Like the eagle heading home in the night version now!

Given that deer tend towards the crepuscular, they'd probably be fine in the lower (brighter) night scene too; maybe not actually so much on the daytime one, though as winter days in the north are so short anyway, this is likely moot.

Shadows are much improved now, I think.

Might be worth trying a boldface version of the snowflake dingbat, just to make it stand out a little more (on the day scene especially). Not sure that'll work though, as boldface sometimes reduces the clarity of finer lines on characters too.

Must admit, I'd thought it was probably for a holiday-themed project of some kind (the title's the giveaway 😉!).

Good-looking map!

My immediate thought beyond that is that some of the broader rivers don't appear quite right. In places where they merge, there's often a patch of darker blue in them which makes them seem a little disjointed. I suspect that may be because the inner glow effect on the rivers sheet needs tweaking to be a little larger, perhaps (it may be something else, as this isn't a style I've used much, or very recently, however).

Also, there's the common problem with river lines where they meet the coast, that they don't match up properly with the coastline, and can seem to run into the sea, with a colour mismatch. Sometimes you can adjust the final node on the river line to match better with the coastline, though sometimes not. One alternative is to add a small polygonal patch of the appropriate sea fill texture over the end of the river line, although even that sometimes doesn't work as well as you might wish.

A further alternative is to set up the land sheet with a Color Key Effect, which effectively "cuts out" the rivers instead of superimposing lines on top, so essentially the rivers become long sea inlets instead. The downside is you have to draw the rivers on the land sheet as well, and in a solid fill of a single colour (by default, this is Colour 6, bright pink). You can though make your rivers look a lot more natural that way, especially if you draw them as polygons instead of lines (this can be a bit tedious for long rivers, however, as you have to draw both banks), or add polygons to disguise where river lines of different widths meet (so the main river line can vary in thickness along its length in a more "realistic" manner than a single line width will allow.

Not sure if I'm interpreting what you're intending here correctly, but if the paler, sandy coloured coastal strip is meant to represent an extensive, low-lying beach, and the fractal lines are the actual high vertical cliffs, it might be useful to use the cliff lines as the coast, and make the seaward edge of the beach have a less strong outer effects line. If it's a beach, after all, it must be submerged by the tide in part at least some of the time, whereas the cliffs would form the actual coastal barrier.

This used to happen with new sheets you'd created in any map. If you didn't put anything on the sheet, it would be deleted the next time you reopened the map. That was changed in an update a long while back, and while it does solve the problem that if you don't use it immediately, you'll lose it, it does mean most maps now end up with far too many sheets in, because nobody's ever going to remember which sheets haven't been used in a given map. Plus there's always the danger you'll accidentally delete some critical sheet by mistake that has something on you'd forgotten about if you try to do a cleanup manually.

It would be excellent to have the same possibility to remove excess Sheets at the end of a map, just as you can with Layers, currently. Not sure how practical that would be from a programming perspective though.

Wasn't able to get along for yesterday's livestream, so have just been catching-up with the VOD tonight instead. SS6 looking good, and I suspect those circled key numbers especially are going to see a lot of use beyond this set alone!

However, I was shocked to see the Hobbit village didn't make everyone in chat smial 😉...

If Erdan Worlds won't let you do what you want with the mapping, it's probably best to look around for something that will. 13th Age might be somewhat closer to that example map whose style you want to replicate, for instance as a first suggestion. You're never going to get exact matches for everything, of course (unless the source map's in a style PF already has available that is!), so you need to decide what's most important to preserve, and then work around that.

In terms of the Sheet Effects, like Edge Fade and Edge Fade Inner, or others that may help blend adjacent textures, adjusting the size and strength beyond the presets is always worth trying out. Experimentation is key though, as has been said before re Sheet Effects generally, and trying to advise you "blind" like this isn't really practical. You just need to play around with ideas and see what you think looks good. If you run into specific snags, someone here may well be able to assist.

You might also want to try varying the edges of adjacent terrains, so they're not always simple linear features - not saying to use fractals here, just add some extra curves and variations by-hand (like a weak "jigsaw piece" join, perhaps), nothing very finely-detailed. With a strong enough Effect, you'll not see much of the original shape, and it may help break-up the linear junction a bit more.

The blending in this sample map looks like it could work by adding rounded patches of one of the greens over the top of the other, with a strong Edge Fade Inner Effect on the patches Sheet, for instance.

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!

No, I didn't try an export with the cliffs on, but zooming in and out made little difference to the problem that some of the lines spread across the intervening land, beyond the polygon's boundaries. There's also the issue that I design my Atlas maps to be viewed at the full-map level shown in the illustration above, and that's where I could see the various problems. While that might have been OK on an output at some size levels, if I can't confirm that in the CC3+ view, I'm not going to chance it!

Thanks Sue & Jim! 😊

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.