Dee-licious! 🍳

So far as I recall from modelling the 8- and 6-rad armoured cars (i.e. also from period images and information), the aerials were fixed in position, and at a height above the turrets all the time. These are the early-war "bedstead" frame aerial types, not the later war smaller "star antennae" which were retrofitted to some models, incidentally.

Oh - and belated congratulations on your ascension to Master Mapper status @Lillhans ! Very well done!

What's caught my eye is how similar these hedges look at the overall scale-look of Sue's sample map here, to the effect you can get using the hedge symbols in the CA169 Fantasy Town style pack. However, those aren't connecting symbols, so you have to do it all by hand, one bit of hedge at a time!

(And before you ask, yes, I already did this in my Hydras In Smoke Maze for the city of Embra in the Community Atlas 😁)

The published maps and artwork for ShadowDark all tends to be black-and-white. I don't mean greyscale here, but sharply-contrasting black-and-white line hand-drawings. It would be good to have something similar for CC3+ (especially for dungeon-style maps, as the current CC black-and-white dungeon styles don't have sufficient bitmap options, or high enough symbol and bitmap resolutions, to look sufficiently clear and presentable - I did some tests for this too), particularly given the current popularity of OSR systems overall, which tend to favour this kind of map look in general. It is though easy enough to convert these maps to at least greyscale, simply by adding a suitable RGB Matrix Process effect to the whole map:

Oh, and a minor tweak to the colour of the lettering!

Enclosed Place of Interest 3 is the Floating Dale Park:

This can be used as a typical real-world park, with opportunities to wander around, or play outdoor games on the central Playing Fields, whose unusual shape may call to mind that Faerie outdoor games and sports may not be quite those familiar from the Mortal Realm.

There are a handful of surface-level buildings scattered around the map's centre, as one of the map toggles will reveal:

These include the Pavilion, where equipment for playing sports and games is available, as well as a restaurant in the central octagon beneath the building's dome. And yes, some of the vegetation is actually intended to be of living glass in Glass Tree Forest. And again yes, those ARE bridges made from rainbows over the River Clack. As ever, the text and PDF files will explain a little more about both facets, and others, from this map. In case this seems not very "Enclosed", there ARE boundaries to the Park which are deliberately less obvious than some.

You're just throne this out there, aren't you? 😉

Well, as it's turned out, not quite "next time" for Level Thirteen after all!

As I was drawing the various Tower levels, and especially when setting-up the cross-level hyperlinks, it soon became obvious I was relying on my own hand-scrawled schematic showing how all the levels connected with one another to manage that. This suggested a further such properly mapped schematic might be helpful for GMs trying to run the Tower with the portals active in the sequence shown on the maps. Thus we also have the Windy Tower GM's Guide map:

Although it was relatively simple and quick to draw (especially compared with setting up multiple macro hyperlinks per level!), it proved a little more complex than anticipated, thanks to the number of crossing arrow lines. Plus the whole went through around six different hand-sketched iterations before settling on this layout, to try to keep the arrow-line patterning as relatively simple as possible.

Now it's done though, it has been quite entertaining to use it to navigate using the FCW file's hyperlinks between the levels, when checking them in comparison with the text notes ahead of the final Atlas submission.

And so REALLY next time, Level Thirteen!

And so finally...

My original idea was to set this dungeon map up as a cellar to the Tower. However, the use of portals to navigate between the main Tower maps, suggested this one could be set up instead as a further level, whose separate nature, while hinted-at by the need to use the golden talisman from Level Seven to operate the portal from Level Nine to it, would only become fully obvious once it began to be explored. It also leaves open the question as to whether this is genuinely just another main Tower level, one with a more secure, semi-secret accessway, and even whether most of the Tower levels might be on a completely different plane of existence to the outside that connects with Level Five.

Regardless of that, this is the final map, whose base was generated by a trio of the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph dice faces from the Adventurer set, here with a few minor tweaks and adjustments:

As the labels indicate, there are alchemical aspects here that survived from my initial thoughts on this layout, now added-to by golems - and there are several of those here, including some variant levitating Iron Golems that can also freely teleport within this Level (only). There's also something horrifyingly vast and terrible magically held in stasis in the Great Holding Chamber. You'll have to read the notes in the Atlas version to find out more, but it's known as The Devourer of Deserts (no, not "Desserts"...) thanks to The Story Engine card draws.

There's a lot more weirdness here, including what seem to be randomly inlaid dark metal symbols in the floors, walls and ceilings in places (another card-generated idea), as well as more conventional dark metal inlay designs, courtesy of our own Loopysue's Marine Dungeons! Some of the accessways are incredibly narrow (that between chambers D and E is barely 18 inches, 45 cm, wide, for instance), raising questions as to how some of the large, bulky equipment ever got into the inner western and northern parts of this complex. Which is just as it should be for what's clearly an anciently-created place belonging to a highly powerful magic-using person/creature. Who seems to be nowhere at all in the complex currently...

The golems are intended to function much like the other guardians elsewhere in the Tower, in stasis until required to tackle intruders, except here, there are often passwords required to stop them activating, not to mention the silver amulet needed to open the door to and from the Entrance Chamber (A). The whole Windy Tower project was though a fascinatingly creative exercise, tying-together (sometimes very loosely!) the randomly-generated card-draw concepts, as well as the oddities of the dungeon layout.

One final piece of weirdness I only found an explanation for after consultations with Loopysue and, indirectly, Remy Monsen. It's been a very long while since I mapped using the Mike Schley Dungeon SS4 style. When I came to draw the Level Thirteen map, as usual, I imported a JPG version of the hand-redrawn dice design as a base to work from in CC3+. I always check the sizing of that, and adjust it when done if needed, using the drop-down Info menu's Distance command, measuring the separation of the graph-paper grid lines using the ortho setting. Ordinarily, that calls up an information panel that looks something like this (I'm just picking random points here to demonstrate):

However, what came up was this:

I thought I must have hit some unrecognised shortcut key by mistake, but then I couldn't find a way to reset it, either using the CC3+ Help menu, or anything in the Tome.

It turns out though that there are actually two commands you can type into the command line to find distances like this, DISTANCE (which gets you the first panel above) and DIST2 (which gets you the lower panel). Now quite why DIST2 has been set as the default in SS4 is a mystery nobody seems able to resolve, given that (thankfully!) it isn't used anywhere else like this. There probably are circumstances where being able to measure both bearing and distance together might be useful, and also the vertical and horizontal distances simultaneously, but it is appallingly confusing to have this thrown at you when all you want is a straight distance measurement. In this instance, it's fairly obvious, if not intuitively so, as to which is the correct value for what was being measured, although that wouldn't necessarily be so obvious under different circumstances. Something to be aware of when using SS4, though - and if you do just need a "normal" distance measurement, simply type-in DISTANCE to get it!

Now it's time to leave Doriant for the time being, and head off to Lanka in Kumarikandam for the next maps in this project...

You should though check your card provider's terms and conditions before carrying out the transaction, as you may find there's a small extra fee to convert the currency (about 3% of the transaction value is common, though not universal). Like Loopysue, I'm in the UK, but have carried out transactions this way for some years for US, Canadian and New Zealand Dollars and Euros, for instance, and the transactions have always been pretty straightforward.

Also, if you're concerned, you can pay through PayPal (even if you don't have a PayPal account), and that shows you exactly how much you'll be paying in your own currency, including the conversion fee (and your card provider shouldn't charge you any extra).

Thanks very much Sue!

I wanted the cliffs here to look different to yours, which I'd already decided to use for the red sandstone types at Embra, as the Palace Heights ones are meant to be a harder, volcanic type of rock. Actually, a Faerie type of volcanic rock, which has different properties and abilities to "ordinary" volcanic rock, so I also wanted the forms here to act as a reminder that something a little different to normal was involved. I also used a similar style of cliff drawing in one of the Crossing Places Streets - the Rocky Vale under Seafield Road there, again because the Vale is a weird place that can't be reached, another reminder of something odd happening there.