Keep forgetting I should update this topic.

The maps are all complete now, but may still need further tweaking. Like yesterday, when I found I'd blocked one of the staircase exits with a large cabinet, and forgotten to open the main gateway from being a solid stone wall... I tend to spot things like this only when pulling together the accompanying notes, and that process is still ongoing, however. So, subject to minor (if at all) changes later, the second underground level:

The idea for the Operations Room table is that the Atlas version can have the hotspot link to the full size table map - the table design here is simply a reduced-scale version of that actual FCW, with the Effects ranges tweaked to fit its reduced form. Not many surprises with the other rooms, except possibly those curious white passageways...

My thinking here is that in ages past, long before the castle was built, there was a temple or a shrine on this part of the rocky ridge, created to mark the spot where the descent began to the Tomb of the First Wyvern Lord. The straight passageway is then the surviving part of that initial descent into the octagonal room that's now been adopted as the Operations Room. This was the chamber where the body would be prepared for its final burial - vaguely like some of the Egyptian pyramid tombs and the temples near those - and then carried down the long spiral stairway that area 3 here represents to the tomb itself. The spiral winds around two and a half times, so the tomb is about another 100 feet (30 metres) below the surface.

Over time, the temple/shrine fell into ruins, and whatever traces may have survived were swept away centuries later when the castle was built here. There's no sign on the surface now of where the shrine/temple may have been, so the upper part of the straight white (actually marble-tiled) passage isn't simply blocked, it's been effectively erased beyond this small segment.

The spiral is fully intact though, and goes down to link in with that revised 2005-2014 dungeon layout mentioned earlier. That remained remarkably intact in the final version, though it has had a few tweaks and a couple of amendments. The largest of those was to change the original external link from a cavern and horizontal corridor to this spiral. I decided also to reuse it here partly because I was reminded of it through this topic on long, thin dungeon maps I started late last month. So here it is, the Tomb of the Wyvern Lords:

There's obviously something more going on here - the broken segments of the long white corridor leading to the Great Tomb (= First Lord's Tomb), for example - while the perceptive may spot some unusual bodies in Tombs G and H. So by activating the GAME MASTER ONLY Layer suddenly we see still more:

And for anyone struggling to see much at this scale, we can zoom in a little more on the GM's view:

All the room layouts and traps were from the original Dwarven Forge dungeon sets, incidentally, though the wall and floor colouring has been adjusted here because CC3+ let's you do things like that easily! The tombs and most treasure items were also based on resin or metal castings I used in the original layout, though the chariot in the final tomb was actually a standard Celtic-style with a double yoke for two horses. This version has been adjusted to be suitable for a wyvern. Yes, the first Wyvern Lord had a flying wyvern-drawn chariot. And those are the remains of his beloved wyvern.

The critters are a mixture of physical and incorporeal undead types (the latter are transparent, but as that didn't make much impact at full-map size, I also added a green glow to them as well). They only manifest if anything in their tomb is disturbed by something living. While they can be driven off and apparently destroyed, they can't actually be got rid of as long as intruders remain anywhere in the Tomb complex, and will keep coming back for more time after time until then.

Investigations by the current Citadel's occupants didn't progress beyond the first pillared hall. There are tales about this place that have somehow survived, while all memory of where it is has supposedly been lost. So the stone doors were closed, and walled-off, and scarcely anyone now involved beyond the leading commanders is aware such doors exist, let alone what they may lead to. There will be more information on all this when I get round to constructing the text and PDF notes for this level. I hope!

For now, and as some folks here seem to appreciate the flavour notes, a couple of extracts from the current iteration of the places lore from the area map to close with. From the Wyvern Dromes list:

Duck's Ford: Legend holds that this place-name derives from a cunning fellow who once tricked a dangerous bandit (or an ogre, or a demon) into drowning themselves in the river here, by telling them the ducks were just walking across the river bed, not swimming, despite the Jackson's breadth. The river bed is in fact unusually deep in the area, and a ferry runs between both banks regularly by Duck's Ford village on the southern bank, as there is no way to safely cross close-by otherwise. The Duck's Ford squadron base is set on a steep, stepped hill on the northern side of the Jackson, and its wyverns are exclusively blues, because this is the main training base for the big-winged blue wyverns. A key region for breeding blues is in the mountains up the stream that runs through Duck's Ford village, from where new recruits are often brought.

And from the SDF one:

Dunnish: Set on some high dunes by the coast east of the main River Jackson channel's mouth in the midst of the Delta, this is probably the most detested posting of all the SDF locations. Completely surrounded to landward by dense swamp-mangrove forests, this is accessible only by sea for cargo and most personnel movement. However, as the bays near this river channel have clearly long been favoured by raiding barbarians as temporary camp sites - there are remains of numerous such places scattered along the coasts in the vicinity - the base has a higher proportion of military ground and boat-based forces to try to prevent further such incursions. The SDF dome is a very recent addition. Its location affecting the personnel, and the presence of the dense mangrove brakes creating interference at times, means the SDF reports from here are commonly unreliable, and suggestions have been made that it should be moved to the nearby "Jackson Five" island instead. That though would mean having to construct a suitably raised site, as the island is too flat and low-lying towards its north-facing coasts. While the place-name derives from "dune", the personnel sent here darkly say it really originates as the place most likely to be visited by unspeakable horrors, following from one or other folk-story told of a fictional land called either "Ingland" (where a town called Dunnish or Dunwich once fell, or was dragged, into the sea), or "New Ingland" (where a town of similar name was assaulted by an invisible cosmic horror). Two Mark III Lightning Cannons help guard the shoreline, with an experimental ship-borne Mark I Cannon (the oldest, relatively weakest, but more robust type) set on one of the larger craft based here. This has never been tried before, and although tests so far have been satisfactory, it has never been used yet against an enemy raid.

"Jackson Five" island? Yes, the four largest islands and the one large promontory along the outer fringe of the Jackson Delta needed naming, and this seemed the most obvious option to go with...

If you're wanting help drawing ship plans @Autumn Getty you might try the Sailing Ships style pack in the March 2009 Cartographer's Annual. I was using it myself recently, though it does lack some things, such as chains and anchors, ropes and ship's boats, all of which would have been useful as additional symbols. It does let you draw vertical cross-sections through a ship as well as deck plans, however.

@Autumn Getty - I'd forgotten your comment about castle maps earlier.

I've rather drawn this one "by-hand" as it were, instead of using some of the shortcut options CC3+ might have provided. The Castle Walls add-on from the Cartographer's Annual for 2010 adds some useful commands for drawing the walls particularly, for instance. I wasn't sure how it might handle some of the variable size crenelations I needed here though, but it would have added fancier doorway and archer-window options than the simple straight cuts I've used, certainly.

If you're intending to draw a lot of castles, you might want to think about the Source Maps: Castles pack too. It is an older system which hasn't been updated for CC3+, and probably won't be now as far as I recall. However, you can use it with the usual DD3, etc., fills and symbols instead of the simpler vector options it comes with (it was designed to the old CC2-Pro standard). Beyond the information in the product pages I've linked to, if you also have the Tome of Ultimate Mapping, there are some additionally helpful discussions and tutorials regarding all the Source Maps products there as well, so you can get a better feel for what it can do for you.

Well, I thought I'd finished the above-ground castle, until I realised I'd forgotten the courtyard horse-trough! Isn't it always the way - some small detail that just throws out all your plans? While fitting that in, I discovered I'd somehow managed to shrink the access-stairs platform adjacent to it - essentially, I just drew the trough into the Ground Level map, and then copied & pasted it over to the First Level one using the standard 0,0 coordinates for the paste. Where it no longer fitted snugly by the platform. So one horse trough, lot of redrawn platforms on all the other maps...

Anyway, this is the upper, Fourth, Level for the Citadel, without grids, so you can play "spot the horse trough":

There are just the three highest tower tops on this level, with more of those Lightning Cannons, though you may notice the different one on the larger round tower. That's the Mark V Strickfaden, still a bit experimental/temperamental, and nobody really likes having to test-use it currently. That's also the tower where any visiting wyverns and riders can land, though that only happens for very urgent matters usually. Unless someone with prestige wants to make An Entrance. Great way to end up on A Charge unless you're particularly senior, naturally!

So, having (probably...) finished the upper storeys of the castle, I headed off below ground:

I wanted to show how the early sub-surface structures related to the main castle, and this first underground level is somewhat complex anyway, so having lightened the backdrop for the upper levels, I thought darkening it here made sense for going below ground, and turning the solid castle features ghostly, as they're really only for illustrative purposes now. Rooms 2 and 6 (and 6's connecting passageway) are actually on the level below this one. However, the windows in the Observation Deck look directly down to the table in the Operations Room, so both of those had to be shown together, after which adding the Ice House too seemed a natural follow-on. I did a pale fade over both though. The Gatehouse Pit drops another ten feet to its spiked base on the next level down as well, but I opted to use the nicely darkened pit from the Jon Roberts style here to suggest that. The switch back to the DD3 spiked pit base should be on the second level down.

As the two "dead" rooms 9 might hint, the construction of the upper part of Room 2 was relatively recent, and based on its lower level footprint. This will also lead into the much deeper, and rather different, third level down.

This is the first Community Atlas mapping project I've not really used any random design systems for (there will be a small element of that in the write-up for the earlier Defence Zone map though). However, the Citadel has been designed using Dwarven Forge model layouts as noted earlier, albeit added-to and modified. The subterranean levels are also all going to be based on such designs, using their original dungeon models in this case. However, for the first two levels down, I've had to reduce the size of the original plans by half, as they were too large to fit under the castle! In reality, this would be crazy of course, given digging out a dungeon takes far more effort than building a castle on the surface. While the plans I used were from the original plan booklets sent with some of the dungeon model sets, the third level down is a revision of a CC3 map I constructed back in early 2014, which itself was copied from the hand-drawn originals I made when I laid out the actual model design for real back in 2005! For that level, I'm holding to the original scale sizes, as we may eventually get to see, if I ever get back to mapping it! So, enough for now, I think!

I wanted to add my thanks also to PF and JimP for providing the prizes here.

I also wanted to add that though it was my good fortune to be awarded the 500th Atlas map thanks to the random draw, the Atlas wouldn't have reached this milestone without the input from large numbers of other people, many of whom have contributed far more to the Atlas project overall than myself (with a special mention for Remy Monsen as not simply being a mapping contributor, but for the huge amount of work he's put in to setting up and maintaining the entire Atlas website as well). It really is and has been a Community enterprise throughout. I hope those here new to the Atlas, as well as those who've already submitted any maps to it, will feel inspired to keep on contributing towards the next 500 maps and beyond!