In a recent thread, @Traveller mentioned that he is seeking to discover the best style of designing castles in order to map the many real castles of the U.K.

I have been on a similar quest, though my quest is so that I can design fantastical castles of folklore and fairy tales, like Camelot and Sleeping Beauty's Castle, or the castles in Errol Flynn movies. Castles with many levels of battlements, parapets, towers and turrets, gardens with hedge mazes, and imposing keeps.

One of the things that seems to come up regularly in these forums is crenellations. I was experimenting using Mike Schley's walls along the top edges of my fortresses, and that looked okay, but didn't allow for much flexibility since the symbols come in one length and the wall drawing tool doesn't show the embrasures and merlons.

Anyway, I designed some symbols. I have 5' x 5' square ones. I have trapezoidal ones that can be placed to have arrow slits. I have corner L-shaped pieces. And I have several different rounded ones for round towers, including a tapered one to create arrow slits.

They are all created using CC3+'s drawing tools, with fills from SS4 Dungeons of Schley. There are five different shades of every shape, using Mike Schley's Natural Stone 1 through Natural Stone 5. (This was designed in SS5 Cities of Schley, but I imported the Dungeons of Schley fills as well.) I think that approach allows them to be used in the Atlas. @Monsen, can you confirm?

(I used the Stone Paving Grey for the structures, but tried one tower with Stone Paving Brown to see how it would look. The intention was to try to create the look of

They are all designed for a five-foot wide crenellation -- basically, you'd draw a line or circle with a 5-foot width for the base of the crenellation and then place the merlons on top. I've tried it both placing them by hand and also using SYMBOLS ALONG, and both approaches work reasonably well.

I am not an artist, and I'm sure others here could do much better ones, but I think it gets the job done. I'm happy to share if anyone would like to use them.

Here is the FSC file and also an FCW example:

And here are some images so you can see how they look. (I put a Bevel effect on the merlons, which is showing some odd effects because the colors with the base are close, even though I used a darker shade of the Natural Stone for the base.)

Here's a close-up of the trapezoid merlons along the edge of a straight building.

And here's one using the trapezoidal merlons for the lower level and then the square ones for the higher level. It also shows the corner pieces.

Here are two different round towers. The one on the left has normal merlons, and the one on the right has tapered ones for arrow slits. (I need to fix the Wall Shadow effects -- the base of the tower should not be casting a shadow farther out than the crenellation on top of the tower!)

Here's a quick "proof of concept" of a multi-level castle with different crenellation styles, plus some domes from City Domes for turrets.

And one last tower using the brown paving fill. This one uses a wider merlon using the SYMBOLS ALONG tool, but I don't think it's quite lining up correctly.

Feedback welcome, and feel free to use the FSC if you like them.

I love the color you picked for the sea. I personally do not think it needs to be lightened.

I'm pretty new to Campaign Cartographer -- or, rather, I've owned the software for ages but I'm new to actually making maps.

I keep saying I bought the software five years ago, but upon reflection, I think it was around 2016. Eight years ago! I played around a bit with Fractal Terrains, but everything was so intimidating! I had this idea that I could just fiddle around and learn it through trial and error, much like I've learned various desktop publishing and illustration programs and over the years. Didn't work! I didn't grasp the approach of choosing what you want to do and then picking the objects you want to do it to. It was counterintuitive and opposite of the image editing software I've used before, where you select the object and then select what you want to do with it.

I thought I could sit down and read the PDFs and learn that way. Nope! Every time I tried to map something, it looked nothing like the pretty pictures I'd see here. (Pro Tip: Even when you understand that sheet effects exist, you still have to turn sheet effects on to see the pretty effects!)

Finally in mid-2023, I decided to watch one of the tutorials. I started with one of the then-more recent Lives, and that was way too advanced, but it gave me a hint at CC3+'s tremendous power and potential. Then I found Joe Sweeney's tutorials, and everything clicked. His "Parrot Island" tutorial gave me a basic foundation, and then I plowed through the rest of his, and then ProFantasy's more "Intro to CC3"-type tutorials and the brief videos about specific functions and techniques before making my way back to the Live videos.

I was fiddling around with map-making in the second half of 2023, but mostly it was to practice specific techniques rather than design a proper map. I created an account on these forums in December of 2023 and posted my first attempt at a proper map (my Castle on a Cloud) in January of 2024 -- mere months ago!

I still watch the Lives every time there's a new one (and I always, always learn something new). I was watching the old ones in the downtime, but I think I've watched almost every single Live already (a few more than once, especially when there's something I want to attempt that I remember Ralf or Remy demonstrating). I've also watched Jim Sweeney's, Dogtag's, Remy's, and Joachim de Ravenbel's tutorials as well. (I find it quite peaceful and Zen to watch a blank canvas get turned into a work of art in under an hour!)

OMG, I discovered that if you set three steps across with the center one (moved to front) in varicolor, you can create a carpet runner down the center of your staircase. My grand ballrooms will have the grandest of grand staircases!

I promise not to spam this thread with more discoveries, and will wait until Ralf has a chance to do the Live, but I just couldn't hold back with this one.

So happy for this! Looking forward to this livestream (and at the moment, I don't think I have conflicting meetings). My question the other day about using Symbols Along to create stairs was unusually timely.