After completing Queen Mica's Scintillant Palace for the Community Atlas, I'd intended to move straight on to the next Errynor 250 x 200 mile map. However, it transpired that Remy was going to be busy with end-of-academic-year items through most of July, so I held-off submitting the Palace maps for a while, and ran into some problems myself. Thus I ended up distracted away from mapping for the Atlas for a time, and somehow found myself concentrating on the city of Providence in Rhode Island, as portrayed in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft from the 1920s and 1930s.

There's an astonishing amount of freely-available information to be found about many places online these days, and a project really just for my own interest in identifying some of the locations mentioned in a couple of Lovecraft's tales, soon grew out of hand rather, as these things do, and it became possible to find more and more seemingly obscure spots on older maps of the city, with information from numerous blogs and websites online, and even two quite recent hardcopy "Annotated Lovecraft" volumes edited by Leslie S. Klinger (formally, "The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft", 2014, and "The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham", 2019, both published by the Liveright Publishing Corporation).

Of course, mappers must map, so it wasn't long before I wanted to try drawing some of these findings out in CC3+. After toying with half a dozen possible mapping styles from various of the Cartographer's Annuals, it was perhaps inevitable I would finally select the Cthulhu City style from December 2017, CA132. The choice was complicated by the facts that I needed both a substantial number of rail lines, and some means of indicating the city's topography. While the former don't feature in the Lovecraft stories at all, they're a very dominant presence in the maps from the 1920s and 1930s, although curiously, the Cthulhu City package doesn't have any tools for drawing rail lines (for all there is an illustrative rail station symbol). The topography is, however, a constant presence in both the tales and on the maps - not least as one of the main roads, Meeting Street, is actually broken in one place where the hillside is too steep, the road ends, and transforms in mid-street into a set of steps instead! Again though, "Cthulhu City" offers no assistance in this respect either.

Luckily, both can be accommodated very easily by simple lines of different colours with maps of this general appearance, and as I'd sourced an excellent map from 1935 by the Geological Survey of the US Department of the Interior, which had a complete street and railroad map superimposed on a 10-foot-contour topographic map, that was always going to be my starting place.

To keep things manageable and as clear as possible, the area involved had to be carefully chosen, and a couple of outlying places of potential interest had to be dropped quite soon in the process as impractically distant from the majority of important sites. Finally though, I arrived at:

Naturally, this assumes viewers will have a degree of familiarity with the Lovecraft tales in question, namely "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "From Beyond", "The Haunter of the Dark" and "The Shunned House", plus one spot which is not derived from Lovecraft, the Milton Hotel in central Providence near City Hall, which came instead from the published "Call of Cthulhu" RPG scenario "The Shadow Over Providence". There's a little more information and commentary in this accompanying PDF though, which may help:

I've also added a higher-res version of the map to my Gallery, and the FCW file is below, should anyone wish to make use of this for their own "Call of Cthulhu" RPG-related activities. It does need the Hamburger Heaven font that comes with CA132, Arial from a standard Windows 10 installation, and the free Copperplate Gothic Light font to view properly:

Map's looking good.

The fill on the frame seems a bit "linear repetitive"; not sure if that's deliberate, though it is mildly distracting to my eye.

The northerly coastline where there aren't any broad beaches or cliffs looks a trifle abrupt. Might be worth considering adding a thin "beach" and/or "rock platform" outline polygon along it (polygon rather than line to look a bit more naturalistic).

Assuming the frame's alpha-numerics are going to relate to a final map key, there'll need to be a suitably pale grid over the map as well to clarify where places away from the frame actually are. It may be worth considering having both that grid and the letter-number frame labels, and maybe even the final key listing, on a sheet that can be hidden, as currently they look rather too modern in style, and the grid's going to be a distraction more generally, if added.

Good-looking map!

My immediate thought beyond that is that some of the broader rivers don't appear quite right. In places where they merge, there's often a patch of darker blue in them which makes them seem a little disjointed. I suspect that may be because the inner glow effect on the rivers sheet needs tweaking to be a little larger, perhaps (it may be something else, as this isn't a style I've used much, or very recently, however).

Also, there's the common problem with river lines where they meet the coast, that they don't match up properly with the coastline, and can seem to run into the sea, with a colour mismatch. Sometimes you can adjust the final node on the river line to match better with the coastline, though sometimes not. One alternative is to add a small polygonal patch of the appropriate sea fill texture over the end of the river line, although even that sometimes doesn't work as well as you might wish.

A further alternative is to set up the land sheet with a Color Key Effect, which effectively "cuts out" the rivers instead of superimposing lines on top, so essentially the rivers become long sea inlets instead. The downside is you have to draw the rivers on the land sheet as well, and in a solid fill of a single colour (by default, this is Colour 6, bright pink). You can though make your rivers look a lot more natural that way, especially if you draw them as polygons instead of lines (this can be a bit tedious for long rivers, however, as you have to draw both banks), or add polygons to disguise where river lines of different widths meet (so the main river line can vary in thickness along its length in a more "realistic" manner than a single line width will allow.

Sorry, I've been MIA for much of August, so hadn't commented here earlier. This is a really nice-looking set of floorplans, and that's a very fancy font for the titles - except for the odd capital letters, which don't really fit.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the fancy font's one of those that will work in the Community Atlas, as only those fonts issued with CC3+ and its official add-ons, plus those available with a standard Windows 10 installation, are suitable for use there (you can use others, but unless someone has the identical font installed, the lettering will default back to something like Arial only, which won't look as good, and may even make a mess of the labelling overall). A workaround is to explode the text once it's placed, which stops it from being text (so it can't be edited again), and changes it just to polygons of close to the original shape and form, though that's not ideal.

You can find the list of allowable fonts in the Atlas FAQs here:

For the mapping contest, any font would be fine however, just not for the Atlas!

More time today, and first-off, I checked the On New Macro as well as the On Open one, as I was fairly sure when I started the new file for this map, the Simple symbols set had indeed loaded. Which is where I discovered this was indeed the case, and that the correct CATALOG line should be :

@Symbols\Modern\Floorplans\Dracula Dossier\Simple.FSC

and not:

@Symbols\Modern\Floorplans\Dracula_Symbols.FSC.

The macro's easy enough to change in an existing map file drawn in this style using the edit facility. You can open it from the Drawing Properties icon on the top toolbar |CC2PRESETS| via "Settings - Map Notes", which brings up the "Select Note" pane.

Choose "OnNewMacro" and click "Edit", from where you can copy the last typed line with the correct location for the Dracula Dossier "Simple" symbols catalogue file.

Close the OnNewMacro without making any changes, and open the OnOpenMacro one the same way, then simply paste the copied text line over the last typed line there to correct it.

Before clicking "OK" to close the macro edit pane, make sure there is ONLY ONE BLANK LINE immediately below the typed line you've just replaced (try to move your cursor further down using the arrow key). If there is more than one, delete it, as if there's anything other than a single blank line there, the macro will become confused and sulk mightily at you! (That is, it won't work properly; note there MUST be one blank line there, however.)

Then save the file. You can check it's working by closing the file you've just saved and reopening it, where the 10 items in the Simple catalogue should now be showing in the symbols catalogue panel to the left of your drawing window in CC3+.