There may be another minor glitch with this Fantasy Town Annual. I've been mapping with it on and off for a couple of weeks, and I've found that if I load a map in the style (just use one of the two samples that come with the issue to test), and then use any of the Zoom view commands, like Zoom Window or Zoom Extent, the entire Symbol Catalogue pane (left-hand column of symbol images) goes completely blank. If I then try to reopen the catalogue, it goes into the Program Files (x86) directory as default, not ProgramData. If I try to use the catalogue's left-hand button to view all the symbols in the map, the program crashes and closes down.

However, if on opening said file, and before doing anything else, I save the file, it's fine. I've got into the habit of doing this with my own files, as I've been using it so regularly lately, but Jim's post here reminded me that it could be something else about this issue that needs tweaking, in case it's not just me that's finding this.

Twice now, Sue!

🤣

No, no, they're actually very predictable. You can guarantee that whatever you've carefully prepared in game, they'll go the opposite way, and the direction they'll pick is inversely proportional to the time and effort you've put into designing the area they're now totally ignoring...

DD3 has four different bitmap fill lava textures, Stone Lava Cooled, Stone Lava Flaming, Stone Lava Molten, and Lava. The Jon Roberts Annual Dungeon style has three, Lava, Lava Hot and Lava Cool. The Munson's Mines Annual Dungeon style has three different reddish lava bitmap fills. The Vandel Dwarves Annual Dungeon style has two reddish lava texture fills similarly. The Mike Schley Annual Dungeon style has a single lava bitmap fill. The Naomi VanDoren Annual Dungeon style has three, Lava Hot, Warm and Cool. SS2 Bitmap A has one lava bitmap fill, and the Bitmap B style has one more. Those are what I found quickly, anyway, among the full-colour dungeon styles. It's also worth looking at the various stone textures in the same style pack as the lava fills, as some could be used as cooled lava too - or changed up to something hotter using some of the colour-changing Effects options, perhaps.

@Loopysue - It's a good video for maps where you have one or more scaled items in the part of the image you intend to use.

If there isn't something like that in the piece of map you want to copy, it's worth taking some extra time to construct an image that does have the correct scale in it - which will likely mean extracting and adding the scale into the map image in image processing software before importing it into CC3+. Key element is to ensure the two bits of the image don't get accidentally rescaled compared to one another before making the final PNG or JPG...

And also not to mistakenly cover some essential bit of the map with the scale...

Thanks @Monsen !

We've had several discussions on the Forum here (and these have happened elsewhere too) over recent years as to exactly what this or that RPG/fiction genre term actually means - including Steampunk, Grimdark and Cyberpunk. The problem with all these is they mean different things to different people, which can be tied sometimes to what they are taken to mean by specific RPG systems. This makes it hard to say what assets a given person might consider satisfactory, aside from this also depending on what scale of mapping is intended - whole country/region (what we often call overland in CC3+ discussions), entire settlement (CC3+ "Cities"), or individual buildings ("Dungeons"), for example - and what the map is going to be used for (an individual building map might be used as a tabletop battlemap for miniature figures to move and act across, say).

Some kind of loosely 19th-century or "Victorian" mapping options might be easier to find, though there isn't a standard set of options even looking there, as most 19th century real-world styles started out in the previous century, and their 19th-century developments carried through into the first third or half of the 20th in different places. In terms of CC3+ assets, there are overland styles such as the late-18th century Ferraris Style from the February 2020 Annual, which general look of maps was still being used in places into the early 20th century, and some elements still feature in maps today. It works well for local areas/small regions and settlements. The August 2009 Annual covered Napoleonic battle maps, again suitable for relatively smaller areas, and a style used from the late 18th through to the early 20th centuries.

The Early Modern Cities style in the 2007 September Annual will fit with some later 19th-century city maps. For 18th-early 19th century sailing ships, try the March 2009 Annual, updated with additions in April this year. Although strip maps (May 2009 Annual) were a 17th-century development that was a method still being used well into the mid-late 19th, showing details just along and near a specific roadway.

These are only a few examples that come readily to my mind. I'd recommend taking a look at this Forum topic, which shows thumbnails from every Annual issue, and gives a simple guide to the general style presented in each issue, with a link to the PF website where you can find more information, including examples of the style in use.

@JulianDracos makes a good point regarding the vagueness of the genre, in common with what I've noted here. RPGs such as Castle Falkenstein and Space 1889, and also Cthulhu By Gaslight, which to me would fall into the loose Steampunk genre, tended to prefer clear, black-and-white line-drawing styles for their maps, sometimes with straightforward simple colours used to highlight particular things, which also seems comparable to how many 19th century maps come across to me.

If you have fence lines, I've learnt they can be placed below a hedgerow to look enough like a gate to work as such in the Fantasy Town style. As long as there's an end-piece for the hedge, that should work OK. It also works with walls too, of course.

Hi @Johann !

My recommendation would be to try to see the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Wikipedia link). This has details on the landscape and landforms in contour maps and text descriptions, with lists of identified places known to have existed in specific periods (including late antiquity, which is where c.450 CE would fall in their categorisation). Where this can be established, changes in landforms (coasts and river courses primarily) have been allowed-for, though I don't think the area of Germania Superior that you're interested in features in that too much, as little work has been done on things like the ancient river courses in this area, unfortunately.

I think the third video @roflo1 was meaning was this one by Remy Monsen (it's on Remy's YouTube channel, rather than the main ProFantasy one):