Hope you've all collected your new free symbols now.

Mike's certainly been racking them up this year. Sorry, I'm not grating on too much about this, am I? It would be unpalletable to be chained to that like an iron bar. Or that seems key to me anyway, to avoid being manacled to the last straw.

[There isn't a "groan" option here either, is there? 😉 Ho, ho ho! Christmas cracker jokes already...]🎄

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.

Depending on what kind of look you'd prefer, and also what sort of land area you want to map, you might also look at World War 2 Area Maps (which has options for illustrative contour lines), Cthulhu City (which also includes illustrative symbols for a selection of building types, albeit with "Call of Cthulhu" elements about some) or the Tactical Maps pack from last year's Annual.

More work of course, but you can also draw your own scalebar, and then label it as you please, in CC3+. If you set the grid scale correctly, and use the "Ortho" and "Snap" commands, it's not as difficult as you might imagine. Might not be so artistic as some of the symbol scalebar options though!

Well, doesn't look much like the tracks for Winnie the Pooh and Piglet... Maybe a Woozle? 😎

Don't forget there's also the Fantasy Realms style from 2009, which has the essential top-down mountain and hill drawing tools.

It's important to recognise too that as soon as you move from the pictorial isometric or side-on images to top-down, you're immediately wanting greater precision in exactly what is where, hence I'm not sure trying to create a set of symbols for top-down features will work well enough. That argument is why there are very few hill and mountain symbols in Fantasy Realms, for instance, with the recommendation to make full use of the drawing tools in that style.

Top-down vegetation is tricky too - lots of rough-edged small rings with a couple of texture lines inside is liable to be all you'd see at typical overland scales. This does work, as it's what was used originally on things like the early SPI-style hex-based board-and-counter wargames, and it's fine as representation, but it's not particularly realistic. Plus it can be very easily drawn vector style, if you want to go down that route.

It's hard to know what would work better as identifying jungle symbols than palms (try a quick online search for jungle map symbols, and most of what turns up IS palms!), given that many jungle evergreens have general side-on shapes similar to in-leaf deciduous ones. Maybe adding a few hanging lianas in places, an attempt at stratification (albeit that means multiple trees per symbol), or splashes of colour for flowers and fruits might help, though again for overland-scale maps, most of that detail's liable to be lost. Altering the varicolor colouring might help with the extant deciduous woodland options, possibly. And for top-down versions, basically, again, you're looking at a rough-edged circle with a couple of interior texture lines.

A statement at which much idle speculation can begin among the rest of us...

The Cyrillics will be originally Bulgarian, of course, as it was they who created the script, back in the 9th-10th centuries 😎.

Puzzled as to why the title isn't also in Cyrillics though (other than to help out most Forum readers here, that is!)?

The placement of the buildings seems a bit too uniform and disconnected from the road network, perhaps. Not sure how modern a setting this might be intended for though.

I suspect the red British markers in the WW2 text you mentioned Mike, might be because the traditional colour to show possessions of the British Empire (as it still was during WW2) was red. Plus it's been very commonly used in other military history and wargaming texts I've read as well down the years. There may be also an element that during the Napoleonic wars (indeed also in the almost-century before and after), many of the defining British troops wore red uniforms, the French blue, hence somewhere in all this came about the dominating idea of British = red. Probably!