I know not everyone likes to provide typed notes to go with their Atlas maps, and that's fair enough. However, and partly I suppose because I've been designing RPG scenarios with both maps and written descriptions since I first discovered the original D&D booklets, it's something I like to do. I find moreover that both facets work together to create more detailed settings overall. So it wasn't a huge surprise that when I began typing-up my notes for this map yesterday, I started realising I'd missed something in the floorplans.

So, a bit of extra drawing, moving things around and so forth, beyond what I was anticipating in my comments here earlier, and now we have this version - normal first, then with the secret cave below:

Most of the changes are along the top row of drawings, with a few "missing teeth" scattered across the roofs now, and adding the chimney stacks, but they're mainly in the central plan, where we have an entire Loft and a new access door from the South Tower now. The Loft doesn't extend right out to the edge of the tiled roof, because I wanted to show only where access is practical - often just as a crawlspace - for creatures the size and form of a typical adult human, something that'll be explained in the notes.

Further tweaking is still required of course, and I'm sure I'll spot other things that need adjusting before this is done, aside from finishing-off typing in the notes. That got sidetracked when I decided I needed to add the Loft! Plus this is already the third iteration of how the Loft should look, as things developed and changed along the way. "Color Key" is your friend when suddenly deciding you need a major rejig of this sort, is all I can say!

Meanwhile, back at the mapping, more progress, more battles!

Two main challenges today, firstly to get everything correctly aligned and pulled together into a single coherent map (I hope!). I decided that this simple style didn't justify a string of separate maps for each level in the building, so, as probably suggested by yesterday's image, I wanted to present everything on just the one drawing. This is the current state of play, now complete with labels:

I very nearly slipped-up on the labelling, as the original style on which the CC3+ Dracula Dossier style is based, uses the Blanch Caps font, which was linked from the Annual's PDF mapping guide, and which of course, being freely available online, I'd already downloaded and installed back in 2015. However, the font isn't available for free redistribution, so instead ProFantasy had substituted the similar free Franks font. As this map's intended for the Community Atlas, fonts not available with PF products or a standard Windows 10 installation can't be used (well, they can, but you have to explode the text to become polygons, so you can't change it as with normal text afterwards). Of course, the default font is set as Blanch Caps if it's available, so there was very nearly an "oops" moment, followed by Naughty Language, had I gone ahead with that! Franks it is though!

The second challenge was getting the scalebar correctly rescaled and then labelled. For reasons I won't pretend to understand, the scalebar symbol doesn't have equal divisions along its length, so trying to rescale it exactly to the scale grid, when all you can see is a ghostly outline in places when you move it proved, shall we say, trying... There may even have been an N.L. moment or two! Once it was finally sorted, I measured the irregular divisions, which turned out to be 0.8 metres long, something that still leaves me mystified. Perhaps something important from the original Dracula Dossier RPG book though (as I don't have that).

If you think the Cellar plan looks a little empty, you might be right:

There's a walled-up low cave concealed on the SECRET Layer, with the tops of some very ancient, worn, partly inscribed standing stones visible in its floor, one of which (admittedly smaller than it was yesterday now!) has been built into the actual cellar wall, and protrudes somewhat from it. The idea is this ancient circle, dating to long before the city was built here, is at least part of what's causing this house to be haunted and abandoned now. As well as such a favourite spot for ghoul feasts, naturally. The "S" = secret door, isn't technically a door at all, but a walled-up thinner part of the cellar wall, so it's obviously been used for access to the cave at some earlier time, and then deliberately sealed later, so it can't be told from the normal stone walls in the cellar now.

Still plenty to do though, more tweaking primarily, plus getting the notes typed up, and maybe adding some missing or slipped tiles on that roof. The house is meant to be boarded-up and shunned by the locals nearby, after all.

By the time I'd chosen a property to map the floorplans for from Vertshusen for this contest, I already had some ideas as to what it was going to be, and what mapping style I'd be going with. The chosen property is that marked by the red square in the SE corner of the walled area:

My initial thoughts had revolved around a haunted house theme, and because I've already done quite a bit of mapping for the Community Atlas using some of the more realistic floorplan styles, quickly decided I wanted to do something different. For me, part of the point in participating in the Atlas is to experiment with new ideas and different mapping styles.

Three possible styles were uppermost in mind, all very similar tech-drawing styles, the 1930s Travel Guide Floorplans from the April 2011 Cartographer's Annual, the 1800s Floorplans from April 2016, and the one I finally selected, the Dracula Dossier style from September 2015. Haunted house, after all!

However, I also took a look through the PDF of "Hobbs' Architecture", which was a recommended freely-available download from the Internet Archive site, mentioned in the mapping guide and webpage for the 1800s Floorplan style, to get a feel for what house layouts should look like and contain in this general type of map appearance.

The working title for the map was "The House That Wasn't There", as I had vague early ideas of creating a building that wasn't always there. Indeed, one initial concept had been to pick a completely empty space in the city, and map the house into that, only I couldn't find a space large enough!

Which building was chosen was partly down to something that looked interesting, that was also a little out of the way, and the final choice was swayed after I was drawn to one of the smaller buildings in "Hobbs'":

which just looked interesting, and had some features not dissimilar to the building in Vertshusen. The size and scaling weren't the same of course, as the Vertshusen buildings are uniformly tiny by contrast to the structures in "Hobbs'". It was a starting point though.

Having measured the house size on the Vertshusen FCW, I set up a suitable template in the Dracula Dossier style, and then directly imported (copy & pasted) the "Wasn't" House and its neighbouring properties, setting "my" house down in the centre of the map border area.

Of course, it's angled as originally drawn, and as others have commented in topics for this mapping contest already, that's not the friendliest layout for drawing rectilinear structures. So I copied the house again, and rotated it to better suit, and then copied that twice more (as my initial idea was for a ground floor plan, an upper floor plan, and a further plan for the two taller roof towers. I also imported copied scans from the Hobbs' book as reminders for the overall look of the plans, setting them up on their own Sheet with a Transparency Effect, so I could position them over the CD3 house roof and get a better idea of what might go where. And then started drawing. This illustrates where I'd got to with the drawings when I ran out of time yesterday:

Which brings us round to the final South Wing, presented as just a single Level. More or less, anyway, as there are a couple of places where the tunnels pass over and under one another, which again helps give a slightly variant appearance to this map. This time, the base layout came from the DF video that actually launched the very first Burrows pieces, as part of their "Dungeons of Doom" KickStarter campaign in June 2017, "Encounter 14: Khri Colony". The Khri are DF's giant insectoid monsters that make such burrows, incidentally. The final amended layout is thus:

A lower height range seemed suitable for the southern side of the Palace complex, given how the surface view sketch was drawn.

So that concludes the extra maps to go with Errynor Map 40, and by the time you read this, I expect I'll be off mapping some far-flung corner of the region or other. Or is it ALL just an illusion...

The East Wing runs to a mere two vertical Levels by contrast, based on images of a couple of layouts on the DF Discord, combined here with the usual additions and amendments, for all the final plans are much simpler than for either of the preceding pair of Wings, and clearly show their rectilinear original forms rather more. This was though quite deliberate, as part of the concept of the various Wings was to show differences between them, suggesting they could likely be put to different uses, and that this area was probably still largely under construction. Plus it wasn't only the layouts that had been getting figuratively tied in knots with some of the other maps!

Simplicity only counts for so much though, so the entryway from the Palace this time isn't on Level 1, but on the lower Level 2 (which is also a somewhat larger map than the others):