The reason I opted for a monochrome style for the overland map was that I'd already chosen the Annual 48 Dungeon Black & White style for the underground map. Even if technically, it's not truly underground at all, as it's set into the gigantic dolerite mesa-like rock pillar which is what's actually called "Melgore", with its entrances at surface level on the north side of the pillar, by the rocky beach leading down to the nearby River Wisper, and which extends up into the pillar a short way (a total of less than 40 feet, 12 metres, given the pillar is roughly 500 ft tall, 150 m). Thus the Necropolis map:

There are, of course, PDF and text descriptions for both maps to go into the Atlas, to provide more flavour and notes on what's where, and what's going on in both. Some of these ideas came from various random design lists, published and personal, although I also drew on inspiration from the book description available from Inkwell Ideas for the "Crypts" dice set used to create the Necropolis map, adapted and amended somewhat here.

Plus the original dice-map was amended, to remove unnecessary blind passages that didn't link together, and to stop the whole from having too much of a "geomorphic dice edge" look in places. In other sections a few new features were added - corridors or rooms extended, shortened or linked, with new doors or secret doors added as well, as my thoughts about what was here developed during the whole mapping process, much as normal.

I wasn't sure at first about leaving the wall shadows visible into the surrounding rock, although this is what the style was designed to show. However, I became quite attached to this look during the mapping, which, with the crispness of the style, gave me the impression of looking at a map set into a sheet of crystal-clear glass. I did a brief experiment with a wall mask to hide the shadows in fact, as part of the process in concealing the bits of the grid that weren't needed, but found that hid too much of the wall lines, and made the whole thing look rather flat overall.

Higher-res copies of both maps are in my Gallery as well, for those wishing them.

My intention is to keep trying out different mapping styles during this project, albeit I am inclined to attempt to retain a stylistic theme where two (or more) maps need to be nested into one, as in this case.

If all goes to plan, I'm next heading off to a continent that's eluded me till now - the tropical heat of Kumarikandam!

As mentioned, the four Palace Wings were based on a different option than the "Carapace" booklet's system, hence none of these maps have schematic drawings beside them. Each was instead based on images posted by various people on the Dwarven Forge Discord, and from layouts shown in several official company videos available on the Dwarven Forge YouTube and Twitch channels. All used items from the cast modular terrain "Burrows" pieces made by the same company.

The nature of such modular terrain items does make for more rectilinear layout patterns than those generated by "Carapace", although this would make it possible to set-up layouts on the tabletop, for those owning such Burrows pieces, that are similar to what appears in the Palace Wing layouts overall. However, alterations were made to the sizes, shapes and orientations of the tunnels and chambers at times as shown in the final maps here and in the following posts, so exact matches would not be possible.

Despite this change, the nature of each chamber in the Wings was again randomly decided using the Appendix 2 tables in "Carapace", with occasional amendments, since these offer the potential for a number of interesting variations and features.

The selected layouts were combined and chosen to loosely match the look of the outlying parts of the Palace on the Illusory Level 1 map, meaning the layouts delving deeper were placed in the western and northern Wings, representing the parts of the surface sketch where the taller buildings and towers were.

First then, the West Wing, comprising three main vertical levels:

All the Wings have just a single connection to the outside, in each case by a link back to either Level 2 or 3 of the main Palace. In this Wing, that's on Level 1 of this trio, where Tunnel W1.1 leads back down to Chamber 2.4 on the Palace's second Level. This layout was based on the extensive, multi-level "Demonic Depths" Build of the Month video from May 2020 by Dwarven Forge.

The idea is that the Wings are generally less-used than the main Palace, so few of the areas in them have suggested-use labels on the maps (albeit some additional comments are provided in the accompanying separate notes files).

Although I've already posted about this in the contest topic, to round-off this WIP topic too, here are the final versions of Cloven House, without and with its secret Cellar cave, now with added cupboard under the Cellar stairs:

For those who might be interested, and again something that's in the contest entry topic too, I've attached here the PDF notes for the map, which will be in the Atlas version in the fullness of time, for those wanting an early preview of this little haunted house:

Do be aware that there's a hint of "adults only" about a couple of the potential apparitions and other ghoulish elements in these notes. Nothing too salacious, just something to be aware of.

Incidentally, anyone thinking I might have abandoned my preference for random design mechanics in devising my Atlas maps in this instance, might be reassured that there were hints of that in selecting what ghostly items to pick from in constructing this description (I have a long list drawn from numerous past sources and ideas!). Such a mechanism was used less here than in other features I've designed previously, however.

And good luck to all the other contest entrants, especially those struggling to get things finished by the deadline!

The final Enclosed Places map condenses the remaining five Places, all streets, into a single drawing:

Lots to see here, so let's try a closer view of just the streets:

All the streets had to be designed in a rather different way to the other Places of course, as there were no Judges Guild products that provided plans for such things in isolation. As I noted previously, instead I reworked a set of tables for randomly generating caves and mines from another old Judges Guild text to decide on their lengths, widths, types and layouts, although that system ultimately was more "me" than "JG". Once the base layouts were designed and drawn into the CC3+ map, the streets were redrawn as proper CC3+ streets of the appropriate width and character, and then the CD3 random street options were used to populate them with a range of houses suitable for their overall names and natures.

The streets I came up with were often quite curvy, and the CD3 random street tool isn't too keen on curves and turns, and it can't really cope with junctions at all, so some of the random properties had to be moved, or removed, or adjusted, and sometimes redrawn using a combination of the base shapes that had been generated. Occasionally, some were swapped out for symbols, particularly where I wanted specific or important structures to be. I also decided early on that it wasn't going to be practical to provide interior drawings for all the properties involved - there were simply too many, and that ran the further risk of making them too much alike without a lot of care. I did contemplate doing interiors for selected properties, only to finally decide against that too. So if you need interiors, you'll have to come up with your own for these!

I'll not go into detail here as to what some of the items on these mapped streets are. The PDF and text files in the Atlas should help in that respect. However, it is worth drawing attention to the most significant structure, the Thistle Street Barracks, home to the Knights of the Thistle, Embra's military and police-force, in as much as any Faerie settlement needs such things. These Knights are not entirely my own invention either, as real-world Scottish knights of the realm are known as "Knights of the Thistle" too, though Embra's are naturally of a more magically Faerie kind.

As with all the other individual Places, the idea is these streets can be linked as loosely and in whatever ways GMs may desire to create fresh interpretations of Embra city.

And this is only the first collection of Places in Embra. There are six more such sets still to come!

Next is another curiously isolated hamlet, this time closer to the River Clack, so it appears on the map as well, although the hamlet's existence is presumably due to the fortuitously-discovered, naturally enough magical, Crimson Rose Well:

As might be guessed, the odd appearance of the settlement and its riverine landing-stages resulted from the original random base map being one showing a small castle and a defended landing on a river. This being Faerie, the defensive walls become high "walls" of thorny vegetation sporting great, heavily scented, crimson rose blooms, and the castle becomes a hamlet-sized community dedicated to looking after the Well and those who come here seeking its magical aid. The fact there could be a powerfully magical sword hidden away within the thorns somewhere (from the featured text) merely adds an extra note of interest. Plus GMs can have fun accounting for why this bit of Embra is so apparently isolated from the rest of the city it needs a substantial landing area all its own on the Clack!

Buildings on the non-streets maps means interiors, and again these are all of just the one storey:

Some of you may recall Eblenn Hill has featured before among these Embra Places maps, as it's the substantial hill the first of the Enclosed Places was set upon, the Freed Haven Floral Garden. Whether the version here is the same or not, and how - or if - it may relate to the "other", is left for GMs to decide.

Embra - Winterset in the southwest moves things towards a somewhat different nature, with many clustered properties, and no River Clack. Water comes instead from a pair of well-fountain pools at two midline crossroads, while the not-quite enclosed areas of Aine's Pastures are connected by a bridge that arches over the northern trail, a particularly obscure - thus clearly Faerie - feature:

The interior views show what the layout of the properties really is, although there are many fewer two-storey buildings, as the lower image here demonstrates:

The western village of Embra - Evenside carries things to an even stranger place, now with a "castle", Caer Sidi, that is really just an elaborate stone fence around an open field! The Clack here isn't a stream, but a series of ponds linked by marshes that have a couple of bridges over the swampier spots. There's also a huge orchard, and a second dry valley with a scatter of marshy ponds along it too:

This is one map which I think especially benefits from a means to help identify which mapped items are genuine buildings:

When I started preparing the Faerie Land map for the Atlas, I already knew I was going to add to it a couple of places which would require further mapping. As it turned out, both would be placed relatively near one another in northwestern Faerie Land, in the River Clack valley.

To better locate both though, it was clear a map covering a much smaller area than Map 40 would be helpful first, which is where the Clack Valley map originated. Examining what the valley looked like on the Faerie Land map, it seemed reasonable to cover the entire length of the River. From that, an area some 50 miles long by 15 miles wide (80 by 25 kilometres) would work nicely, as shown here by the orange rectangle:

Making a hand-drawn copy of this area onto squared paper, much as I often do (see the Map 40 construction topic elsewhere on the Forum for the concept), I then drew-up some new and amended random feature tables to add fresh detail, deciding and setting the results into one-mile squares across the whole valley. From those, smaller rivers could be added in places, also drawing on the general tenor of how and where the various hill ranges had been plotted on the larger map previously. Here too, I'd decided to add a variety of random plants as well as creatures, since real-world faerie lore frequently draws attention to such things as having significance. This all helped give further character to the region.

By this stage, there was an increasing need for a host of new names to highlight some of these fresh significant places. Aside from the randomly-generated names left over from the Faerie Land map, which hadn't been used there, I'd also come across a substantial series of random-name tables on The Collaborative Gamer blog a while before, so I used those to roll-up an extra set of names to choose from, to add to what I had already. Some of the name-options on that blog are heavily Tolkien-based, which I decided against employing here, but many of the other tables read almost like a series of thesaurus entries, giving ideas even when they weren't always used in the strictly random form in which they'd been rolled. Then it came down to fitting the names to suitable specific places. After which, the CC3+ mapping could begin!

Looking through the various mapping styles of those I'd not used previously which work particularly well for handling smaller overland areas, led me to the Alyssa Faden Overland style from the 2014 November Cartographer's Annual. This is supplied with the Bridgnorth font, and that too seemed to fit with what I intended for this area.

This then is the basic map:

There are two small Keys to accompany it, which can be hidden separately if required, one of which brings in the extra labels and markers for the various creatures and plants added to the map:

Although most of the area illustrated falls within the Faerie Land Core zone, as defined already on Map 40, a small part towards the map's left-hand edge is beyond it, as this overlay view shows, also intended to be toggleable in the final Atlas FCW version:

Part of my reason in picking this mapping style was because it comes with its own selection of cloud symbols, so I had to add some of those too:

As these are purely decorative, despite being placed so as not to conceal too much of any important labelled sites, they were set-up so they can be toggled on or off separately as well.

Naturally, the Forum's layout options make horizontally-linear maps particularly difficult to see much detail on, so the images below show the western and eastern halves of the map a little closer:

This last image is larger than the usual Forum preferred size, but it is at least complete!

The Atlas map will also be provided with the usual PDF and text file document of notes explaining more about the map's contents, and which two late medieval Herbals were drawn on especially to add a sprinkle of magic to some of those special plants!

And so to the vehicles. The first of these, the wrecked ship, proved by far the most time-consuming in this Aunty MacKassa set. I'd selected the Sailing Ships pack from the 2009 Cartographer's Annual, which as noted previously, provides only limited help for drawing pre-gunpowder-period vessels, especially as I prepared these illustrations some time before the Annual was updated in April 2021.

My design for what became "The Naughty Lass" (it can sail beneath the waves and on the surface, after all!) was decided following heavy influence from Pauline Baynes' drawings of "The Dawn Treader" in C. S. Lewis' novel of its voyage, along with the nicely-detailed "Sea Ghost" ship drawings in the D&D scenario book "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" (2019, p. 53). This led ultimately to this deck plans map:

I got into rather a mess with this, however, as my initial idea had been to have one vertically-narrow rectangular plan view with the individual decks being toggled on and off one at a time within that condensed space using the map's Layers. Unfortunately, this ran into problems due to interference between the Sheet Effects in the lengthening stack of Sheets per deck, and between decks. So the deck plans had to be separated out, and the map greatly expanded, into the form now shown here. The Layers though ended up partly in the very condensed form as originally envisaged, partly in a more standard format for the decks I'd constructed later in the process. The Sailing Ships pack was meant to show just one deck per map, but that had seemed a little too clumsy for what will be really just a minor adjunct to another map once entered into the Community Atlas. I'd definitely draw the map differently as far as the Layers are concerned, if starting again now. At least it looks more or less OK still, I hope!

From the beginning, I'd also wanted to do a vertical section for The Naughty Lass, as that option is part of the Sailing Ships set-up. So I did, complete with "ghost ship" glow:

And an optional metric scalebar, via an Atlas toggle in the FCW file:

I also had to tone-down the original daytime-bright sky backdrop, to something more dismally matching Aunty's nature.

Again, a PDF and text-file set of notes will accompany both these drawings, in which you can find out about the nature of the ship's "adults-only" figurehead and how it relates - in Aunty's idea of dark humour, naturally - to the vessel's name...

For the Atlas, the Section Drawing is linked from the Coral Cave map via the "ghost ship" symbol in the top right corner, with the Deck Plans map connected from the Section Drawing only.

While working on the Ellenge Town map for the Kachaya, I'd also prepared some random tables for designating shops and facilities suitable for Merfolk settlements, given that all undersea civilisations will have a degree of similar requirements for places to live. As I wanted to provide some ideas to the Community Atlas more generally too on developing undersea settlements for all the main races I'd situated in Errynor's oceans, from what had been decided for the Map 01 area, the logical next map was a Merfolk settlement. Of the two still-inhabited ones on Map 01, the Shaldun castle stronghold set in the line of The Cliff itself seemed too similar a location to what I'd already explored for the Shark Bridge area, so I opted instead for the town of Selass out in The Deeps:

I'd already established that Selass was going to be a kind-of independent frontier town, towards the edge of the abyssal plain of Nibirum's greatest ocean, and that the abyssal plain itself would be an area likely to attract adventurers and prospectors. Selass would then have grown to serve their needs in this area. Not wanting to simply drop the settlement onto the routine, flattish, deep ocean floor (the sea's about 3,600 m, nearly 12,000 ft, deep here), and having already worked with some undersea uplands (the Aak Hills), I thought a hollow would be more interesting here. This had the added advantage I could try out @Loopysue's City Cliffs set from the 2020 Cartographer's Annual (CA 165).

Using my random tables, I worked out the size of Selass, and rolled-up what its main features were going to be. The population involved needed two modest villages of agricultural workers and hunters to support it, and them, and dicing for their locations placed one very near Selass, like a "suburb" perhaps, the other a couple of kilometres/a mile or so to the southwest. This meant Selass took on a somewhat elongated look overall, and doodling shapes around this layout brought me to the realisation both Selass + "suburb", and its neighbouring village, could be set into rounded areas where the sea-bed had partly collapsed - when a small magma tube had fallen-in, say, or an especially gassy magma emplacement had led to the sea-floor fracturing in a similar way - places that could have plenty of cliff-opening caves afterwards, suitable for occupation and expansion. Two such places relatively near one another would thus have been ideal for the Merfolk's uses, and included an explanation for why one village had ended up so close to the town, yet could be thought of still as loosely separate from it.

One minor drawback was that the City Cliffs set is intended to work best with the CD3 Bitmap A symbol sets, which are not black-and-white, the overall colour scheme I'd been trying to use for all my undersea settlement maps, due to deciding that while the deep-sea humanoids can all see normally despite the eternal darkness of the deep oceans, their vision without a light source is purely monochromatic. That though was easily overcome by simply applying an RGB Matrix Process Effect set to "Gray" to the entire map. I did have to keep turning it on and off along the way to ensure whatever was being added in colour still worked in greyscale, of course.

Merfolk architecture as I'd envisioned it is pretty eclectic on the whole, so aside from cave-dwellings, a mixture of sea-floor-surface building styles - even some that look remarkably like their land counterparts - would be perfectly reasonable. What seems to be a chimney might be really a vent of some kind, though it could be equally a rooftop accessway, for example. So I drew on all the CD3 Bitmap A symbol sets available, including @ScottA's Celtic houses and @Loopysue's City Domes, to provide an appropriate mix. The switch to greyscale became helpful in another respect, because I needed three shipwrecks, reused as buildings, and the Bitmap A symbols have no ships at all. Luckily the original CD3 vector symbols do have some - not perfect for use as wrecks, but clearly boat-shaped - a difference the use of greyscale helped conceal!

The settlement outlines were to be traced from my hand sketch, once scanned and imported into the CC3+ template, and rescaled to fit the proper area. Using this, I constructed the cliff-lines for both Selass + suburb, and the separate mile-distant village. This took a few tries to get right, as I'd not realised individual segments of the connecting-symbol cliffs couldn't be swapped-out for replacements. After that though, it was easy enough to complete the cliffs.

In order to have the buildings and caves placed randomly - no streets needed on the deep sea-floor, after all - I'd always intended to use the Symbols In Area command to set-up these layouts. So I added basic coloured circles for the relevant Areas within the outer cliff-lines, and populated them with the correct numbers of identifiable symbols of different types for the different surface building shapes chosen, using just the standard Geometry.FSC set from CC3+ at this stage. Once the random patterns were established, it became possible to identify what should go where from the selected properties and places lists randomly determined earlier. The Cave Entrance symbols were moved in places to their nearer cliff-lines, and a few other minor adjustments made, before replacing those except the cave symbols with their final CD3 Bitmap A ones. The most significant change made during this process was to add a cliff stack feature around the southern border of Selass near where it met with that of the adjoining village area, where a particular cluster of symbols had chanced to lie.

Labels and keys were added, along with other surface features in and around the settlements to give them a little more "life", after which an area map was constructed to show the relative locations of the settlements to one another on the sea-bed. For this latter drawing, the cliff-lines from the town and village maps were simply copied and rescaled accordingly. The provided distance scale symbols proved a little too small and unclear when added to the maps, aside from the need to relabel those for the area map, so after adjusting and adding some suitably sized Grid options, fresh scales were produced for these by hand instead.

Hence the final combined map looks like this:

This isn't very clear at the usual Forum resolution, so this is a closer view of just the left half:

And this is the right half:

As usual, a detailed set of text-file and PDF notes was drafted to accompany and explain more about the whole mapped set-up here.