When I started preparing the Faerie Land map for the Atlas, I already knew I was going to add to it a couple of places which would require further mapping. As it turned out, both would be placed relatively near one another in northwestern Faerie Land, in the River Clack valley.

To better locate both though, it was clear a map covering a much smaller area than Map 40 would be helpful first, which is where the Clack Valley map originated. Examining what the valley looked like on the Faerie Land map, it seemed reasonable to cover the entire length of the River. From that, an area some 50 miles long by 15 miles wide (80 by 25 kilometres) would work nicely, as shown here by the orange rectangle:

Making a hand-drawn copy of this area onto squared paper, much as I often do (see the Map 40 construction topic elsewhere on the Forum for the concept), I then drew-up some new and amended random feature tables to add fresh detail, deciding and setting the results into one-mile squares across the whole valley. From those, smaller rivers could be added in places, also drawing on the general tenor of how and where the various hill ranges had been plotted on the larger map previously. Here too, I'd decided to add a variety of random plants as well as creatures, since real-world faerie lore frequently draws attention to such things as having significance. This all helped give further character to the region.

By this stage, there was an increasing need for a host of new names to highlight some of these fresh significant places. Aside from the randomly-generated names left over from the Faerie Land map, which hadn't been used there, I'd also come across a substantial series of random-name tables on The Collaborative Gamer blog a while before, so I used those to roll-up an extra set of names to choose from, to add to what I had already. Some of the name-options on that blog are heavily Tolkien-based, which I decided against employing here, but many of the other tables read almost like a series of thesaurus entries, giving ideas even when they weren't always used in the strictly random form in which they'd been rolled. Then it came down to fitting the names to suitable specific places. After which, the CC3+ mapping could begin!

Looking through the various mapping styles of those I'd not used previously which work particularly well for handling smaller overland areas, led me to the Alyssa Faden Overland style from the 2014 November Cartographer's Annual. This is supplied with the Bridgnorth font, and that too seemed to fit with what I intended for this area.

This then is the basic map:

There are two small Keys to accompany it, which can be hidden separately if required, one of which brings in the extra labels and markers for the various creatures and plants added to the map:

Although most of the area illustrated falls within the Faerie Land Core zone, as defined already on Map 40, a small part towards the map's left-hand edge is beyond it, as this overlay view shows, also intended to be toggleable in the final Atlas FCW version:

Part of my reason in picking this mapping style was because it comes with its own selection of cloud symbols, so I had to add some of those too:

As these are purely decorative, despite being placed so as not to conceal too much of any important labelled sites, they were set-up so they can be toggled on or off separately as well.

Naturally, the Forum's layout options make horizontally-linear maps particularly difficult to see much detail on, so the images below show the western and eastern halves of the map a little closer:

This last image is larger than the usual Forum preferred size, but it is at least complete!

The Atlas map will also be provided with the usual PDF and text file document of notes explaining more about the map's contents, and which two late medieval Herbals were drawn on especially to add a sprinkle of magic to some of those special plants!

And so to the vehicles. The first of these, the wrecked ship, proved by far the most time-consuming in this Aunty MacKassa set. I'd selected the Sailing Ships pack from the 2009 Cartographer's Annual, which as noted previously, provides only limited help for drawing pre-gunpowder-period vessels, especially as I prepared these illustrations some time before the Annual was updated in April 2021.

My design for what became "The Naughty Lass" (it can sail beneath the waves and on the surface, after all!) was decided following heavy influence from Pauline Baynes' drawings of "The Dawn Treader" in C. S. Lewis' novel of its voyage, along with the nicely-detailed "Sea Ghost" ship drawings in the D&D scenario book "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" (2019, p. 53). This led ultimately to this deck plans map:

I got into rather a mess with this, however, as my initial idea had been to have one vertically-narrow rectangular plan view with the individual decks being toggled on and off one at a time within that condensed space using the map's Layers. Unfortunately, this ran into problems due to interference between the Sheet Effects in the lengthening stack of Sheets per deck, and between decks. So the deck plans had to be separated out, and the map greatly expanded, into the form now shown here. The Layers though ended up partly in the very condensed form as originally envisaged, partly in a more standard format for the decks I'd constructed later in the process. The Sailing Ships pack was meant to show just one deck per map, but that had seemed a little too clumsy for what will be really just a minor adjunct to another map once entered into the Community Atlas. I'd definitely draw the map differently as far as the Layers are concerned, if starting again now. At least it looks more or less OK still, I hope!

From the beginning, I'd also wanted to do a vertical section for The Naughty Lass, as that option is part of the Sailing Ships set-up. So I did, complete with "ghost ship" glow:

And an optional metric scalebar, via an Atlas toggle in the FCW file:

I also had to tone-down the original daytime-bright sky backdrop, to something more dismally matching Aunty's nature.

Again, a PDF and text-file set of notes will accompany both these drawings, in which you can find out about the nature of the ship's "adults-only" figurehead and how it relates - in Aunty's idea of dark humour, naturally - to the vessel's name...

For the Atlas, the Section Drawing is linked from the Coral Cave map via the "ghost ship" symbol in the top right corner, with the Deck Plans map connected from the Section Drawing only.

While working on the Ellenge Town map for the Kachaya, I'd also prepared some random tables for designating shops and facilities suitable for Merfolk settlements, given that all undersea civilisations will have a degree of similar requirements for places to live. As I wanted to provide some ideas to the Community Atlas more generally too on developing undersea settlements for all the main races I'd situated in Errynor's oceans, from what had been decided for the Map 01 area, the logical next map was a Merfolk settlement. Of the two still-inhabited ones on Map 01, the Shaldun castle stronghold set in the line of The Cliff itself seemed too similar a location to what I'd already explored for the Shark Bridge area, so I opted instead for the town of Selass out in The Deeps:

I'd already established that Selass was going to be a kind-of independent frontier town, towards the edge of the abyssal plain of Nibirum's greatest ocean, and that the abyssal plain itself would be an area likely to attract adventurers and prospectors. Selass would then have grown to serve their needs in this area. Not wanting to simply drop the settlement onto the routine, flattish, deep ocean floor (the sea's about 3,600 m, nearly 12,000 ft, deep here), and having already worked with some undersea uplands (the Aak Hills), I thought a hollow would be more interesting here. This had the added advantage I could try out @Loopysue's City Cliffs set from the 2020 Cartographer's Annual (CA 165).

Using my random tables, I worked out the size of Selass, and rolled-up what its main features were going to be. The population involved needed two modest villages of agricultural workers and hunters to support it, and them, and dicing for their locations placed one very near Selass, like a "suburb" perhaps, the other a couple of kilometres/a mile or so to the southwest. This meant Selass took on a somewhat elongated look overall, and doodling shapes around this layout brought me to the realisation both Selass + "suburb", and its neighbouring village, could be set into rounded areas where the sea-bed had partly collapsed - when a small magma tube had fallen-in, say, or an especially gassy magma emplacement had led to the sea-floor fracturing in a similar way - places that could have plenty of cliff-opening caves afterwards, suitable for occupation and expansion. Two such places relatively near one another would thus have been ideal for the Merfolk's uses, and included an explanation for why one village had ended up so close to the town, yet could be thought of still as loosely separate from it.

One minor drawback was that the City Cliffs set is intended to work best with the CD3 Bitmap A symbol sets, which are not black-and-white, the overall colour scheme I'd been trying to use for all my undersea settlement maps, due to deciding that while the deep-sea humanoids can all see normally despite the eternal darkness of the deep oceans, their vision without a light source is purely monochromatic. That though was easily overcome by simply applying an RGB Matrix Process Effect set to "Gray" to the entire map. I did have to keep turning it on and off along the way to ensure whatever was being added in colour still worked in greyscale, of course.

Merfolk architecture as I'd envisioned it is pretty eclectic on the whole, so aside from cave-dwellings, a mixture of sea-floor-surface building styles - even some that look remarkably like their land counterparts - would be perfectly reasonable. What seems to be a chimney might be really a vent of some kind, though it could be equally a rooftop accessway, for example. So I drew on all the CD3 Bitmap A symbol sets available, including @ScottA's Celtic houses and @Loopysue's City Domes, to provide an appropriate mix. The switch to greyscale became helpful in another respect, because I needed three shipwrecks, reused as buildings, and the Bitmap A symbols have no ships at all. Luckily the original CD3 vector symbols do have some - not perfect for use as wrecks, but clearly boat-shaped - a difference the use of greyscale helped conceal!

The settlement outlines were to be traced from my hand sketch, once scanned and imported into the CC3+ template, and rescaled to fit the proper area. Using this, I constructed the cliff-lines for both Selass + suburb, and the separate mile-distant village. This took a few tries to get right, as I'd not realised individual segments of the connecting-symbol cliffs couldn't be swapped-out for replacements. After that though, it was easy enough to complete the cliffs.

In order to have the buildings and caves placed randomly - no streets needed on the deep sea-floor, after all - I'd always intended to use the Symbols In Area command to set-up these layouts. So I added basic coloured circles for the relevant Areas within the outer cliff-lines, and populated them with the correct numbers of identifiable symbols of different types for the different surface building shapes chosen, using just the standard Geometry.FSC set from CC3+ at this stage. Once the random patterns were established, it became possible to identify what should go where from the selected properties and places lists randomly determined earlier. The Cave Entrance symbols were moved in places to their nearer cliff-lines, and a few other minor adjustments made, before replacing those except the cave symbols with their final CD3 Bitmap A ones. The most significant change made during this process was to add a cliff stack feature around the southern border of Selass near where it met with that of the adjoining village area, where a particular cluster of symbols had chanced to lie.

Labels and keys were added, along with other surface features in and around the settlements to give them a little more "life", after which an area map was constructed to show the relative locations of the settlements to one another on the sea-bed. For this latter drawing, the cliff-lines from the town and village maps were simply copied and rescaled accordingly. The provided distance scale symbols proved a little too small and unclear when added to the maps, aside from the need to relabel those for the area map, so after adjusting and adding some suitably sized Grid options, fresh scales were produced for these by hand instead.

Hence the final combined map looks like this:

This isn't very clear at the usual Forum resolution, so this is a closer view of just the left half:

And this is the right half:

As usual, a detailed set of text-file and PDF notes was drafted to accompany and explain more about the whole mapped set-up here.

As you'll likely be aware already @aulyre, there's a vast and still-growing literature on the archaeo-historical aspects of the region, and you could easily spend years simply wading through as much of that as you'd care to - I have, certainly, starting back in the 1990s!

Of my own maps of this region, I posted a selection just over a year ago on the Forum here. Unfortunately, this was shortly before the Forum underwent a major revamp to its current incarnation, so the post now looks rather a mess, as we had to embed images rather differently then, using an "[Image_12345]" coding notation, but the images are all still there, just no longer where they were meant to be in relation to the text, so you have to hop up and down to get the full gist properly.

As for references, a couple of atlases I found extremely helpful when I was starting out might be of interest, if you haven't come across them yourself as yet, and a couple of texts.

• Michael Roaf's Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (published in 1990), which I was thrilled to discover on checking this evening is NOW FREELY AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD COMPLETE (!!!), and with a string of appended corrections, thanks to the kind offices of its author, via the Academia website, as of 2017! Link. I think you will need a (free to join) Academia membership to download the full PDF, but that isn't too onerous. For all its date, it is an astonishingly inspirational work in my opinion.
• The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World edited by Richard Talbert (2000), which unfortunately isn't available online yet, though it is available for iPad as a download (as of 2013). Otherwise, the hardback version is available to purchase alternatively, which I think still comes with an additional CD-ROM, according to some comments I found online (the library copy I borrowed more than a decade ago had one), including this Wikipedia page, although some of the links from that are now broken. GBP prices (brace yourself!) for the hardback start at about 265 GBP (Amazon UK lists), but the iPad version is a less fearsome circa 15 GBP instead (albeit you'll also need an iPad, so swings and roundabouts...). The Princeton University Press pages for these are here: hardback version -- iPad version. The related Ancient World Mapping Centre website is probably worth a visit as well, albeit they've been having major site issues this year, so a number of links don't work currently. Most of their Free Map pages are still functioning, however, and are certainly worth a look too. The Atlas is another astonishing work, if for a somewhat later period than Roaf's text.
• Civilizations of the Ancient Near East edited by Jack Sasson (1995) is a monumental four-volume collection of specialist essays on all manner of topics for the region. The length and quality of individual contributions can be variable at times, but it is a wonderful means to find out at least some basics on a vast array of topics, with follow-up references to help get you started looking for more. Irritatingly, I can't even find an online description or a complete review of it, though I suspect barring extreme good fortune, it will mean accessing a library copy now anyway.
• Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux (1993) is probably THE classic single-volume introductory text to the region and period. It is, incredibly, and despite its date, still currently in print! You can also find it available to borrow or purchase via the Internet Archive here (limited preview version otherwise).

This has taken a lot longer than I'd expected to compile today, so I won't try to say more; there's enough to be going on with already, I suspect in this little lot!

On a roll, so Palace 7 was also done with a black-and-white style package, this time the Inked Dungeons one from CA160 last April, the first time I've used this. I must admit I wasn't too sure about it at first, as it uses a quite "busy" looking fill to mask the outside of the subterranean walls. However, when I selected the various snowflake images for the Palace designs, this flake was probably the most obvious to pick, because it looked so different to many of the others, as elongated on one axis. That in turn set me thinking about larger ice crystals, as the central Crystal Garden area here was a single huge ice crystal on the original image, so far as I could tell. So now this Palace has unusually large ice crystals visible along and buried in its translucent outer walls as well, simply because the style pack set me thinking while I was drawing the map!

In addition, Inked Dungeons comes with relatively few symbols, which isn't so much of a problem with these large-area Palace drawings, since as I've noted above, there can be problems where the symbols have too much interesting surface detail from other style packs. So I used only one, actually designated as a brazier, but repurposed here as its opposite - the fountain in the Crystal Garden - and just drew the few other more obvious features, as has been the case for many of the other Palaces.

The final step once more was to offer the option of a simple blue cover to colour the whole map, as previously, intended to be a toggle option in the Atlas version, and as with Palace 6, added using a blue rectangle with a strong Transparency Effect. Because it stops me panicking when I open the file and find it's just a blank white emptiness otherwise (see the Palace 5 notes above!).

Thanks folks!

@Fersus - Yes, I wondered about a hexagonal grid. However, over the past year, I've been involved in discussions about the use of movement grids in RPGs more generally elsewhere, and the consensus has been almost exclusively for square grids (or occasionally none at all). They're such a feature of most published dungeon maps, it's hard to break away from that, I suspect. Plus because hexes don't scale equally in all dimensions, a square grid works better for estimating distances for the GM by-eye.

Given the whole point about participating in the Atlas, and contests like this too, is to try different things, at least from time to time, my intention was to try to make each of the ten Palace maps different. So for the second one, I picked the Old School Blue style from CA12 (also known as the Create Your Own Style pack). Blue, ice, seemed apt!

For continuity, I've decided to stick with the Mason Serif Bold font that comes with CC3+, however.

Thanks Quenten! I started trying to analyse what the influences had been on this set, and while some were obvious enough, the more I thought it over, the more came to mind, mostly from folklore, mythology and fantasy fiction (which latter tends to rely heavily on both the former, of course). Plus as I said back when I started mapping "my" bit of Alarius a couple of years back, I've been working on parts of what was to go into that for decades, and the same is true here too, as essentially another part of the same thing.

Meanwhile, back to Palace 8, which is finally completed. This is it:

There have been a number of additions and amendments, mostly of a cosmetic nature, beyond the anticipated scattering of symbols and other internal additions, and the labelling, of course. The most substantial change was probably to reduce the overall size of the map somewhat, as the whole felt a little unbalanced at the top and base of the drawing once everything had been added. That was a bit fiddly, because there are always quite a number of entities to amend on the Map Border and Screen Sheets, as well as things like the Background Sheet, whose rectangle was also then too large.

I then had to change the fill for the frame. For all it might be thought a little incongruous as not having a very icy/snowy look, I rather liked the default wood-block pattern on the earlier version, and it looked a serious contender to remain, right up until the point where I adjusted the size of said frame. At which point, the lower border (only) suddenly had a dark horizontal line running right through it, because of the way the fill fits itself into drawings at the scale it had. And that quickly became A Distraction, so sadly it had to go.

The new fill for the frame is Water Green from this CA54 style, scaled-up to prevent it tiling, and holding up remarkably well in doing so, I thought. I was really just experimenting with it, but as soon as it dropped in with the light Bevel Effect, I knew it had to be The One!

Just posted on the PF Blog yesterday, this is a new, slightly eclectic, list of useful options when mapping with CC3+, by our own resident expert Remy Monsen. While the Blog posts are always worth seeing, this is one that's worth printing a PDF version of for future use, I think.

Some of the ten tips will likely be familiar, others things you know about but can never remember the times they're needed (like how to reset the "exporting in fewer passes" thing, item three on this list, and which I always end up scrabbling around trying to recall where I put the note as to what command has to be used to reset this, after a rare glitch that's reset it to the smaller amount!). And others may be new to you - OK, me, then 😁 (looking at you, Quick Move)!

A good deal later than I'd hoped, delayed thanks to various events outside my control, the next batch of maps for my sort-of Dungeon24-25-2... project are finally completed, covering aspects of a small peninsula on the northern shores of the easternmost Peninsula of Lanka, Kumarikandam:

Lanka's pre-existing Atlas notes described it as an ashy, blackened, barren, volcanic wasteland, home to demons, dragons, dwarfs and assorted other (probably inimical) humanoids. However, peering closely at the Atlas map for the peninsula, there are a few spots with trees, shrubs and other hints of vegetation, some of which have settlements marked nearby, so it's not entirely desolate. And it was one of those vegetated headlands that I finally settled on mapping, from this extant base (extracted from the map above):

That orange-outlined area is some 20 miles square (30 km or so), to give an idea of scale.

A group of locations where sites of interest could be placed, were randomly assigned, much as usual, and then ideas for what they might be were drawn from, or inspired by, prompts from The Story Engine's "Deck of Worlds" and its expansion card sets, with some from the main "Story Engine" deck and its expansions too, including "Worlds of Blight & Shadow", "Written in Ash & Bone", "Worlds of Myth & Magic", "Worlds of Tide & Tidings", "Heroes' Quests & Fools' Errands", and the "Story & Worlds Bridge Expansion". From which you can tell I was leaning heavily into the "doom and disaster" concepts from the previous map's notes...

With that completed, the map was starting to come alive more, which, thinking about its geographic location - right on the equator - helped firm-up further. I was tempted to run lines of low hills into the gaps in the pre-mapped wooded areas, on northeast-southwest lines, only to decide against that (although hints of that still survive in the final map) as some of the ideas that had begun to coalesce favoured more west-east lines instead, partly based on what and where the random features were placed. These also gave rise to a number of offshore items, many of which were turned into islands too small to be shown on the original (honest!).

Thinking of what mapping styles might work best for this generally "threatening" area brought me eventually to the Dark Fantasy Maps style (CA140), to which were added items from the SS1 Fantasy Color style too, as suggested by the CA140 PDF Mapping Guide. After which, mapping commenced:

To keep things nicely confusing, "Dragon Head" is the name of this whole peninsula area, a coastal village settlement on the peninsula's northern tip, and the name of that headland where the village is sited! More hints of oddness feature in other map names, which the PDF map notes in the Atlas expand upon, as usual. There are definitely Dwarves, Demons, (Demi-?)Gods, Cannibals and Undead in places though, not all necessarily in what might be considered typical forms, along with still weirder things...

Speaking of which, the jungles have been kept deliberately off the hills for a couple of reasons. One is to further enhance the slightly uncomfortable feel of the whole area - rainforest jungle, but maybe the rain here isn't so healthy as it might be (the locals say it's often so heavy, it strips anything less tenacious than grass from the uplands). Plus the land has been tainted by events elsewhere across Lanka that laid waste to so much of it. The other main reason though was because when designing this map, I was also reading a couple of books on the Guadalcanal campaigns of 1942-43 in the Solomon Islands. Those islands are covered in tropical rainforest jungles, yet on Guadalcanal, as period photos clearly show, the hills are bare of anything much larger than scrubby bushes and grass, including from before any fighting began there. That contrast was just so unnervingly striking, it seemed very apt to reuse it here.

The dungeon map was originally going to be located on the western flanks of the narrow, crevasse-like canyon of Sundered Dale, near this map's centre. However, I found I was struggling to find reasons to so-locate it, and exactly how it was going to work there, because part of the design from the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph Dice showed a large clump of trees in an open air circle, in the centre of a large, partly-roofed, temple-like chamber.

Inspiration for where else it might be placed, and just what it might be, came unexpectedly during a YouTube livestream on Free RPG Day 2025 by The Story Engine, creating settings with various guests using their card decks and expansions. One feature option that wasn't immediately spotted by the streamers was "Fence of Toads", and as so often in the live chat, we went off on our own little tangent about that... Then the stream's organiser, creator of The Story Engine decks, Peter Chiykowski, spotted our tangential chat about the point where I'd mentioned I'd then very recently been designing a "Swamp of Toads" (for this Dragon Head map). He said he'd love to see that, half-jokingly, and so was born the decision to expand the Swamp of Toads into a complete, separate Atlas map!

In case you can't spot the Swamp immediately on the map above, it's here, and we'll find out more about it next time:

Map eight of my little group of settlements is for Brightlawn Hamlet:

And here are the FCW and PDF files for it:

having updated my WIP topic and added a higher-res map version to my Gallery, as normal, too.