Julian makes an interesting point here about other undersea settings than fantasy. There are probably more options to set people thinking of underwater adventures in fiction for the alternative-Victorian to modern periods than the pseudo-medieval fantasy one overall. Quite a number of the Bond movies from the 1960s and 1970s involved some undersea elements, for instance. Personally, it was the 1965 Thunderball film that started me thinking about underwater games more generally, partly because that was coupled with a lot of cheap plastic toys around then that were (often rather loosely, for which read "copyright-avoiding") based on that movie. That influence has never entirely gone away. There was also the Gerry Anderson children's TV series Stingray around the same period (1964-65), which was set in a then-near-future-looking 2060s.

I'm not sure this moves things forward in this project however, since there are already CC3+ assets to cover much of these settings (admittedly, while needing to repurpose or adapt for some things), so the sea-bed setting is probably the key thing for this project, and by the looks of things so far, that seems to be getting some excellent coverage already!

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.