As I've spent the last 18 months on and off mapping elements of the deep undersea (lightless, yet still intelligent-creature inhabited, parts of the Community Atlas world), I'll be very interested to see how this project develops.

The biggest difficulty I found was the lack of prior examples to draw upon (it's a long-ignored topic even in fantasy RPGs for some reason), though for shallower, sunlit, seas, at least there are things like aerial imaging to draw upon, and there are established real-world mapping styles for the near-coastal seas too (like the Marine Maps CA style).

More importantly, have you managed to resolve the issue?

Yes. Rather than try to explain it, look-up "arrows" in the CC3+ HTML Help file using Search, and have it display the "Double Arrow" entry. For some reason typing "Double arrow" in the search bar comes up with nothing...

You can add arrows at both end of a straight, arced or smooth path/line. As we've noted here before though, depending on what size of arrowhead you need, you may be better off drawing the line, adding filled polygon triangles for the arrowheads, and placing them separately yourself, as the automatic system can show the line extending beyond the arrowhead sometimes.

Well, this evening's "fun and games" with the Forum took a while to get started, but suddenly I've just had two events occur one after the other - "A temporary error occurred. Please retry." boxed message at the lower left of the screen. One happened when I tried to click to "Like" a posting, the second when I wanted to add a typed comment.

And while I was typing this, I've just had another, though unless that was the system failing its autosave roll, I have no idea why - no, it's just done its autosave OK - because I wasn't even typing at the moment it appeared! It's still on-screen now (but I haven't clicked to close it yet, as I wanted to make sure I copied the message correctly).

So, the Gremlins have changed tack, but clearly, they're still here. Someone's been feeding them after midnight, perhaps...

Getting there, I think!

There are still problematic shadows with the three eastern, smaller mesas from the bridges, and the eastern cliffs. Looking at your FCW file, I'd assumed you'd already drawn white polygons for the cliff tops, but I see that's not the case, so my advice in my previous posting will only partly work. Those pesky grey areas, which I discovered are on your "Cliff Cover" Sheet, have obviously helped where they are, but equally not where they aren't!

As this is the template for your drawing style, I'd suggest using that Cliff Cover Sheet as the place to draw white (colour 15) polygons for ALL the clifftop areas. This should mean you can use the technique I'd proposed for things like bridges anywhere you like without it causing problems with the shadows in future drawings. Such polygons will need to be drawn carefully to avoid losing the cliff-edge line on the cliff symbols, because the polygons must fill the whole clifftop area, and lie above the cliff lines themselves so the bridges can cast shadows on the cliffs, but not on the clifftops. This will also let you place bridges anywhere you wish, of course.

Yeah, it is depressing to think how exciting Modron was when I first saw it in the late '70s, yet it's still one of just a tiny handful of fantasy RPG undersea adventures 40+ years on, for all the booklet doesn't really do as much with the marine environment as it might. That merfolk village layout is identical with what JG were doing for purely land villages at the time, for instance, albeit the seabed map is still the most detailed for any underwater fantasy setting, so far as I recall.

Thanks Julian.

The new FCW file shows one small grey patch still, on the northern edge of the map; it's Tag # is 248272, which should let you change its properties without having to find it first.

The latest update map image is looking good now. Just one bridge with odd shadows still, that between mesas 1 and 2, coming off the main eastern cliff-line.

So yes, with luck you can start adding actual map details next!

The CD3 Bitmap B Elven style catalogue is essentially THE tree-settlement option. I think it should work just fine when converted to B&W, as the colour options have a good, clear range, and as it looks hand-drawn, it would be fine for OSR-simulations (we all drew by-hand back then; no other viable options!). CD3 Bitmap B also has a decent range of vegetation symbols should you want to add more variety, while the Hovels catalogue includes many rustic-looking plank constructions which might be useful as well. Plus the other options are large for this style, so there are numerous other building shapes you could fit in with some vegetation cover for unusual structures. If this Bitmap style doesn't appeal, there're also vector style options in the Elven tree-settlement line with CD3, and arguably even more options with the numerous additional vector catalogues.

Alternatively, you might look to the B&W dungeon styles - the OSR Dungeon style from CA97, for instance, has a useful range of vegetation symbols - though of course you'd have to draw your own buildings that way.

Good luck!

Sorted!

Julian makes an interesting point here about other undersea settings than fantasy. There are probably more options to set people thinking of underwater adventures in fiction for the alternative-Victorian to modern periods than the pseudo-medieval fantasy one overall. Quite a number of the Bond movies from the 1960s and 1970s involved some undersea elements, for instance. Personally, it was the 1965 Thunderball film that started me thinking about underwater games more generally, partly because that was coupled with a lot of cheap plastic toys around then that were (often rather loosely, for which read "copyright-avoiding") based on that movie. That influence has never entirely gone away. There was also the Gerry Anderson children's TV series Stingray around the same period (1964-65), which was set in a then-near-future-looking 2060s.

I'm not sure this moves things forward in this project however, since there are already CC3+ assets to cover much of these settings (admittedly, while needing to repurpose or adapt for some things), so the sea-bed setting is probably the key thing for this project, and by the looks of things so far, that seems to be getting some excellent coverage already!