, which were so large, they needed preparing as specific items. From the start, I thought they'd be more interesting as definite circles, as that seemed weirder than making them less neat and regular, aside from, of course, being easier to draw! Ultimately, I simply drew the first one, then copied it to the other two locations. Initially, I created a new drawing tool to prepare the outer circuit as white with a dark grey outline. However, that proved problematic at the join where the avenue leading in to the centre of the barrow was, with the darker outline showing a break there. Thus that idea was scrapped, and the outer circuit drawn instead using a dark and a white line of different widths on separate sheets. The little cross-lines, helping to suggest the outer stone walling (I've pretty much envisaged these as gigantic versions of the great Newgrange barrow in Ireland), were simply hand-drawn, and are deliberately not all straight or evenly-spaced, to hint at something maybe less manufactured about these structures, despite their overall regular forms. The interior dome was drawn using a Solid White 10 fill circle, or more accurately, copied and amended to be so from one of the outer circuit lines, onto a new Barrows sheet. This had a suitable lighted bevel effect added, tweaked to help darken the domes to make them stand out better. For some reason, the Solid White fill worked better than the Solid one in doing so.

Labelling the map wasn't altogether straightforward either, trying not to hide too many of the dead tree symbols, and avoiding the highlighted hexes, while still making clear what was being labelled. The "Scale" note was the most trying (bottom right corner), as having just squeezed in a "Feralwood Forest" label on that side of the map, I couldn't decide if I should lose the eleventh hex in column 1600 to keep the scaling comment on two lines, or lengthen it to three. In the end, the latter won out, as the map felt lopsided because of that missing end-hex. Well, I kept noticing it, at least!

Onward now to the subterranea!

[EDIT 19 November 2024: Although I originally added the provisional PDF description for the map to this post, I've removed it now, as the final version has been submitted for the Atlas!]

Thinking more about the new Sticky Note Dungeon Annual just released yesterday, while checking it over and afterwards, it occurred to me that with a few additions, it could be used equally to generate a form of point-crawl overland map too. For those unfamiliar, this is a sketch that links places of interest in a pattern to identify how the various points can be reached, without bothering too much about the exact distances, directions or terrains intervening - except that things such as intervening difficult terrain might mean no direct links, with instead a set of further points bypassing the blocking feature to be encountered along the way.

As an example, I created this map almost ten years ago now for a wargaming magazine article on Jason and the Argonauts, showing a stylized series of overland connections along the western and northern Black Sea shores of Anatolia, into about the middle of that great peninsula, and along the coast north to modern Georgia, ancient Colchis:

This isn't all that clear at the usual Forum resolution, so I've added a further version at higher-res to my Gallery.

Thus essentially what can be drawn for such a system is a very simplified map, one that here even ignores the coast, and features only the main river lines of significance, chiefly those that cross travel routes, all in a rather abstract manner.

Something that's long been of interest to me has been trying to map the places referred to in H. P. Lovecraft's stories concerning his Dreamlands. I've had a couple of tries at this myself, the first time almost 40 years ago, and another that sadly didn't get very far more recently, using the beautiful E Prybylski Watercolour style from last year's Annual. Several other vastly superior to me artists have created their own versions of such a map over the years too, which all have their pros and cons.

One main difficulty is the details in Lovecraft's tales don't include things such as specific distances, or where different places might lie in relation to those mentioned in one story, and perhaps only obliquely referred to in another. Distances might be given in terms of hours or days sailed or flown on sea or in the air, or overland by yak, zebra or on foot, or might just be stated as being a long way apart. It's possible to estimate real distances by making assumptions, but this still doesn't help in locating where some of the places mentioned, but not passed through, or directly connected to elsewhere, were.

In the stories, as it would in genuine dreams, this all makes perfect sense, since these aren't real places, and Lovecraft was a lifetime lucid dreamer, so was writing more or less from experience. As a mapper though, it quickly becomes problematic.

However, the Sticky Note concept helps here, by generating a means to show places with some details about them, and lines showing how they connect, without worrying about details on exact directions, distances or even the size of a given place.

So I tried a quick version as a test earlier today. Had to create a couple of new drawing tools, and import a bunch of symbols from the SS1 Handrawn Hollow set, but it was all pretty straightforward. I drew out just the places along the Southern Sea coast, heading westwards from the great city of Dylath-Leen, as described by Lovecraft, using an annotated hand-sketch I'd prepared last year when working on the E Prybylski version:

Obviously, a lot more could be done than I've tried here, and this is a bit rough-and-ready in places, but the basic concept seems sound.

These SS1 hand-drawn symbols seem to work quite nicely, although I'm sure none of us would be averse to having a purpose-made set in the C. C. Charon style, should an overland version of the Sticky Note style be offered subsequently 😁!

(We might need an A3 or larger option for the paper to draw world-sized maps though 😉)

Map six is for the hamlet of Arvika:

I've made the usual updates elsewhere on the Forum & Gallery too, while the FCW and PDF notes follow:

So, the first of my theoretical ten villages is ready, from Hex 005 of the hex-map somewhere above (or here, in case that's a bit easier to find!), Ljungby. A few more details are in that linked post, although the PDF is here as well for those interested. Deliberately, I've kept the notes short, hoping that might improve my chances to complete all ten village maps!

Delayed for a clutch of reasons during the last couple of months, I have, off-camera, been continuing with my sort-of Dungeon24 project for the Nibirum Atlas, drawing small dungeon maps, and, where necessary, the area maps to place them in. Progress has though been a lot slower than I'd hoped of late. Plus, as I was finalising the accompanying texts for the latest pair of maps, Remy Monsen announced the 1,000 Maps Competition for the Community Atlas, which has complicated matters further. We'll get to that shortly (although if you've seen my notes in the main Competition topic, you'll have some idea already).

As I'd enjoyed developing the black and white style reminiscent of that used in various of the Shadowdark RPG supplementary materials last time, with the OSR Dungeon style from Annual 97, I decided I wanted to continue with that for the other three maps created from designs rolled-up using the Explorer set of Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph Dice. As it's turned out, this has also become a pleasing way to help celebrate the Shadowdark RPG's winning of no less than four prestigious Gold Awards at this year's Ennies, announced at GenCon on August 2nd (for Best Layout & Design, Best Rules, Best Game and Product of the Year)!

Back to the dungeon map and where it was to go. The random choice for its location was to be Peredur, as last time, now though in the southern part of that island continent, in Haddmark:

I soon discovered that this region had been less heavily mapped than others on Peredur, and as none of the regional maps really fitted with what I'd been thinking of for this dungeon, came to the conclusion I'd need to draw an area map as well. Of course, I wanted a black and white option for that too, to try to emulate the style of hex-maps used for similar areas in the Shadowdark supplements. These have a very specific size, using 6-mile horizontal hexes, with 17 columns west-east, by alternating 10 and 11 rows north-south. Typically, I had to expand my map by one column to make sure I collected all the places in the area I eventually selected (after quite some internal debate), a minor amendment. The area I went with doesn't have a name-label, so, and partly for how I'd already started developing the dungeon map, it became the Whispering Wastes, here:

Even so, it was a bit of a squeeze! This was the base map, with a suitable hexgrid superimposed that I used to draw the final map, with the place-name labels hidden for clarity:

Then, as normal, I randomly rolled-up a variety of overland map features, in this case using tables, with occasional amendments or adaptations, found in the main Shadowdark rules (which have a specific hex-map design system). Indeed, aspects of those tables would allow the creation of more detail for many of the places. While time-consuming to do in full, I did give serious consideration to this for a while, although as luck had it, the dice came up with rather more hexes with features than the average for this map anyway - 41 instead of 31 - which acted as a deterrent.

Some places were obviously decided already, with the three small settlements and one bridge symbol (which I decided should be another settlement too), although randomness being what it is, only one of those coincided with the hex-feature rolls, so a few adjustments had to be made. I did though retain or adapt those "moved" features into the settlement hexes as well. After which, it was time for the CC3+ mapping!

I opted for the Annual 121 Black & White Fantasy overland style as the basis, since it has a useful range of symbol options, which was then labelled-up mostly using the standard Windows Arial font, except for the title, which continued the use of Primitive, from the 2015 Annual, as previously. And this is how it finished:

The highlighted hex-map border and individual number-labelled hexes follow the style set by the Shadowdark supplements, though I stuck with the Annual's normal road, water and river appearances for ease here. On-map labels are typically kept to a minimum on the Shadowdark maps I was mimicking, so the place-names for the one-hex features are all to be found in the accompanying PDF and text map notes once in the Atlas only. I also decided to extend the mapped region a little outside the hex-mapped zone, as while ordinarily those outer hex-lines would form the border, that felt a little too edge-of-the-world to me in this case, as well as creating problems for where to add the main title, compass pointer and scaling note.

Overall, I was pleased with how this turned-out, although I have a fondness for hex-maps anyway, so am likely biased!