Having established that I wanted to draw an overground map for Shadow Keep's ruins based on the underground one, I copied and pasted over into a new map the sub-surface wall lines for the Keep's Grand Entrance octagon, and those areas of the Kennels where the hanging moss skeins were shown, together with sketch-lines for where the heaviest collapsed rubble lay, blocking the stairs down into the Grand Entrance chamber, and the first part of the stairs too. That Grand Entrance became the surface ruins' Inner Keep, with a larger octagonal sketch-line for the outside wall of the Outer Keep, together with a couple of similarly sketchy gatehouses for access to both. I also added the line of the Old Road from Elkan Village, leading off the southeast map edge, based on the trail-line illustrated on the Atlas map for the Loksa Environs area (the B&W hex-map from last time).

This looked a complete mess, as sketch-maps often do at first, especially after I started cutting-up the wall-lines, showing which had completely collapsed, and which were still partly intact. I wanted the final walls to look as if they had some surviving dressed stones covering their lower parts in places, with those missing from the higher surviving stones, which I decided would be chiefly packed-rubble wall-cores. These walls were thus initially drawn as stone-fill polygons, so as to have flat sides yet ragged ends where the rest of the wall had fallen away, something simple lines can't do. A couple of higher sheets were added to the stack for numerous hand-placed rock symbols from the Mike Schley SS4 Caves options, sometimes rescaled, with more fallen rock rubble strewn liberally across the ground surface. As so often with elements like this, a degree of trial and error was involved, getting the shadow effects especially to look right, without being too overwhelming or invisible (hopefully!).

The fissures and crevices took still more trials to get right, with various attempts to use bevel options failing to achieve a suitable look, whereas a simple Edge Fade, Inner was all that was really needed, on several dark grey, angular, hand-drawn polygons! In the end, there was so much fallen rubble everywhere, I started to wonder if any of these painstaking efforts would ever be seen at all! At least I'd know they were there though 😁.

Indeed, I scaled-back the amount of rubble, especially over the stairs, since while it's all fine for the map to be accurate, it also needs to be usable for GMs, so things can't always be drawn exactly as they might genuinely appear. In a century since the event, there'd be likely a lot more vegetation covering the rubble than appears here, for instance. Thus, the final map:

As the mapping was underway, I also designed a couple of surface aspects, beyond the heavy vegetation of the Shadow Woods jungle (which was already placed as present on the earlier Atlas map). This was done again using The Tome of Adventure Design, which came up with the Flying Foxes (terrier-sized canines with prehensile forepaws, bat-like wings and sharp teeth, whose bite carries disease - they like to live in the largest jungle trees with big branches they can easily walk along) and the odd-sounding Slap Grass. Slap Grass grows in patches up to adult-human-tall, and crawls along slowly through rubbly soils using its roots. It has sword-length, wing-shaped, flattened flower heads that it uses to slap at passing creatures (attracted by sensing heat and motion from them, if large enough). This forces its seeds into the creature's skin, and if not removed quickly, once in living tissue the seeds grow rapidly through their host's body, killing the creature in a very short time. And, as the yellow-green patches on the map suggests, there's a lot of it about here!

I decided to keep the map overall fairly simple in its labelled features, and not too threatening in its contents, although GMs could always have a few Forager Elemental Wasps pass through as an additional problem for parties trying to clear enough rubble away to access the underground complex.

Looking ahead for next time, it's a return visit to Artemisia, around the south-centre of that island continent, somewhere in the Lampoteuo Region...

OK, maybe try this.

1) Set up a suitably-sized snap grid that'll let you draw squares of the exact size you need, and keep the snap grid turned on.

2) Draw an outline square of the size you require, with the line thickness you need it to be, using the snap grid.

3) Copy that square, and paste it immediately below the first one. Again, the snap grid is your friend.

4) Then paste another line of two squares to the right of the first two, with the half-square offset required. You may need to adjust your snap grid to allow this correctly.

5) This gives you a base of four squares in the correct pattern that you can then copy, making a larger area of squares with the necessary offset. Depending on how large an area of squares you need, once you have a larger part of the pattern available, you can simply copy said larger number of squares to speed things up. If you group the batches of squares too, that will make copying the groups easier.

6) Once you've filled the area you need with the offset squares pattern, save this as your base file that you can then open and re-save each time you want to draw a map using this offset grid.

By using the snap grid and basic commands like grouping the areas of squares, the whole process should be pretty quick to do, and hopefully fairly problem-free.

[Edited this where boldfaced, as I realised after posting that the pattern actually needs a four-square group, not a five as I originally suggested! (Otherwise you end up repeatedly overlapping the column with three squares in it.)]

And now released into the Wild, looking thoroughly stunning! Amazing work, as many here have already noted, Shessar!

Just posted on the PF Blog yesterday, this is a new, slightly eclectic, list of useful options when mapping with CC3+, by our own resident expert Remy Monsen. While the Blog posts are always worth seeing, this is one that's worth printing a PDF version of for future use, I think.

Some of the ten tips will likely be familiar, others things you know about but can never remember the times they're needed (like how to reset the "exporting in fewer passes" thing, item three on this list, and which I always end up scrabbling around trying to recall where I put the note as to what command has to be used to reset this, after a rare glitch that's reset it to the smaller amount!). And others may be new to you - OK, me, then 😁 (looking at you, Quick Move)!

While the map layout from the Inkwell dice designs was pretty straightforward, I'd already amended it in a few places before embarking on the CC3+ drawing, because rather than being subterranean, this was going to be a surface feature Palace building, albeit one composed of living vegetation, to fit with its key inhabitant, the Swamp Elemental known as Ssathrokkwa, the Toad Lord. The Palace is thus an extension of himself, in a somewhat loose sense. From a distance, and even quite close-up, it simply looks like one of the denser patches of swamp-jungle vegetation scattered across the whole Swamp area, while inside, being composed of living shrubs, trees and other plants, with marshy floors that sometimes include pools and water channels that pass beneath the walls, the structure isn't as solid as it may appear, albeit with thorns, cuttingly-sharp leaf edges, and dense internal branches that act as deterrents to anyone trying to force a way through walls or ceilings.

Ahead of the mapping, aspects of the Palace and specific items within it were randomly chosen, with adaptations, from a variety of tables in the main Shadowdark RPG rulebook, the free PDF adventure pack "Shadowdome Thunderdark" again, both by The Arcane Library, and the "Curiosities" tables in the "Unnatural Selection" supplement for Shadowdark published by Dungeon Damsel.

For the mapping style, this became quite an unusual mixture. One of the possibilities I'd considered for the Swamp of Toads map was the Darklands City style, and although that wasn't used there, I did like the connecting-symbol hedgerows in it, and thought they might be interesting to use here instead. The tree symbols and water options from that were also deciding factors. However, this is a dungeon-sized map, not a city-sized one, so others of Sue's dungeon-scale styles were pressed into service as well, ultimately including those for Marine Dungeon, Creepy Crypts, and Forest Trail, aside from a few more from DD3.

And so to the map:

Part of the reason I wanted to use the Darklands City hedges was because they come with thinner, brown-leafed segments, which seemed an ideal way to indicate the doors to this complex. That's because they don't appear obvious to non-residents, and open like a camera iris, the branches and foliage pulling back to form a rounded opening at the touch of a living hand or tongue (the latter is the usual method for the Toadfolk, naturally). The solitary Secret door is shown on the map above ordinarily, which decided me to also provide an option to show similar marker-lines for the ordinary doorways as well, for clarity:

That should have a toggle in the final Atlas FCW version.

Similarly, there should also be a toggle for the map grid:

That's been kept deliberately very subtle, and sometimes well-hidden (especially by that grove of trees in the Throne Room, area 12 - the floor space continues beneath their canopy, although much more heavily vegetated than in other open areas). GMs needing a more obvious grid can of course adjust it as necessary. There's also a cluster of magic crystals in the centre of the grove, for those wondering what might be happening there - there are more notes in the PDF file for the Atlas, including Shadowdark game stats for the new and variant creatures involved.

It's amazing what can be repurposed as something else at times. That long, rising passageway with two sets of mud-and-branch steps in (14), for instance. The "steps" are reused rectangles of the Fields bitmap fills from Darklands City, the mud in between the Earth texture fills from there, and the darker area (actually an ooze pit trap) beneath the "14" label, the dungeon dirt patches from Creepy Crypts. At the southern end of that passage, that dashed-white-line square is set over some strands of Kelp from Marine Dungeon, standing-in for swamp-jungle liana vines! And that square hatch and vines lead up to the Watch Tower, available on yet another FCW toggle for the final Atlas version, thus:

Of course, that Tower's of living vegetation too, so the floor is composed of interlocking branches, and the walls of canopy foliage, through which the watchers can climb to keep watch. There's a gentle, milky haze overlay across the lower parts of the map to indicate this is the highest part of the complex as well, and if required, there's an extra area of grid that can be shown for the Tower as well:

The lower grid doesn't need to be shown at the same time, as they're on separate Sheets, although both are here.

This was a lot of fun to draw, especially with the water pools here and there. Indeed, I got a bit carried away with adding water channels and pools outside the complex initially, as they just looked so interesting, and had to scale those back ultimately in places!

With this complete, the next map's scheduled for somewhere in the vast expanse of NW Doriant...