Always liked this style; it was what persuaded me to buy my first-ever Cartographer's Annual! Plus of course it was updated more recently as well.

The "seeing them always float" problem is quite common, unfortunately. I often find this looking at crater images from other planets, where they seem to be domes above the surface, not holes sunken into it. Sometimes if I concentrate enough, the "up" and "down" will simply flip to look correct again.

When I'm struggling to get a Sheet Effect, or combination of Effects, to look right, I turn them all off and identify why that makes things look worse, and then try adding the Effects again one at a time, adjusting each one to see exactly what it's doing. This may mean adding different Effects, and deleting the ones that don't help.

Something that might be worth considering is to stop trying to get the shadow Effects to work at all, and simply try drawing some grey polygons for where the shadows should be, on a separate Sheet of their own, above the cliff lines (so they'll shadow the cliffs correctly), but below the cliff top polygons (so you'll get a sharp cutoff at the top of the cliff edge). This has the disadvantage that if you want to change the lighting angle, you'll have to redraw the lot again, however, and you'll need to keep track of exactly what the lighting angle will be, with some construction lines across the map.

I suggest this because what I'm seeing on your most recent drawing is that the shadows aren't coming from the cliff edges in the right places. Many seem to be coming from a point much higher up the cliffs, so are looking too much like a drop shadow, even when they aren't. I think this is because you're relying on the clifftop polygons to produce the shadow, but because the lower cliffs aren't in the same place as that (further away from its line), they're looking wrong and "floaty".

This is looking much better for the "mesas" in the central area. The long cliff line at the northern edge shows one problem, in that the cliff lines on that aren't shaded at all, which really detracts from losing that "floating" impression.

There seem to be a number of pale grey polygons in places, which are rather distracting now. If these are needed (I have the impression a couple may be being used to conceal unwanted parts of the shadows in places), I'd suggest changing them to match the background colour.

The "white gap" event may be due to some of the Sheet Effects interfering with one another. If it persists, and you can't find the cause, you could try uploading the FCW file here for one of our more technical experts to examine, as I'm sure they could find a solution to that sort of problem if necessary. It may be there's something else on that upper cliffs Sheet that shouldn't be there (a white polygon, perhaps), and that's all that needs resolving.

Shorter shadows just mean a higher Sun, so hopefully this won't be too much of a problem in terms of still giving a useful impression of height for you.

You might alternatively try adding a Glow Effect to your settlements, roads and rivers, which would help them stand out more as well. You may want to move, or remove, some of the trees where they're hiding the river and road lines too.

The simplicity is VERY appealing on these, I agree - as long as you can remember what the symbols mean, anyway! I recently got a full set of the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph Dice sets, many of which use the same basic designs and symbols. At least those come with a key on each boxed set though!

I do recall now you mention it that photocopy prevention angle; I'd forgotten all about that in the intervening decades. Mind you, it was a struggle to even read the pale blue or grey maps sometimes anyway, which always seemed rather self-defeating, particularly when the detail plans inside the booklets were done in clear black-and-white.

It's great to be able to add a grid to these maps without worrying about where it's going, as that blue background hides everything that's the same colour so nicely.

That's much better!

Still seeing some patches of pale grey in places, but that too might be a Sheet Effect. I have found that if you have a stack of objects on different Sheets above or very near one another, that can start to cause all kinds of weird problems, as the Effects seem to start interacting in completely unexpected ways - inexplicable, very often. Even two different Effects on the same Sheet can create oddities which then go away if you simply move one Effect above the other (sometimes)!

Symbol gaps can be tricky to overcome in these cliffs. You may resolve some by simply adding a few short hand-drawn lines of suitable colour and thickness in the appropriate places. Where you have sets of lines forming a "V" shape, you could add either hand-drawn lines or extra, more broken, cliff-lines, to suggest hanging valleys on the cliff-tops, perhaps.

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...