Yeah, but aren't they for the contours, rivers, roads - Oh wait... 😉

Not sure about the strength of the "Copyright Bay" label either 😎

More seriously, the green skull with horns looks too pixellated to my eye; seems not to fit well with the rest of the map's style and clarity, though I appreciate that's entirely to do with the original source illustration, and not something that can be fixed without some serious redrawing.

Jim, I think your original maps are from the Argan Argar Atlas, which states only that the hex scale is 8 km or 5 miles. All that means is each hex is classed as five miles in size, but that's NOT in any specific direction. This was a very common assumption at one time, when hexes were really just used for approximate distance estimating in games overall (RPGs and boardgames), so it's not a true scale from any one part of the hex to another.

It doesn't help that even some of the original hand-drawn maps of Glorantha by Greg Stafford don't have a proper scale on them, so realistically, you can set whatever scale distance best suits your purposes, and not get bogged down in the minutiae of mathematical precision for something that never had it in the first place!

If you want to investigate further, this topic on the Basic Role Playing Forum (for those unfamiliar, BRP is the base RPG system engine all the Chaosium RPGs use) pretty much covers all the essential details and issues. Even the official published RQ books and maps aren't consistent in their scaling of the same places - which to an extent is fair enough, as this is a game world set in what for Earth would be the Bronze Age!

I agree the Sd 222 looks too dark. Rusting and damaged is fine, but it still needs to be seen when used on a map.

Classic problem when painting miniatures for tabletop wargaming too; too realistically camouflaged and you can't find them among the vegetation, etc. Always a degree of compromise involved.

Don't know quite what it is, but the Sd 222 always looks like a "Doctor Who" Dalek to me...

There seems something of a disconnect between the "Building Codes" colours and what's actually visible on the map, so it's unclear to me what the point of still showing the colour coding is in this view.

The overall texturing looks very unclear currently. That may be partly the usual Forum resolution issue, but to my eye, the roofs at present look hugely oppressive and uninformative, just masses of dark and tan colouring. Some of the hatching on the fields and in parts of the city look very similar too, which together gives a confusing impression. Do the roofs actually need showing? The previous iteration of the map seemed more useful as a map overall because of the colour coding. I'm unclear what showing the roofs is meant to accomplish right now though.

Quite a number of the labels that are legible are inverted presently.

Delicious! And spider-meat "bacon". Now where's the frying pan? 😁

Interesting setup.

Some of the shadows look odd, especially those objects that don't currently have any - really low table in the middle of the floor, for instance!

It's also probably worth putting the chairs, benches and stools on a different Sheet to the tables, so the tables will cast a shadow on the seats, and the seats won't all have the same shadows as the tables.

Bit tough having to run outside every time to find a toilet, but maybe that's in the upstairs 😁

Depending on where it's located, it might be worth considering adding a fireplace to at least the main room?

Many thanks everyone for your kind comments, "Likes", and so forth. Haven't been on here for a couple of days, so apologies if I've seemed to be ignoring anyone.

I've been working on this group of maps for about six months now, so I've tinkered around with quite a few options, some of which worked better than others, and some of which have ended-up as something of a compromise. I went with the paler mists in the end (and there are some minor variations in the colouring and density in places) as I wanted Embra to be "lighter" in tone generally, although there are a few less welcoming spots too (we'll get to those...).

Well, once the maps are in the Atlas, it should work a little like this, once you find Embra at least. It might have been nice to be able to swap from map to map without needing the linear Atlas structure, but the set was designed specifically for use that way.

They're my own interpretations of images from randomly-drawn tarot cards. These are the notes regarding them that I gave in the opening "Embra" Forum topic:

The texts were also designed to fit the available space next to the map, and how much text you can type into a single text-box in CC3+, so some of the descriptions were amended because of those constraints too!

Yes Jim, the breaks in the lettering are due a type of acne where the same colours in the letters recur in the symbols or fill texture the letters are overlying. This seems to happen when there's any glow on the lettering. You may be able to solve it, should you change your mind, by changing the colour of the lettering (either to the "other" black - colour 17 if you originally used 0, for instance - or one of the darkest greys or browns), or by adding a new Sheet just below the TEXT Sheet, and copying the text onto it, but with no effects active on the new Sheet. In this case though, you may find the paler lettering will be OK on the darker woodland fill, without the need to use dark text letters there.

The third set of Embra "Places" are the Watery Places of Interest, accessed from the appropriate pie-segment of the "Official Guide" map:

One of the aspects that caught my attention from when I originally bought it in the Dover Clip-Art "Celtic Borders on Layout Grids" hardcopy book, was a page of individual knotwork creatures. Here, I simply couldn't resist the two merfolk to add to the borders for the Watery Places, with a neat little criss-cross design just in the frame's corners. As previously, the link-spaces on this schematic drawing are simply labelled extracts from the actual linked maps, with GM notes. The pattern for the layout here was basically the same as for the first of these Places of Interest maps, the Enclosed Places.

Hilly map 5 is Sunset Mound, a rather more characterful hill than some in this set, looking a little like a fish with a small tail, the dominant upland in the area, with a swarm of much smaller, elongated hills clustering nearby:

While the shape for The Fence hedge-lines with its dense corner copses was largely determined by the base-map being a castle, most of the interior for that was ignored, replaced instead with a small focal-point derived from the map's accompanying featured text, that bloodstained Altar of the Dying Swan. Why such a huge, empty space surrounds it, is for GMs to expand upon.