If you wanted to add some rails and railcars, Remy did a livestream video on drawing rails and railway rolling-stock here, which may be of use.

Late to the party, but lowland tundra is essentially cold, dry and treeless. In general, it's the name used for such treeless places where the ground is permafrozen a short way below the surface, so shallow lakes and bogs are common, when the topsoil's frost thaws in summer long enough for hardy, low-growing plants to survive. Alpine or mountain tundra is similar, but its treelessness is because of the poor, thin soils, and colder, higher altitude air, as well as general dryness. Lakes and bogs are less common, as the drainage is often better in the higher mountains. It's all downhill from there, after all 😉.

Red desert sands are fine by me too - handy for anyone wanting to recreate Martian landscapes, of course!

Fascinating to see this discussion.

I did something similar to what Sue describes (without using the Blend Mode option), while taking advantage too of Sue's Transparent Dome symbols, a couple of years ago for the Faerie City of Embra in the Community Atlas. I used both round and square variants on the theme to "mist-out" the edges. This topic, on the village versions of the city, shows the circular variant, and all the maps can be viewed and downloaded via the Atlas website, of course (Embra Official Guide page). You can find all the other topics discussed with images on the Forum as well, should you wish - just search for "Embra"!

They all seem perfectly fine to me, Sue. Natural terrain colours don't always match quite how you'd expect, and can change under variant lighting conditions anyway.

I can also see that "patchy" texture look working well for different kinds of swampy lands, with a suitable water texture showing through between the islands.

Structure markers - yes, some probably are too large. You might need to replace the hollow centre to the Town and City ones with a contrasting colour circle/diamond instead of being hollow, if reducing the sizes (looking at the way the smaller markers are on the map now).

The craters look nice, although the pale outer rim is a little too sharp and dominant at present. Crater rims tend to end up as a relatively gentle hummock-line very quickly, through a mix of natural slumping during to soon after formation, and weathering processes. Currently, the rims look a bit too wall-like.

I've not used GIMP in a long while, so my thoughts on its later versions are likely biased by the problems others have had with it - some of which may be down to user error, of course!

I'd only used MS Publisher (and a few earlier similar programs) for creating maps, graphs and diagrams prior to CC, and I'm not sure many would think of those as really art programs as such 😁.

GIMP's the only thing I've tried in this line, and haven't used that in a very long time (to create some symbols for use in the Atlas on this map there, as described in the opening post of this Forum topic from May '21). It has a learning curve worse than CC3+'s now (or so I gather from some who've battled with the newer versions of the program). I've only used the older versions, which were easier to learn - sort of...

I have quite a few of the earliest items in this line, going back to the later 1970s. The earliest were some sheets of square floor tiles and wooden planks printed on card that you had to physically cut up to use. They weren't tiles as such, you just had to cut them to whatever corridor size and shapes you wanted. That's where the concept of geomorphs probably originated, to make best use of things like this. There were a few other bits and pieces with that, including a cut-up stone stair sheet, both straight and spiral, and some wooden doors. They were printed with a single colour per sheet, and good-quality, black, hand-drawn lines to show the texture. One of the stone colours was cream, with neatly-drawn, square and rectangular sub-tiles per 5-ft square (scaled for 25mm/28mm minis back then), the other stone was grey with numerous small "crazy-paving" style pieces per floor square, and a few bits missing to show it as "worn and very old", the stairs were grey with wavy-edged steps, so as to have a bit of character, and the wood doors and planking done in a pleasing red-brown. Can't recall who made them now; might have been the original Games Workshop - they were certainly the UK sellers.

Then in the early(-ish?) 1980s, I bought up a full set of the Steve Jackson Games "Cardboard Heroes" range of A-frame standee card minis, which also had to be physically cut-up from their full-colour-printed sheets, and which had a huge array of mini options for characters, monsters and all manner of flat-lain items. You can still buy these now, but as downloadable PDFs to print at home. They're still excellent, as the artwork quality was uniformly splendid, and at the time nobody else was making things like this. Spoilt for choice in home-print options these days, of course!

About the same time, I found a booklet called "The Compleat Tavern", published by Gamelords in 1981. This provided a whole array of tables and rules for running events of all kinds in taverns and bars in fantasy RPGs. Main reason I got it was because it had a loose foldout tavern plan printed on thick paper (mono printing on cream paper), which again came with cut-up sheets of items like tables, chairs, benches, etc, printed brown on darker cream thin card.

Subsequent to that was a set of pull-out and cut-up printed item sheets in an issue of either "Dragon" or "Dungeon" (the TSR in-house magazines of the period), which were simply printed black on flat-lain small rectilinear tile-shapes, suitable for the items involved (jars, barrels, chests, etc.). Can't recall what date that was now, but from the basic print-style, I'd guess sometime in the 1980s.

And lots more since, naturally, though I didn't come across anything quite like these 1984 pieces. Being in the UK though, getting hold of anything published in the States was often very difficult, and commonly expensive.

Which is fair enough!

I think at the time I was bought the original D&D boxed booklets, and even when the City State arrived, there were two UK importers for the whole country here, so it was never easy - or cheap - getting hold of any of the US-published items. Made it all a bit more special though!

To answer some of the questions here, yes these were genuinely used as playing cards back in the day, but they also had an educational aspect, described sometimes as a sort-of early pocket atlas. The full sets included the usual 52 cards, an explanatory extra card, and a title card with a map of England and Wales divided into counties. The cards were among the first maps to show roads. As the sample here shows, they also gave the county dimensions, latitude (they predate the adoption of the Greenwich meridian for longitude in the mid-19th century in Britain) and selected towns' distances from London. It's thought only one complete set of these cards still survives, although there are a few incomplete ones, and more surviving individual cards.