Reading contour maps like this is something of a specialist skill. It often benefits from field experience of walking over the terrain using a suitable map, or looking at an area and picking out features from the map as comparisons. Sometimes, it's very obvious what's too steep because of how close the contour lines are together - closer = steeper, basically.

Some folks are able to look at a contour map and visualise the terrain, and this is something you can teach yourself with practice, though not everyone finds it either possible or very easy to do.

You might find plotting out scale drawings, cross-sections at a right-angle to the contour lines, gives you a better idea of what the topography will really be like.

You might also examine real-world contour maps at an appropriate kind of scale to what you're planning, and look at where, and how, water flows over the landscape. Water always flows downhill, and goes for the easiest route, which often means where there's a steeper gradient.

However, you'd probably find more useful advice by searching online for "interpreting topographic maps", as there are a lot of suitable sites and videos regarding this topic. Good luck!

You should be able to find Wingdings from that More Fonts dialogue, Jim, assuming you have it installed on your computer. Of course, the pointing hand might not be one of the characters CC3+ will let you access, even so.

Meant to give this a bump yesterday, when the style was released into the wild for real!

@TheBlackVolk - Remy Monsen posted this video last July which may help.

I probably already moved the city somewhat, given the relative size of the symbol on the enlarged bitmap version I used as the basis for this map. That linked version is the one I'm basing all my comments on now, however, as it's not going to change substantially before it hits the Atlas. Assuming I ever get the fortress mapping completed...

The way I've been thinking could influence parts of the city's final layout is all, drawing on the final notes write-up.

You could certainly use the technique I suggested to make any existing pictorial city symbols look underwater too, with a transparent small polygon waving across part of the symbol, say, or blurring the whole symbol a little (though the Blur Effect, if used extensively on a map, can slow down redraw times, unfortunately), or a mixture of the two. If it's in shallower waters (less than circa 200 metres/660 feet of seawater, generally speaking for Earth; maximum sunlight penetration limit), you could add a few wobbly green lines to represent photosynthetic undersea organisms in a similar way alongside and over parts of the symbol as well.

Fully second Jim's point about us all always learning. The CC3+ program suite is vast in what it can achieve, and it's impossible to be aware of even many aspects of it, let alone all of them, especially as there are usually multiple ways to achieve something using it.

I like the "goes to somewhere else..." tunnels! I spent years designing dungeons/scenarios that were intended to link with one another by similarly vague pathways, and where the next mapped sequence had a similar group of tunnels going - who knows where! I ended up having to keep a separate written list of all the "blank" routes so I didn't lose track completely...

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I think this may be Remy's blog article you mentioned, Sue. It includes notes on the RGB Matrix Process, at least.

Given the blog article uses an overland example as its RGB Matrix Process test, I'm guessing it will work with that at least (can't be sure if the tree symbols have been affected or not in the blog sample images, however).

A quick test, slapping a greyscale RGB Matrix Process Effect onto one of my own overland maps (whole map setting) suggests it does indeed convert all the symbols to greyscale, while adding a few random choices of dungeon symbols to it, suitably enlarged, shows they too convert to greyscale without problems. Obviously, this is hardly definitive for all possible symbol sets, but it doesn't suggest there's a problem with what I've checked so far.

Which is pretty much where almost everyone else is too! The snag is ocean currents seem to behave much like air currents in the atmosphere - so as with the prevailing wind diagrams, the charts you see are huge simplifications of the real situation. However, they're much harder to get accurate information on at the same level of detail as is possible for air currents/winds because of being undersea. The deeper you go in the ocean, the less data there is, because it becomes increasingly difficult to get equipment there with any useful regularity.

When you consider new animal species are found on pretty well every deep-dive into the unlit parts of the oceans (everything below roughly 200 metres/660 feet, so that's pretty well all of the oceans!), it's very obvious how appallingly little we know about what goes on there at all. Like the Coelacanth, believed extinct for 66 million years, yet still happily getting on with things and thriving today in Earth's oceans!

@Loopysue - "Shadowlands" and "Borderlands" come with additional baggage from other fantasy-related sources, and which don't really relate to the style of symbols in this style, unfortunately. "Dark Ages" has very time-specific connotations, which don't fit these symbols at all.

"Edge of the Wilds" or "Twilight Realms" seem to work rather well though, assuming the images you've shown in your most recent illustrated posting cover the range of symbols and terrain-looks included in the style.

I'd agree with your later comment that a personal name wouldn't really work here, because your own style clearly isn't limited to just one or other of the PF style-packs you've constructed.