Slightly confused @Quenten - Monseignor never went away...

Might be a while before this hits the Atlas, incidentally, as there's still quite a queue because of the fire & ice contest entries, aside from other items by Quenten and JimP (and possibly others!).

Thanks very much Remy!

It's great to know the Atlas has grown so much, especially with the recent boost due to the winter contest. Amazing to think when that competition began we were still a couple of maps short of 500!

Thanks very much Jim!

I agree with Monsen, on both counts - Mercator Historical was THE reason I bought the first Annual, and diversity of options for everything else (as well as thinking beyond simply mapping styles sometimes, in discussions of mapping tools, for instance).

Something I wanted to do, and which remains in-progress, is trying out different styles from the main programs and the Annuals in preparing maps both for myself and especially the Community Atlas project. It's easy to fall into a pattern of familiarity with styles that feel comfortable, and not look beyond those, which is something I'd prefer to avoid. Luckily, the options in the Annual issues provide a large pool of options to explore ?

As someone who started out with those three beige booklets in the white box, Original D&D as I've long considered it, I have to take issue with the "beta version" view!!! When it was published, there were NO OTHER RPGs of any sort. Nobody even knew then (mid-late 1970s) what RPGs WERE! And I speak as someone who spent a lot of time explaining to others back then what I thought it meant ?

To these three were added four more supplementary RPG booklets, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes. After these, the Basic Set was released while TSR were working on AD&D, as a sort-of stopgap, as the three main AD&D rulebooks took a couple of years to all appear (1977 to 1979 according to Wikipedia, which tallies with my recollection; the Basic Set was published in 1977 apparently - see this page).

I don't think this Basic Set was the same as the later (1981) Basic and Expert Sets, however. I don't know personally, as I went down the AD&D route, because that was closer to the version of the rules the expanded white box set + supplements provided at the time, and by the early 1980s, I was moving-off into other systems, including my own D&D variant anyway. Back in the late '70s, the idea was the Basic Set would guide beginners into AD&D; I was never sure how well that worked, as only one person I knew back then tried it, and found it a little limited.

Thanks very much everyone - especially Monsen for adding it to the Atlas so swiftly! Glad you liked it!

According to the PF blog posting, yes it is.

Might have been useful to have set it up in its own docket in the downloads page though, as I can see that CC3+ one getting pretty crowded quickly if these are going to release at one a month regularly.

And it might have been a bit more intuitive to find it in the list, especially if you already have a lot of PF products listed there. I have NO idea how many files are supposed to be under each item there now, so can never spot when anything new turns up there unless I know exactly where to check.

Making progress on catching-up with the videos today now!

I've used the Parchment Backgrounds before, so this didn't really show me a lot that was new, but it's always good to see such things being used for real. I imagine now we could use the Color Key Effect to create things like the gaps in the parchment textures, but the video did show the ability of the extant template to hide features like symbols that Color Key won't operate with, so was valuable from that perspective aside from anything else.

Not sure about the new-look "spooky Ralf", though a quick check of this week's video suggests this has now become the thing, and I guess it helps see a little of what the mini video camera screen sometimes hides on these streams. Plus it gives food for comments in the chat!

You need to change the filename for the bitmap fill that's currently on your new "overlay" sheet to start with "@", as I was originally getting just Red Xs all across the map Jim. I used "@\Filters\Images\CA91 Texture.png" to access the texture, but you don't actually need to do this at all if you just add the Effects to the Whole Drawing, as they don't need a new Sheet adding. If you use Texturize on the Whole Drawing though, you WILL need to use the filename for the texture I gave previously.

You also probably shouldn't be using such a strong Transparency Effect either; 10% opacity makes all the Effects in the list effectively invisible.

Currently, your settings for the RGB Matrix Process Effect give a pale pink colouring to the whole. Was this your intent? I ask, as this is a completely different appearance to that from the OSR Dungeons. I applied the OSR Dungeons RGB Matrix Process effect to your map, and it converts the appearance to a mild sepia greyscale effectively (note - no Texturize or Transparency Effect is in use):

If I add the Texturize Effect as well (no Transparency), I get this:

Not sure this is quite what you were looking for, however.

In terms of the planet's size and physical features, that's got to be your decision. If you're looking for ideas, I think you're already doing as much as is reasonable, by comparing the appearance to Earth's geological past. Mountain heights and (especially) ocean depths in deeper geological time are the more problematic aspects, the oceans because no oceanic crust is very old, geologically-speaking, which is where looking at other Solar System planets might be useful to get an idea of what the topographic range can be in the absence of large amounts of free water and its concomitant weathering effects (so before such things arrived). Different geologies can mean this isn't an easy comparison, if you're aiming for precision, of course.

Then again, Mount Kerofin in Glorantha was eight miles high (circa 13 km; from sea-level), so again, you pays your money, and... ?