Thanks @jmabbott !

I tried playing around with some of the CA97 B&W drawing tools, fills and symbols, which is what made me realise that if only the resolution of some of the original images for the fills and symbols had been a lot better, it would have solved many of the current issues. Of course, whether the original drawings were of any higher res, I don't know. The style's about eight years old, so maybe we could suggest a makeover for it as a few others have had lately, especially given the current popularity of OSR systems overall. [Is that too subtle a hint? 😁]

It's interesting that hex maps never really caught on for dungeoneering. I recall one of my early close-acquaintance DMs used a clear plastic covered hex map and erasable marker pens to draw out key settings on the fly, but that was pretty much of a rarity (this was back in the very early 1980s). I think they have continued to appear from time to time, though quite rarely. Of course, as your drawing neatly illustrates, hexes do create the fresh problem of partial hexes - there's just no winning whatever we try 😉!

Although the ShadowDark dungeon maps use squares on the solid floors (only), which gives a sense of scale to the drawing and in use, the rules are deliberately very free-form-vague about distances overall, with just Close = 5 feet, Near = up to 30 feet and Far = within sight, which (finally!) pulls the game further away from its wargaming roots, of sometimes ridiculously precise needs for measurement on the tabletop.

A quick run through of the YouTube videos for this (they're all VERY short!) suggests the idea is to use whatever's generated with a tablet to actually run games. There are plans to make the dungeon maps SVG format too and to add fog-of-war options for showing/hiding areas.

Perhaps of greatest interest is that the hexmaps are in development for zooming-in to show features like maps of settlements (which are generated by - go on, guess - Watabou!). This should indeed enhance using such a system for online/computer use.

How many hexes is that? 😉

Hadn't realised there were problems with this till now, so have just deleted the problem files and reinstalled the issue.

Incidentally, but as frequently in the past, I find the "Open PDF Mapping Guide now" command at the end of installation doesn't work, and moreover means I can't use Adobe Reader for ANY PDF files subsequently, until I've restarted the computer. It would be a lot better in my view to have the end command be to run the sample map file for the new Annual, from where there could be a link to the PDF instead (as that seemed to have avoided the crash-the-Reader problem previously). This is running everything on a PC using Win 10, and usually otherwise without problems in opening PDFs.

If all you need initially is for all the walls to be identical for both floors, just copy and paste the walls of your first floor's drawing to wherever you need them, using |CC2COPY| .

If the doors and windows aren't the same on both levels, do this before you add any doors or windows.

If both levels will be in the same map, you can just use the straight copy command. If you're setting up two completely different maps, one for each level, then use the "Copy to clipboard" option instead, because the basic copy commands won't copy the selected items to be pasted in a different file.

Not sure if something (else...) has changed about the YouTube interface lately, but this isn't the first stream I've landed on recently where the timing hasn't been what was intended by the creator. In one case, even the DAY was wrong, so at least this was only half an hour out!

After a fair bit of digging around online regarding the game this originated with (Living Steel, by Leading Edge Games, from 1987), so far as I can tell, the planet Rhand was intended to be a planet much like Earth - so NOT a cylinder!

The original version of the Rhand map seems to have been done as a fold-out poster for the 1987 boxed set, and was a much simpler-drawn version than this artistic presentation. That map had two separate rectangles (for the east and west "hemispheres", probably centred on the equator, although no latitude lines were shown, only longitudes), and two separate polar circles. This colour-artwork version was included in a later single-volume work called Rhand 2349 in 1991 (see the RPGGeek page for it). You can see both maps together for easy comparison on the Wayne's Books blog posting here by scrolling down to the "Poster Map" section, about halfway down the page.

The map illustrated above seems to have been an attempt to combine these four original planetary sub-maps into one, so as J Slayton already ably noted, it's not any kind of real map projection at all, simply an artistic view of the planet. Sort-of. By the looks, the scale bar was simply copied and pasted from the map on the poster, and should probably be ignored for this map, as it has no actual meaning here.

Incidentally, I discovered while investigating this issue (albeit somewhat after the fact), that one of the three sample maps in the Annual folder for the Pete Fenlon Revisited style is blank, the CA179_SilverMountains.FCW one. This may have been updated by a later version, as mine is from November 1st, 2021, but thought it might be worth mentioning in case it still hasn't been amended. It obviously isn't meant to be from the PNG image for the same map shows!

Thanks Frosty!

There are some astonishingly detailed maps available online now. I found many for Providence alone from the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, and I know there are more for a lot of other places as well, including larger geographic areas. Some of the cartography on these is especially beautifully-done, something that has been commented on the Forum previously, of course.

Delightful! 🌈💩