The final stage of this group was the lower level partly beneath the Great Temple, which both sections of the upper underground complex link into, Thalagos Cavern:

The base layout was from the Inkwell dice, as noted in my first posting above, with a few minor tweaks, notably extending those three straggling exit passages, which lead off-map for some considerable distance to the inner edge of the swampy Moat surrounding the higher area on which Threshorsh is set. The passages are all mentioned as being flooded in their latter stages in the accompanying notes for the Atlas version, and all emerge under the swamp, so there is no easy means to access the Cavern from outside that way.

Since the Inkwell dice designs are set on a geomorphic grid, that does make it quite easy to connect with other such layouts above and to the side like this. Indeed, I simply copied and pasted over the chute from the Great Temple and the floor from the Cavern Access passageway in the Threshorsh map to this one (both of course are drawn to the same standard Dungeon "in-feet" scale), to make sure everything linked properly.

Creepy Crypts was the base style used for the map, giving some interesting additional rocky textures, and while the walling system takes a little getting used to, it had the advantage in this map of allowing me to very easily add those steep-drop Cliff Lines simply by copying the sheet effects to a couple of new "Walls-but-not-really-walls" sheets (I didn't call them that!). Then by tweaking the water effects a little, it became possible to show the shallower sloping shores around Lower Lake too - the pale lines - leaving the shadowy darkness of the cliff-drops to show where those were - including all round Upper Lake.

Fun times were had adding all kinds of patches of mould, assorted splats and stains, and a few small treasure piles, to parts of the floors, along with some significant clumps of fungi. Some of the moulds and fungi are bioluminous too, which were among the randomly-obtained features to add to this map. And yes, sacrifices do occasionally find their way down from the Great Temple to the bridge top above Upper Lake (though not perhaps as often as you might think). The trickiest element was the scaling grid, largely because this never seems to work well in narrower, variable-width cave passages. I did try it as more strongly visible at one stage, and considered a toggle to let it be turned off (as it just looked too strident). Ultimately though, I felt this subtler version worked OK, and should anyone need to brighten the grid, the FCW will always be available in the Atlas.

There was a lot of space around the layout too, so I added some of the DD3 "holey" textures to change it up a trifle, and added a few more, and larger, TT1 options than I'd anticipated at the start - even a varicolor DD3 dragon, if maybe one a bit too robust and "wing-y" for the Swamp Dragons as I'd been thinking of them. I did consider reducing the length of the exit passageways, but I wanted to keep the labels for them on the map, so left things alone finally. Plus I did rather like the vaguely spiky-tentacular look this gave to the whole. Though that's probably just me!

Ordinarily at this point, I'd mention where I'm off to for the next "Adventurer" dice set of designs. However, we're having a short excursus from that, as I've brought forward the mapping for the "Ruins" 6R* dice-face design (which you may recall I mentioned when using the unruined version of this, from the "Cities" dice-face 6R, for the Seer's Hall Village map previously). That will be going onto Lizard Isle, a large island offshore of southern Alarius.

If you need electronic image versions to trace into a CC3+ map, North Carolina Maps may help, if you haven't bookmarked their site already, that is!

After some protracted hunting online, the best I can find are some CC2 versions of just the geomorphs on this very old website. I can't seem to find this map in CC2, although it's almost certainly based on the old TSR module "Lankhmar City of Adventure", which came with non-CC2 versions of both this map (in more usable detail) and a separate booklet with just the geomorphs. I also stumbled upon a set of PNGs for the geomorphs (only - again...) on Box here. The first site just has GIFs as well as the CC2 options, but the PNGs may be more useful if you wanted to convert them to symbols.

Otherwise, yours may be the only surviving FCW version of the whole city map available online!

The original has a fascinatingly "windblown", swirling vibe to it overall.

And as someone who often copy-traces by hand/mouse scanned hand-drawn maps into CC3+, the tenacity to make such things a reality is something I can readily appreciate!

Threshorsh promised to be an interesting challenge, as the dice designs for it had two subterranean segments linked by a surface area with a small settlement in it, so a mixture of different, though matching, mapping styles seemed like a good idea. In the end, that mixture kept getting broader as the mapping proceeded. This is the final map:

As the cliff line was such a significant feature on the dice designs, and divided the over- from the underground, I decided to start with that, and the overground segment of the drawing, thus started the map from Sue's Forest Trail and Forest Graveyard packs from the 2022 Annual. Of course, I knew already I'd be needing some buildings as well, and while I toyed with the idea of drawing just the interiors, as is often suggested with the "Dungeon" style packs, the dice showed purely roofed structures, which seemed a more interesting option here. So Darklands City from the 2021 Annual was quickly added to the plan, with repurposed ruins to show the stone foundations for structures still being built (as something the random options had come up with). One downside is the thatched Darklands City buildings all have obvious chimneys, so ideas were swiftly added for how to conceal those (tropics, after all). Luckily, the style has options for adding separate dormers and awnings, which helped greatly, and those features allowed the construction of additional building shapes as well - including what I really wanted to add beyond the area the dice design provided, some round hut shapes. And yes, those are hand-crafted from the resized smallest awning piece - hand crafted to help give a slightly more ragged outer edge, as these are huts built by Lizardfolk, after all!

The cliffs are meant to be fairly low, at most 60 to 70 feet, 18 to 20 metres - hence some of the properties built into the outer edge of them actually ARE meant to rise above their tops. That meant adjusting some of the usual options for the cliff effects (mostly on the hand-drawn shadows, which were also shortened). The Forest style allowed some playing around with the water effects as well, as while I didn't want to add a stream, because this is meant as the drier part of the Isle, I did want a freshwater source, and a rainfall pond seemed suitable. That proved particularly interesting, as I'd not used the technique for water employed here before. Chances are you may not be able to tell where it is at this resolution, but the pond lies just southwest of the Palace.

With the subterranea, the drawing was much easier, as neatly regular for the most part. I decided these areas were probably Dwarf or Gnome work, and likely commissioned long ago, perhaps by the Lizardfolk, to help account for their different appearance to the settlement (as mentioned in the notes to go with the map in the Atlas version). The chief concept behind the whole is that this is where Lizardfolk come from all across the - as the locals call it - Leminish swampland when it's time for them to begin their transformation to become Swamp Dragons. At Threshorsh, they can enter their chrysalis state during a ceremony in the Great Temple, then be taken to relative safety to continue their change in the Transforming Chambers, and returned for a further ceremony in the Temple as they begin to emerge. Following that, when they can move about unaided, the young Swamp Dragons are guided down to Thalagos Cavern, partly beneath the Temple via the Cavern Access passageway from the Chambers, where they can grow to a fuller strength and size before venturing out into the wilds. The timescales for all these changes should be highly variable between individuals I felt, and also that only relatively few Lizardfolk would ever undergo the change at all. The swamplands may be fairly vast, but dragons need a lot of land to support them, although I had opted for a more sinuous, serpentine form for these Swamp Dragons (largely influenced by the same-name dragons in the Shadowdark RPG, except those are flightless, whereas I wanted these versions to be able to fly, though not strongly or for long). This also allows for the fact that the Queen here, Shemenshra, is still in her humanoid form, despite having reigned for 40 years, for instance. In the notes, I did keep things vague as to how the Dragons may relate to their former selves and those they knew who remain as humanoids, or what mental abilities they may retain as Dragons.

Those familiar will doubtless have spotted that DD3 was called into action to expand the symbol options, and Creepy Crypts too, largely for its extra terrain patches, which are really helpful in blending and lightly altering the textures and transitions, along with providing straw piles for the chrysalises to rest upon. The straw colour in the Transforming Cells helps identify how advanced the progression may be for the chrysalis-occupied Cells (darker straw = longer time underway). Having allowed space for the map legends around all this still left some blank spaces, so finally TT1 was drawn upon for those figurative illustrations.

Next time, we find what lies beneath that irregular pit hole in the Great Temple (which probably took longer to draw to look right than the Lizardfolk spent cutting it through the rock, or that's how it started to seem...).