I can confirm that! A long time ago, I came across a book with a lovely map, which turned out to be a rubbishy, derivative novel; never read it again or any more in its series, and refuse to give it publicity now!

Rather liked the weird pink-purple map, just to be contrary. As that can be added using the RGB Matrix Process though, it's not an essential for the Grimdark style, of course!

Liking the paper texture too.

EDIT:

Should also have mentioned - colours and all that - that Sue's Spectrum Style Part 2 has just been released into the wild via the November Cartographer's Annual!

Chanced-upon something of possible interest in this line today. The OneBookShelf download sites (DriveThru RPG, etc.) are currently running their annual Hallowe'en promotion, part of which is to hide away spooky freebies behind Hallowe'en-themed miniature graphics on various pages scattered across the site, as a kind of treasure hunt. One of those freebies this year is an RPG called Xas Irkalla. It normally retails at $15, reduced to $11.25 in the Halloween Sale at present, but free using the special link.

Firstly, you must have an OBS account (free to open) to download anything from the site, but you don't have to give them more than a few basic details to do so (no credit card or bank info, for instance). Secondly, Xas Irkalla is an adult, hard, very deadly RPG that uses the Strain survival-horror system. It is definitely not for the faint-hearted. But, y'know, this topic is about grimdark, so... This is the core book, so ALL rules and details about the setting needed to play the game are included.

Oh yes, the special freebie link! Use the "My Library" link at the top right of the normal OBS page. Once there, scroll to the foot of the page, and towards the lower right corner, you should see a glowing pumpkin head. Click that, and the freebie will be added to your cart.

If you'd like to hunt for others, there are at least 11 more to be found just on DTRPG.

Still haven't tried Edge since it appeared in one of the all-too-frequent "Windows improvements" recently. I think the only prior difficulty I had with Chrome was on my ISP's site, which apparently - and incredibly - still uses Flash Player for part of their system. Hardly Chrome's fault of course. Stunningly, my ISP wasn't aware that support for Flash Player ends this December, yet they still haven't updated that part of their site...

It looks like there's a problem with the macro that operates with this drawing tool under Terrain Default, Woods Dead. The first line is:

SYMFILLLOAD @system\fillers\CA163 Snow Woods.symfill

If you change the end of the line to read:

CA163 Dead Woods.symfill

instead, that should solve the problem.

To do this, click on the Overland drop-down menu at the top left of your CC3+ screen, and choose All Map Drawing Tools... That will bring up the Select drawing tool pane. Click the Advanced button at the bottom left of that pane.

Scroll down the Tool name list to find the Terrain Default, Woods Dead tool and click on the name. Just in case you make a mistake at this point (easily done!), click the New button and give the tool a recognisable, but different, name, like "Terrain Default, Woods Dead 2". Click OK.

Now, in your "new" tool, click the Command to execute button. This will bring up the macro that runs with this tool in a separate pane. Change the "Snow Woods" of the first line to read "Dead Woods" instead. Don't change anything else! Click OK.

Then click Save, so the change you just made will work with the tool, and then click OK. You can now draw with the corrected Woods Dead tool. I hope ?

I imagine this will be amended when the second part of the Spectrum Overland set is released in the Cartographer's Annual next month.

I'm never sure just what's meant by "OSR", but then again, I gather neither is anyone else, as it means whatever people want it to mean, apparently! Not very helpful, however...

If you're aiming for the look of the earliest White Dwarf maps (I was a subscriber from issue 1, though not for decades now; I still have all the originals), their own maps were straight black-and-white, with clear lines and no shading. There was a Midgard map in Issue 2 (1977) for instance, which was just very basic hand-drawn line-art. There wasn't even any shading for the seas on that Midgard map, and if they hadn't been labelled, you'd never have known it! The map did though have a notably heavier line for the coast than the river lines, which might be something to think about for this map too.

I think the first map that used shading in WD (aside from the overland map for the first part of the Valley of the Four Winds story in Issue 8 (1978), which was a piece of artwork in itself, rather than a true map; it was later used as the basis for the boardgame), was the dungeon map for The Lichway in Issue 9 (also 1978; an adventure for D&D). Water was illustrated in that with a similar shading (albeit using a dot-shaded dry-transfer sheet texture) to what you have here, with heavy black outlines for the banks/edges, as also for the outlines of the dungeon walls.

As a complete aside, for all it seems odd now, the square grid for that Lichway map was placed everywhere EXCEPT in the dungeon and across the water - so in all the solid rock only, as we'd likely now think of it. That seemed to work well at first, because the walls were fitted to the grid, so the room interiors were all very clear and obvious, and many of the room sizes could be gauged quite readily. Snag was the vital, very long, broad, diagonal corridor and its right-angled crossways, which ran across the entire southeastern side of the dungeon. I ran Lichway back in the day, and this diagonal element was a nightmare, because you couldn't work sizes from it at all!

Sorry, rambling here, but digging out my old White Dwarfs brings back a lot of memories!