I've never done this before, so maybe this suggestion is total nonsense, but what if you just fill the dense poor areas with random houses using the "fill with symbols" command? like Ralf did in with the trees in the last live session but with houses instead?

you have the big streets as guidelines, so you could just draw polygons in each of these areas and then fill it with houses. poor areas are not that well maintained and abandoned houses might get reused/repurposed/rebuilt and there's probably not that much incentive to really check the building regulations, so the ensuing chaos of the fill with symbols effect could be explained that way. wherever there are too big gaps there just naturally streets are formed and where houses overlap you can delete a few of those.

I guess that would be way less work than actually placing all of them/setting up streets in advance that might end up being to close to each other resulting in lots of overlap anyways...

Ad 2)

I often want my entities to extend far beyond the map border to hide some effects on the border.

In this example I have a desert continent in the south and a grassy continent in the north.

the desert one is restricted to the border, the other one is not.

as you see, the political border is creeping into the frame. I often don't want that, so I draw my shapes far outside the border so the effects don't bleed into the frame.

You also can see that there is a screen around the map that hides everything that sticks out of the map border (in my case I exaggerated my landmass to show that this will eventually end).

You can use the command COLLAR in the bottom line of CC3+ (just accept the preset options by right-clicking twice) to automatically increase the size of the screen so it hides everything again. But this is optional as you can tell CC3+ to just print everything inside the border anyways...

reading your tutorials be like:

Steps 1 - 6: ok, ok, pretty chill so far

Step 7: and then the doom music kicks in :D

really nice layout! Not much to add, maybe a little work to be done where wood and stone walls/floor meets.

Oh, and maybe 1-2 outhouse is enough, and instead make a place to tie horses to and a well?

Wow! this is really great!

Just one small suggestion: you might think about outlining your river with a black line as well, then Mike Schley's symbols would merge even better with it...

I'm not sure how popular it is right now, as it's just a few days old.

And to be clear: it is NOT a map drawing tool. It is meant to be a small mini game for people who are about to create a world to help build a history of said world. I think even if we don't need to build a world right now it's a fun way to get some inspiration for a new map we're about to draw.

It's set up in multiple stages. Each Player starts with an empty sheet of paper (or a section of a single sheet of paper). First everyone gets a few roles that determine what the player shall place in their respective area. The players can choose where exactly to put it and the guidelines are pretty vague. For example you roll for landmasses and you might get something along the lines of "one big island/continent and a small one". How they are shaped and where exactly they are is up to the player.

After a few steps when land features and some starting settlements are placed the players will be able to grow their start-kingdoms and during later steps they are allowed to place the features/settlements/etc on the other players sheets as well (when a WAR! was rolled up for example already existing settlement might get destroyed, or your kingdom could set up a colony on an other players sheet...)

Again: how you draw that exactly is all up to you/the players and it is meant to be done as a crude sketch on paper.

But, and that's why I posted it here: if anyone ever wanted to start a new map but lacks inspiration this game would be a nice way to get the outline/concept of a new world going.

Wow, that turned out great! I'll definitely check it out on the weekend!

Ok, afterthought: I dd recognize, that my methods do have trouble with rounded walls. And while I played around with the settings and browsed the Forum I read the post "complex shapes -- is traced better then cmb now?"

which mentions this article: https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/7048, which mentiones where to find cmb:

there are multiple options available. What you probably want is "line to path" (you find it by right-clicking in the dynamite symbol)

just draw your walls:

choose line to path, select all parts of your wall, right-click somewhere and select "do it", hit redraw, and voilà:

so, scrap everything I said before and use this method!

The explanation of the color key effect was golden, Sue! Thank you so very much!

I might have overdone it though: I used this technique on nearly every symbol. That way I can use the black outline and still highlight them so they get noticed in the shadows (moving the grid below the symbols helped as well, but I'm not sure it's practical for gaming purposes...)

One thing I still can't get to work are the footprints. They just refuse to get a sheet effect. I even tried DELAYDRAWSYM, but that just lets them disappear completely. I do have the suspicion that the "Footprints Human" from DD3 might themselves be already an effect? Is this possible?

Sorry, slightly off topic, but do you remember where the kegs are from? And if the distortion of the left one is from the Symbol itself or from the extraction of the image?